Illustration by Sija Hong. View more info here.
Hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving! Here’s a look at an illustration for my book ‘The Stowaway’ by the talented Sija Hong.
I was thinking about the the similarities between architecture and painting. Both fields have a love and awareness of light. How does light fall on and around a space? How does color bounce off objects? What is the effect of the changing light during the day and into the night on a space? What colors accentuate the feeling of expansion and which colors create the feeling of intimacy?
When you walk into a room that is carefully designed to complement the person who inhabits this space, you are immediately exposed to the ambience, everyday objects and the arrangement that speak to the inhabitant. The colors accentuate the mood; the objects often have both functional and sentimental value; and their placement reflect the resident's preferences. You catch a glimpse into the interior of the person's life and many times, you come away inspired.
In similar fashion, when you gaze upon a painting, a similar connection is made as the artist has created a space, often three-dimensional, that you are able to immediately enter and become enveloped in. The painter intentionally creates layers to produce lighting effects for contrast, emphasis and depth. This ability to direct light also focuses the viewer's gaze upon one aspect of the painting, evident most often in classical paintings by artists like Rembrandt, Caravaggio and Vermeer to Turner, Bingham and Leu. This effect can be very dramatic and compelling such as the chiaroscuro to create a three-dimensional shaded drawing or the feeling of a spotlight in a painting. More subtle applications create a diffused or filtered look from the slight halo of light behind a person's head in the afternoon light to the reflection of light off a table in a sunny room. As Edouard Manet says so aptly, "The principal person in a picture is light."
The depiction of light in a painting is also linked to the use of color. Coolness and warmth are also depicted by the use of color, showing the difference between a cold early morning and an afternoon bathed in sunlight. Immediately, the viewer also makes emotional connections affected by the sight of such colors and the creation of such scenes. For the pleinaire painters who loved to work in natural settings, observing how light changed both in nature and in cities was essential to creating any work.
An architect is also greatly affected by color choices, the spatial arrangement of objects and the texture and materials of objects, creating contrast and reflections of light that affect the ambience of different spaces and movement through them. How does this space look in the early morning light as compared to dusk? These are sacred times for the artist who holds a paintbrush, a camera or a pencil in hand, ready to experience how light changes and affects the space in question.
For the painter, the 'room' is the canvas and you, the viewer, are invited to delve in and explore. For the architect, the 'canvas' is the room that you, the viewer, wander in and occupy. Both invite exploration and redefine your definition of space and the feelings you experience in these spaces, affected primarily by the presence of light.
Light itself is mysterious. Light can create a sensuous and compelling experience as you are able to feel things physically merely through observation and movement within a 'space' of light. Yet perhaps the most compelling aspect of light itself is its ephemeral quality and how it shifts from opaque to translucent and transparent with millions of gradations in between, and the powerful emotions we associate with it.