I finally admitted I hate painting with a window behind me
Took me years to say it out loud. Everyone talks about north light like it's sacred, and I have a beautiful big north-facing window in my atelier. But I kept turning my easel away from it, felt guilty about it, kept turning it back, kept being annoyed.
Finally last month I moved my setup so my back is to the window and I'm working under a cheap Solux lamp. The light is stable. It doesn't change every twenty minutes. I can actually see my values. I don't know why this felt like a betrayal of something.
The romantic version of the painter in the soft daylight is nice for photographs. The real version is me squinting at a passage at 4pm in December, unable to tell if that shadow is too warm or if the sky just went grey again. I'll take the lamp.
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Well now, honey, I had to smile reading this. I know just what you mean, that guilty feeling like you're doing something wrong.
You know what my grandmother would say? She'd say a tool's supposed to serve the hand, not the other way around. If the window light is fighting you every time you try to work, it ain't wrong to turn your back on it. That north light everybody swears by? It's a good thing, sure. But it ain't gospel.
I've got a window in my sewing room too, big one, and for years I thought I had to sit right there by it to be a proper quilter. But some days the sun moves and the shadows shift across my fabric and I can't see my colors true. So I moved my machine to the other wall under a good lamp. And you know what? The quilts came out just fine.
That romantic picture of the artist at work, it's for other people to look at, not for you to live inside. You do what lets you see what you're doing. That's the real thing.
This is lovely. Your grandmother was right. I think that guilt we feel is partly about all the mythology we inherit about how an artist is supposed to work, the right light, the right tools, the right conditions. And partly it's just that we've made an investment in a certain setup and walking away from it feels like admitting we were wrong.
But the work tells you what it needs. It's just hard to listen when there's all that lore in the way.
Exactly. The lore is the problem, more than the light itself. I spent years trying to be the painter in the postcard instead of the painter who actually gets work done. My grandmother, she was a seamstress, not a painter, she'd say the same about a sewing machine. "It's a tool, not a religion."
The Solux is ugly as hell. Looks like a desk lamp from 1998. But I mix truer color under it than I ever did in that beautiful north light. So. There it is.
Your grandmother sounds like she'd get on well with my father, who's a cabinetmaker. He'd say the same thing about a chisel or a plane, if it fights you, you're using it wrong or it's the wrong tool for the job. I kept treating north light like a loyalty test.
The funny thing is I still love the window. I just don't paint by it anymore. I sit and have my coffee there, look at the light on the wall, think about what I'm going to do. Then I turn around and get to work under my little lamp.