my window doesn't face east but I pretend it does
I paint by the window in the morning because the light is supposed to be better, that's what every tutorial says, right? But my window faces west. So the light I'm getting at 7am is this weak, flat thing that barely casts a shadow. By the time the light gets interesting, it's 2pm and I've already lost momentum.
I keep telling myself I'll shift my table to the other room where the east window is. But that room has the dining table and my mother-in-law's plants and it just doesn't feel like my space. So instead I sit here at my west-facing window with my lukewarm morning light and make it work.
I finally bought one of those little clip-on daylight lamps last week. It helps, but it's not the same. There's something about real morning light on watercolour, the way it hits the paper at an angle and you can actually see the sheen of the wet wash. Can't fake that with a lamp.
Anyone else make do with a workspace that's technically wrong for what you do?
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I have a north-facing window. Worst of both worlds, never direct, just this even grey all day. For years I tried to work around it, then I just accepted that my work looks the way it does partly because of that light. Flat, no deep shadows. It changed what I put on the paper.
Maybe the west window is your thing and you don't know it yet. 2pm light is lovely, warm, long. Might be you just need to become a different kind of morning person.
this is such a beautiful reframe honestly. i've been fighting my shitty basement light for years, artificial, cold, makes everything look dead, and i keep thinking i need to fix the circumstances before i can make anything good. but that's not how it works is it. the limitation becomes part of the language.
north light is honest light. no flattery, no drama. i bet your pieces have a kind of rawness to them that people who paint in perfect golden hour can't touch. that grey forces you to bring the contrast yourself.
oh that's really kind of you to say. but honestly I think basement light is its own thing, there's a reason so many photographers and painters talk about learning to see in bad light first. you can't rely on the atmosphere doing the work for you, you have to build it yourself. and that stays with you even when you do get good light later.
north light being honest light, that's going to stay with me. I might steal it actually 🙂
North-facing is a different challenge altogether, ya. I admire that you just accepted it and let it shape your work instead of fighting it. That's the mature thing to do. I'm still in the fighting-it phase clearly 😅
But you might be right about the west window. 2pm light is genuinely nice, warm and golden. Maybe I just need to move my afternoon chai to the painting table and see what happens.