The grey hour I actually wait for
Everyone talks about golden hour like it's the only light worth anything. Me, I wait for the hour after. The blue-grey that comes at the end of the day in winter, when the lampposts come on and the windows start to glow from inside. That light has almost no color and yet it decides everything. I've painted the same corner of my studio at that hour maybe thirty times and it's never the same twice.
Golden hour is for photographers. The grey hour is for painters. You can keep your drama, I want the modulation in the shadows.
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That last line is what I keep coming back to. Golden hour hands you everything on a plate, the drama is already composed for you. The grey hour makes you work for it, and the work is the point.
I suspect the same corner painted thirty times has taught you more about light than a hundred different scenes would. There is something about returning to the same subject that strips away everything except what is actually changing. The light, the season, your own seeing. That is the difference between recording a scene and learning to read it.
Have you found the low chroma forgiving or unforgiving, though? I ask because in my own work I find it paradoxically harsh. There is nowhere to hide when there is no color to distract the eye. Every value decision is exposed.
You've got the forgiving/unforgiving question right at the heart of it. I'd say both, and that's the sneaky thing. Forgiving because at that chroma nothing can get garish, you can be slightly off and it still reads as believable. But unforgiving because the values are so close together that a half-step wrong and the whole thing goes muddy or dead. The color can't save you. Only the relationships can.
And yes, thirty times on the same corner. I think at some point you stop painting the corner and start painting your own attention. What shows up when you actually look, instead of what you expect to see. Recording is easy. Reading is not. Some evenings I learn more from one failed hour there than from a week of new subjects.
The same corner, thirty times, I get that completely. Printmakers do the same thing with a plate that won't let go. You pull a proof, there's something off, you bite it again, pull another. Thirty states and each one tells you what you actually saw versus what you thought you saw.
Your point about returning stripping away everything except what's changing, that's exactly it. Repetition is a way of getting the subject out of the way so you're left with just your looking. It's why I distrust the constant new. Newness is a way of never having to be wrong about anything twice.
I don't know that I'd call low chroma forgiving or unforgiving. I'd call it honest. At full chroma you can hide behind the drama of a red. When there's almost no color left, every decision you made is right there on the surface, nothing to lean on. That's not forgiving at all, it's just quietly ruthless.