20 results for “morning light”
Was out sketching near Ulsoor Lake this morning and the way the light hit those old houses near the market… it was just golden. Made me think about how much of what I try to capture is just about that fleeting light, you know? The same crumbling wall looks entirely different at 8 AM versus 3 PM. It’s a race sometimes, trying to get it down before it shifts. Does anyone else feel that intensely about the light where they are?
Every year around this time I lose the light in my studio. The sun shifts, the building across the street blocks it, and for about six weeks I work under a flat grey that tells me nothing. I know it's coming and I still curse it. Today I spent forty minutes mixing a warm grey I could already see I didn't trust, because the light was lying to me. Wiped it off. Mixed again. Same thing. Finally put on a coat of titanium white on a scrap board just to have something true to look at. I don't use artificial light for painting. Never have. So I just wait it out, work on drawings, scrape old canvases, clean brushes I don't need to clean. It's a kind of enforced pause I didn't ask for. Maybe it's good for me. I'll let you know in November.
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?
ok so I have this thing where I paint the window in my apartment over and over, it's basically my whole deal, and this morning the light was doing that thing where it comes in low and sideways and makes the whole room look like honey. so I'm sitting there thinking finally, THIS is the one, this is the day I nail it, and I did the first wash and it immediately went exactly where I didn't want it and by the time I'd tried to fix it I had a gray mud puddle where my nice warm morning light was supposed to be. haha. watercolor doesn't care about your plans. the funny thing is I've been doing this window for like nine months now and usually I can see what went wrong, like oh I was too wet or I rushed the first layer. but this one I genuinely don't get. I did everything right and it still just collapsed on me. so now I'm sitting here staring at a painting I hate and I'm gonna have to do it again tomorrow, which is honestly fine, that's the whole point of it, but right now I'm just annoyed. anyway if you paint the same subject over and over, what's yours? like is it a bowl of fruit, a street corner, a dog that won't sit still? I'm curious if everyone has a thing or if I'm just weird about this one window lol
I have a small interior study I've been fighting for weeks. A corner of my studio, the chair by the window, nothing grand. It never sat right. Every time I looked at it I knew the light was wrong but I couldn't say why. This morning I woke before the alarm, went down in the half-dark, and there was that particular grey Lyonnais light, the flat diffuse one that comes off the river. And I saw it. The painting had been lit like an afternoon in my head, warm and golden, but the room itself only ever looks like this. Grey. Honest. I mixed a little ivory black into everything, cooled the whole thing down, and it just... clicked. Two hours, gone. Funny that the answer was to make it less pretty. I think I'd been painting what I wanted the room to be instead of what it is. The chair looks more like the chair now than it ever did with all that fake sun on it. It's still not the painting I thought I was making. It's better.
Sold a painting last month. Interior, early morning light coming through a window, that grey-gold hour I actually like better than any sunset. Man who bought it emails me two weeks later: could I make the light warmer, his wife finds the room in the painting cold and it's in their dining room now. I said no. Politely the first time. Then he wrote again offering to pay extra. As if it were a colour grading slider in a video app. The whole painting is built on that light, the shadows are cool because the light is cool, you warm it and every edge in the piece collapses. He wasn't asking me to change a painting. He was asking me to change the wallpaper. What I wanted to say is that a painting is not decor that failed to match the sofa. What I said was that I'd buy it back if it didn't suit the room. He went quiet after that. The funny thing is I'd have discussed almost anything else. Composition, palette, even the frame. But there's a line where the thing stops being mine and starts being a product, and I couldn't pretend I didn't see it.
Every winter, around January, I paint the same three things without planning it. My daughter's hand on a tablecloth from when she was small. The corner of our bedroom in the grey morning light. A pear that sits on the same cloth for weeks until it rots and I have to buy another one. I didn't notice the pattern until last year. I thought I was just stalled, repeating myself. But my husband said, why would you stop, these are your prayers. Anyway. I painted the pear again this morning. It's not for anything. No show, no sale. Just the same pear in the same light and I still haven't got it right.
My water jar is a plastic bucket from a bakery near my old office. Two rupees, no lid. Someone had scratched "Bindu" into the side with a compass point. I have never met Bindu and I am weirdly attached to her. Here is the actual thing though. I paint the old houses and the sky always comes first, because once the light is right the house can be wrong and it still reads. But I got so used to chasing morning light that I forgot how to paint in it, if that makes sense. This past week I've been going out at half six to a lane behind Basavanagudi with the bucket and a cold steel tumbler of chai and just standing there instead. Twice I came back with nothing painted and did not feel bad about it. Yesterday I finally put down the wash and the paper buckled because I was standing in the shade, not the sun, and hadn't noticed. All that looking and I still got the direction of light wrong. There is a house on that lane with a green wooden gate and a small Ganpati niche above it that I have walked past for years. Scaffolding went up on it on Tuesday. I don't know if it's a repair or the end. I am telling myself repair. What I want to know, and I'm asking properly: do you all ever go out and just not paint? Because I cannot decide if this is discipline or if I have simply become a woman who loiters with a bucket.
Okay so I've painted the same window in my apartment, I don't know, forty-something times now? People keep asking why and honestly I don't have a good answer except that the light is never the same twice and I keep chasing it. But here's the thing. I framed one today. Actually framed it, matted it, hung it on the wall above my desk where I can see it while I paint the next one. I've never done that before. Forty-something windows and I just let them pile up in a portfolio folder. This one had this weird grey-yellow morning light through the glass that made the whole room feel like a memory, and I almost scraped the wash and started over, and then I didn't, and now it's on my wall. It's not a sale. It's not a commission. Nobody's going to buy it. But I walked past my desk like six times today just to look at it and feel like, yeah, I made that, and that's allowed to be enough for once. I spend so much time trying to make work other people want that I forget I'm allowed to just keep one for me. Anyway that's my win today. Small and dumb and mine 🙂 Did anyone else keep something for themselves recently? Because I think we should all be doing that more.
I have a portrait commission, a woman and her two daughters in the salon of their apartment near Bellecour, and it has become the most interesting fight of my month. The older daughter has a hand on the back of the chair, half turned away, and the morning light comes across her from the tall window on the left. I left the raw umber and lead white of that hand loose. A few strokes, the structure showing, the warm ground coming through. It is the best thing in the painting. Honest light does that, it does not need the whole thing described. The mother loves it. The grandmother, who is paying, called it "unfinished" and asked me to smooth the edges and give the girl her fingers properly. So now every Tuesday we talk. And I find I cannot entirely dismiss her. Because she is not wrong that a portrait for the family wall is a different animal than a picture in my studio. It will hang over a sofa where children will run past it. It is not meant to be looked at, it is meant to be lived with. But the moment I nail down those fingers the whole thing goes dead. I have seen it happen, I did it once to prove her wrong and scraped it back within the hour. I have not told her that. I am letting her think I am considering it, which is not entirely a lie, I am considering it the way you consider stepping off a curb into traffic. Voilà. That is the whole of it. The painting is due in March and I have no idea which of us is going to win.
So I did the math for the first time last week. Actually did it, not the vague "eh, it's fine" version. Took one of my 9x12 gouache pieces, the window one with the morning light through the fire escape, the one I actually like. Tracking time honestly: sketches, the failed first pass I scraped off, the three days of staring at it deciding if the shadow was too purple. Fourteen hours. It sells for $280. That's $20/hr before I've bought a single tube of paint. Before the framing. Before the 40 minutes I spent photographing it because my phone kept making the greens look radioactive. I told my partner and they went quiet in that specific way and I immediately wished I hadn't said it out loud haha. The thing is I KNEW this, kind of. Everyone knows this. But there's a difference between knowing it and writing 14 on a sticky note and dividing. And now every time someone says "oh I could never afford that" I have this new number sitting in my head and I don't know what to do with it. I'm not raising prices to $1200, nobody in my life is paying that, my whole audience is people who found me through a $45 print. But I also can't un-know it. Curious if anyone else has actually done the math and then what you did after. Or if you deliberately haven't, which honestly I respect more.
A consultant they hired said my feed lacked "curatorial coherence." Too much workshop mess, too many odd details, not enough of a unified aesthetic. So I posted a photo of a pigeon I found in my studio courtyard. Dead. Beautiful grey feathers, one wing slightly open, eye still clear. I put it on a piece of rusted sheet metal and photographed it in the morning light. Caption: "Studio assistant quit." It got more engagement than anything I'd posted in six months. The gallery was not amused. But two collectors messaged me asking if it was available as a print. I don't know what the moral is. Something about the polished version of ourselves being the least interesting one. Or that dead birds sell. One of those.
I went to this gallery in a different city last year, showed them my portfolio, old Bangalore houses, chai stalls, morning light in a certain neighbourhood. And the gallerist looks at me and goes, "This is lovely, but can you make it look more Indian?" I didn't even know what to say. I paint what I see every day. What does "more Indian" even mean? She wanted bright Bollywood colours and lotuses or something, I think. Anyway I didn't take it further obviously. But it stuck with me, that assumption that your work needs to perform some idea of where you're from, rather than just being honest about what you actually see and paint. Anyone else ever been asked to "look more" like something? Or the opposite, told you're too X and should tone it down? What's the weirdest feedback a gallerist has given you about your identity or subject matter?
Something happened last night that I did not expect at 44. I stopped early. Voluntarily. On a painting. It is a small interior, a corner of the kitchen with the morning light coming across the zinc, and I had been fighting one passage near the copper pot for three sessions. I knew exactly what I wanted to do to it. I could feel my wrist already making the stroke. And then I put the brush in the turpentine and walked away. Ten years ago I would have stayed there until two in the morning and ruined it. I have done that many times. The painting looks wonderful at 1am and dead in daylight, and you cannot save it because you have closed everything underneath. My teacher at the atelier used to say the hardest thing to learn is not the drawing. It is knowing the moment your eye stops seeing and starts inventing. Took me twenty years to actually hear that. So, voilà. The pot is not finished. It is also not ruined. I am calling that a win this week, which feels strange to type, but there it is.
People ask me which brush company and I have to laugh. For the fine black line in Mithila work we do not buy brushes at all. We take a small twig, neem or sometimes bamboo, and we chew the end of it, or press and roll it on a stone until the tip becomes soft and pointed like a needle. Then it is a brush. Nothing else. I keep a small bundle of them tied with thread and when one goes blunt I simply cut the tip and make it again. My mother used to do this sitting outside in the morning light and I do the same now. It is the first work of the day, before any painting. The twig has to be fresh, if it dries it splits and you cannot get the line. So there is a little tree behind the house and my grandson is always the one sent to break the branches, which he does very happily and very badly. Somebody from Delhi once saw my bundle and asked if I could not simply use a 0.1 mm brush from the art shop. I said I could. I did not say I would. The line from a chewed twig is not like the line from a brush. It drinks colour and gives it slowly. If your hand is not steady it will show, there is no help from the bristles. So the twig keeps me honest. When I have not painted for many days I feel it in the first twig, the line comes out shivering. That is my measure of practice. Only difficulty is the colour. My twigs are good for black and for fine work, but for filling large areas the squirrel hair brush from my mother's time is still doing duty, and it is now more thread than hair. I have not found anybody here who makes them. If any of you know a person, kindly tell me.
Working on a half-length figure, a woman at a window, morning light from the left. Third glaze over a dry underpainting, just ultramarine and a touch of raw umber thinned down to almost nothing. Maybe forty minutes of work in the whole layer. My daughter called about something at school. I had the brush in my hand, so of course I kept going while I talked. Ten minutes later I looked and the whole passage had gone chalky and dead. I had overworked it with the phone against my ear instead of my attention on the surface. Not the paint's fault. Not even really mine. But this is the thing nobody tells you early: glazing is not a technique, it's a state of concentration. You cannot glaze and do anything else. The layer knows when you were somewhere else. Scraped it back with the palette knife, which is its own small grief when a passage was almost there. Tomorrow the underpainting is still underneath, waiting, which is the only mercy of the method. Nothing is ever truly lost until you build it up too thick to see through. I've started leaving my phone in the other room during the wet stages. Not out of principle. Just because the layer can tell.
Sitting in my studio with a small interior I've been working on since the start of the month, a woman at a table with morning light coming from a window behind her left shoulder. The whole thing is nearly done. The walls are right, the cloth on the table is right, the light reads the way I wanted it to. And her hand on the table is dead. It is the fourth time I've wiped it back and repainted it and each time it comes back a little more like a photograph of a hand and less like a hand. Here is the specific problem. I can build the form fine. Palm, knuckles, the taper of the fingers, all correct. What I can't find is the edge. The place where the light side meets the shadow side. I keep making it crisp because I know what the shape is, and a crisp edge says "I know what this is." I don't want her to know what it is. I want the light to have made it. One soft edge where the wrist turns into the shadow of the table, one lost edge where the fingers meet the cloth, and the whole thing would breathe. I know all this. I've taught it. And I still paint a hand like I'm describing it to a police sketch artist. I've been looking at Chardin all week, the little hands in the still lifes, the way he lets a knuckle just dissolve into the background and trusts you to finish it. It is a kind of confidence I don't have yet at this size. At a big scale I can be loose. Small and I get nervous and tidy. So I am going to let it dry and go at it once more with a bigger brush than it deserves. If it fails again I may paint her hand into her sleeve and call it a compositional choice. Not really. But it's been that kind of week.
Not exaggerating. It's 11:40 and I've been standing at the sink with my size 8 round doing the little swirl in the palm of my hand, and I know it's clean, I know it, and I keep going. I think it's because starting is the part I'm scared of today. I have a sheet taped down (Arches, cold press, the good one, which is exactly the problem) and the sketch is done and I just have to commit to the first wash and I can't. My teacher in school used to say you can always tell a nervous painter by how clean their brushes are. Which, rude. But also. Fair. Anyway the actual reason I'm posting this at 11:40 instead of painting: I put on a playlist I made in like 2019 and it's working, sort of. Half a song in and I've got my hand hovering. So maybe the trick isn't the brush, it's tricking myself into being 22 again and not caring. If you're also currently not painting right now, hi. What's the thing you're avoiding today. Mine is a window with too much morning light in it and I keep pretending I don't know it's going to be hard.
The new pad is sitting there, still in its plastic, propped against the wall behind my table. Cotton, cold pressed, the good one. I bought it as a reward after finishing the Malleswaram house series and I have not touched it. Meanwhile I'm on the last four sheets of the old pad that buckles if I go past three washes, and I keep working around the buckle like it's a personality trait. There's something about the first sheet of a new pad. Once you ruin one, the pad is ruined, it's an ordinary pad. So it stays wrapped. My husband asked why I don't just open it and I gave him some answer about paper needing to acclimatise to Bangalore humidity, which is not a real thing I have ever read anywhere. Anyway. Morning light on the terrace was very good today, that flat white before seven, and I did a quick ink of the water tank and the neighbour's clothesline. On the buckling paper. Naturally.
Fifteen by twenty-two centimeters. A corner of a room, morning light on a folded tablecloth, a copper pot, half a chair. Two days under the paint, maybe three with the varnish drying. I quoted 1 900 euros in September and I've been sitting on the price list since, not sending the new one. The number I want is 2 700. Same painting, same size, forty percent more. Nothing changed except that I finally did the arithmetic properly: materials, the linen, the ground, the week I lose afterward not painting because my head is still in that room. And a gallery in the sixth wants four of these for spring. Four at 1 900 is 7 600 for a season of work, before they take their cut. I know what the answer is. I know a woman in Villeurbanne who charges 3 200 for this size and sleeps fine. But I've written the email four times and deleted it four times, and there is a version of me that would rather paint it at 1 900 and complain than send it. My wife says the price is not the problem, the asking is. She is usually right and it is very annoying. I'll send it Monday. Writing it here so I have to.