The Artist's Road Painting the World's Beautiful Places

Sunrise, Sunset

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Winter Landscape with Pink House    1918    Lawren Harris

   Now that we’re over the hump of the shortest day of the year, we feel a bit more optimistic and are looking forward again to the longer, sun-filled, plein air painting-perfect days ahead. But, as with so many anticipated good things, we must exercise some patience. The neat equation of subtracting the number of daylight hours on the winter solstice from the number of daylight hours on the summer solstice and dividing the difference by the 182 days between the two, isn’t accurate. In reality, the rate of increased daylight varies each day, starting out very slowly after the winter solstice and speeding up much later in the cycle.

   To complicate matters, it is different at each latitude, so that the gain of daylight in Minnesota each day will be greater than that in Florida. This has to do with the 23-degree tilt of the earth’s poles to the plane of its orbital path around the sun. The best calculator for finding the increased daylight for your area is at the Time and Date website. It is there that we discovered that after a very slow gain of only 37 seconds on New Year’s Day for our location, we will be speeding up to having a 2-minute gain per day by January 31st. The highest rate of increase, 2 minutes 30 seconds, occurs on April 6th. We continue to gain daylight until the Summer Solstice but at a slower rate of increase each day. The calculator is simple and fun to use on the Time and Date site. Enter your zip code and scroll through the months to find sunrise, sunset, day length and more.

   While we are awaiting the slow return of the sun, we thought Members might enjoy the engaging story of those intrepid painters of Canada, The Canadian Group of Seven and their adventures in the short days of the very northern winter. "We are on the fringe of the great North and its living whiteness, 
its loneliness and replenishment, its resignations and release, 
its call and answer, its cleansing rhythms. 
It seems that the top of the continent is a source of spiritual flow 
that will ever shed clarity into the growing race of America."      - Lawren S. Harris, 1926

   Members can read about another adventurous Canadian artist profiled in our article, Emily Carr - The Soul of the Artist.