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Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Harvest Time 12 x 12” Oil © John Hulsey

This week, I’ve been across the road painting my neighbor’s famous sunflower fields again. He plants millions of them and because his property is hilly, it looks remarkably like the sunflower fields in Provence, France. People come from all over the U.S., and even overseas, to visit and take photos. I go to paint, and over the years I’ve gotten comfortable with the thousands of visitors walking by, some of whom ask me what I’m doing or how I’m doing it. It isn’t easy to explain, exactly.

Sometimes, I start by telling them that plein air painters have two large obstacles to overcome before we can begin to capture what Nature has set before us. The first is the vast difference in luminance between sunlight and paint. A new white paint was invented in 2021 which claims to reflect up to 90% of the light striking it—a huge improvement, but still no match for the light we experience outdoors. The whitest artist’s paint …