Trompe L'Oeil

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

We often write about the many advantages of painting outdoors in the winter, especially when there is snow on the ground. It is one of the few moments when the ground can be lighter than the sky, a rare exception to the reliable Carlson Theory of Angles. The drawback to having snow on the ground is that it is incredibly bright, sometimes blinding, and we may need to put on sunglasses in order to protect our eyes. The trouble with this is that by their very nature, sunglasses are tinted to some color - gray or the reddish-brown called amber, for example. This tinting cannot help but alter the actual colors in the landscape before us.

The Scene

Although our brains attempt to perform a kind of magic act and compensate for the false color information fed to them by our eyes, this compensation is only partially successful. To illustrate the effect of sunglasses in a snowy landscape, we took pictures through the lens of a pair of ou…