Can the Artist Speak?
In his book Shadows and Enlightenment (1995), art historian Michael Baxandall states, “Académie lectures, with their axioms and arguments, are not very representational of the fabric of a painter’s operational reflection.”[1] Indeed, eighteenth-century art theory does not fully reflect the feelings, habits, or methods of artists who worked in the Enlightenment. Instead, it was common for scientists, philosophers, or art critics to speak for artists; theory concealed practice. Thinkers proposed formulas for how artists should draw, paint, or conceptualize their pictures. Though many artists published their own ideas about art methods, Baxandall’s statement points to a history in which an artist’s voice was overshadowed - pun intended - by the voices of others.
The discourse on “shadows” – the subject of Baxandall’s book – was one area in which an eighteenth-century painter’s “operational reflection” was neglected. Philosophers and natural scientists speculated shadow’s physical and visual properties, providing artists with epistemologically-backed suggestions on how to depict shadows on paper or in paint. From the 1740s to 1760s, the fascination for shadows as a perceptive phenomenon led to new discoveries about shadow’s color, shape, surface, reflections, and diffractions. In 1743, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Intendant to the King’s Gardens, read a paper at the Academy of Sciences in Paris, in which he announced his observations of the variations of colored shadow throughout the day:
“I observed in the case of more than thirty dawns and as many sunsets that shadows falling on a white surface, such as a white wall, were sometimes green but most often blue, and a blue as vivid as the finest azure.”[2]
Buffon found that during dawn and dusk, a shadow was not devoid of light but rather reflected the color of the sky, leaving a dark blue tinge. As this example shows, Baxandall’s book interestingly traces conceptions of shadows in the Enlightenment. Yet, his book falls short in fully addressing the “fabric” of an artist’s process of rendering shadows in art. As an oil painter, I felt the best way for me to critique Baxandall’s book was to put paint onto canvas, to produce theory from practice.
My artistic training is admittedly from the twenty-first century. Yet, oil paint’s chemical properties today are similar to those two hundred years ago. Oil and pigment, now and then, require certain steps of application. Fundamental to such steps is the chronology of applying darks first, and then lights. This has to do with the qualities of oil paint in which it is easier to lighten, but much more difficult to darken. In order to not lose the richness and depth of a dark color, one must paint dark pigments first. When painting a landscape, as I show, the artist may draw with blocks of shadows – geometric shapes of positive and negative space – on to which they will slowly build layers of lighter pigments. Thus, shadows, in oil paint at least, are tools in constructing composition from the very beginning. They form the crucial foundations of a harmoniously balanced scene, from landscapes to portraits. For the artist, the science of shadows is not solely based on perception, an aspect which Baxandall mainly focuses, but also based in chemistry. Art is just as much controlled by the medium, and indebted to it, as it is by the senses. Materiality sways practice, chemistry inspires shadows.
[1] Baxandall, Michael. "V. Painting and Attention to Shadows." In Shadows and Enlightenment. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Accessed November 13, 2020. A&AePortal,https://www-aaeportal-com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/?id=-13761.
[2] Baxandall, Michael. "IV. Rococo-Empiricist Shadow." In Shadows and Enlightenment. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Accessed November 13, 2020. A&AePortal,https://www-aaeportal-com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/?id=-13760.