The Miracle of Sunlight

Those of us fortunate enough recently to have experienced the total eclipse of the sun felt the awe of its light contracting, disappearing, reappearing, then expanding.  We watched the sky and images around us take on evolving color changes that became almost too much to comprehend.  No camera could record what the human eye experienced and the exhilarating rush it sent throughout our being. 

Ever since the Impressionists became aware of what happens to color as the sun changes position and how our location to the sun determines how we see color, artists have discovered a vast array of methods for expressing the effects of direct sunlight.  Many follow in the path of Claude Monet who was the first to explore these changes multiple times within a single subject.  For Monet, the content was color, not the images. 

Below are three from his thirty (or more) studies of haystacks.  Look at them slowly and notice the differences in color Monet found within the same areas of the scene.

What Monet's work proved, and what we can prove to ourselves, is that local color is little more than a platform for light to do its miracles.  The light source means everything to what we perceive upon and within that local color. Look at the colors I found in these pumpkins whose local color we would call orange.