Sunlight is essential for our competition winners
Rise Up by Cathy Hillegas.
Spend even a little bit of time around artists, and it won’t be long before you hear talk of the importance of light. It’s one of those critical elements, almost as integral to art-making as line, shape, form, and edges. Regardless of style or subject, many artists you encounter are likely to wax poetic about their love of light and shadow. Indeed, I would wager that not a single issue of this magazine goes by without the mention of that topic.
So it’s no surprise that, for roughly half of the 13 winners in our Artistic Excellence competition, sunlight played an absolutely critical role in their pieces. In fact, for Deborah Tilby, the sunrise was the entire goal of her landscape GOLDEN GLOW. “I timed my walk along a favorite beach to ensure I’d be in just the right place to get good photos of the sun coming up through the leaves and branches between the bushes,” Tilby says. “I absolutely loved the way the light was coming through the tall grasses, too.”
Cathy Hillegas chased the light for quite some time before she found just what she wanted for her watercolor RISE UP (above). “I’ve always loved the look of bare white sycamore branches against a bright blue winter sky, but I just couldn’t find the right tree,” she says. “And then, one day, as we were driving down the road, I saw a tree I pass six or seven times a week, and the light was brilliant. I was lucky to have come along when the lighting was just right. Another 10 or 15 minutes later, and the scene would have looked completely different.”
But it’s not just the landscape painters who pay close attention to the sun’s effects; the still-life painters amongst our group were equally inspired. Artist Soon Warren noticed a ray of light from a nearby window that was illuminating a bunch of garlic bulbs in her kitchen. “When the sunshine hit one of the layers of the white, fluffy skin, it was magical how the thin skin layer turned translucent,” Warren says. Megan J. Seiter, meanwhile, set up a floral still life in her studio and then took photos of it throughout the day to capture it in various lighting. The ideal photo was obvious: “It was during sunset, and the sun was mimicking the burnished colors of the tulip,” Seiter says. “I especially loved it for that reason.”
We hope you enjoy the many ways artists depict light in this issue.
This Editor’s Letter appeared in the December 2021/January 2022 issue of Southwest Art magazine.