Great read - Thank you!

Painting description for the redditers of r/blind: It is almost a black and white painting of mountains in a snow storm, very stark and expansive.The only color is a hint of blue in the billowing storm clouds and a dark black-green for the pine trees, but it is hard to see the green in the trees for the contrast of white snow they are covered in.The objects that are closer appear crisper and darker and with more color. The objects fade the farther away they are, so that the mountains in the middle of the canvas, which appear to be the farthest away are little more than a swipe of crisp white paint against the billowing clouds. They are distinguishable more for their texture than their color.

For those born blind, a description of distance as seen by the sighted (also this is for the sighted, as few but painters and photographers are aware of how this works)… On a clear day there is still air between you and everything. Air, being mainly made up of nitrogen, scatters light in a blue range. It actually scatters green, purple and blue, but the net effect is blue, which is why the sky appears blue. If you look directly up on a clear day, the sky is a darker blue at the apex and lighter around the horizon, this is due to the fact that when you look up on a clear day you are actually seeing the dark void of space beyond the reassuring haze of nitrogen blue, and the color combination is a deep blue color. At sea level there is more nitrogen between you and space, so the color of the sky at sea level is much lighter blue than in the mountains.

Being from the mountains I prefer a high altitude blue sky. It feels more vibrant, more alive and dangerous, because you can see just how precariously we sit, perched on this small speck of dust, floating in the infinite. A sea-level blue is like a blue for babies, the atmosphere thick and reassuring, like baby’s blanket.

Anyway, around the edges the of the horizon you are actually looking through more nitrogen than when you look up. When you look out across a vast landscape the things that are farther away will actually appear bluer than things that are closer, because there is more nitrogen between you and farther away objects.

However, nitrogen is not the only important gas to consider when painting distance. There is also water vapor. Water vapor scatters white, so in humid places, things in the distance appear whiter, more faded and hazy.

In the painting the subject is a series of mountains. At higher elevations the air is much thinner, so there is less blue fade, however there is also less water vapor, so things appear very crisp even at great distances.

I lived for many years in a very humid part of China. I always remember being shocked by the crispness of the mountains when I would come home. I never really thought about how amazingly crisp they are until I had lived away from them.

This painting is of a winter storm, so the main gas to think about is water vapor. In the painting white swirls across the canvas obscuring the distant range of maintains, making them fuzzy and soft and just barely there, while in the foreground ghostly white aspens throw up their thin branches against the stark contrast of the black-green pines. The overall effect is one of space and distance, as the closer land on each side of the canvas, crisp, and jagged, swoops down and away from you, into a valley, made soft by its distance from us. Beyond the valley, in the haze, is the softest whisper of a further range of mountains.

If you enjoyed with description and would like more, just let me know.


[edit] WOW! Gold! Thank you kind benefactor! I have never gotten gold before! Thank you!



-Claudette