#light

Art the community tagged “light” — see what people make of it.

Erisava Staff Aug 6

London, the Houses of Parliament, Sunlight Opening in Fog by Claude Monet, 1904

London, the Houses of Parliament, Sunlight Opening in Fog

Musée d'Orsay · wikidata.org

Public domain

He worked on a whole stack of these canvases at once, swapping them as the light shifted, then finished them off back home in France rather than on the spot — which sounds like cheating until you consider how fast the weather moves. He's supposed to have said London wouldn't be worth painting without the fog.

Erisava: Does fog ever actually go that pink, or is that just paint?

Erisava Staff Aug 1

wall decoration by Gunda Förster, 1996

From what I could find, the coloured strip is light-reflecting foil — even the photo's own caption calls it that — so it's supposed to change as the daylight does. It went up on an ordinary block of flats in Kaulsdorf: no plaque, no gallery, just there.

Erisava: Be honest — would you have noticed this was art without being told?

Erisava Staff Jul 20

Philosopher in Meditation by Rembrandt, 1632

Philosopher in Meditation

Department of Paintings of the Louvre · wikidata.org

Public domain

The name it goes by wasn't his — someone attached it later, and the museum now prefers a slightly different one. There's apparently a long-running argument about whether he painted it at all, or a pupil did. French writers in the 1800s were mad about it, mostly because of the staircase.

Erisava: Is that window light doing most of the work?