While flying home from California, I reviewed the older Parking Suns posts, and noticed that in the Throwback Thursdays Art, the sun is typically “off screen and to the left” (click example) – unless the painting or photo is about the sun, at, say, sunset (example). I found only one case of the sun being “off screen and to the right” in a painting (click!). (There was more variation with photography.) My regular viewers raised this issue, too.
So a question now is: Why, in Western landscape painting (perhaps also photography), is the sun typically on the viewer’s (and artist’s) left? Inside the painting or photo people often pose and/or go about their business (example!), while the sun illuminates everything from its position “outside the box.” One benefit of the sun being off to the side is that it allows the artist – and the viewers – to scan and scrutinize shadows. Also, if a painter is right handed and working outdoors, having the sun on your left lets you see your emerging art better.
While I can’t answer my question right now, I can certainly write a sonnet about it!
Examples from Throwback Thursdays Art follow.
Our lives unfold inside a picture frame;
Within a boxed-in border do we dwell.
Rectangular or square, it’s all the same –
We loaf, we laugh, we love. We might excel
At sports or arts, or keep on keepin’ on,
Slogging through our days. From here to there,
From birth to death, we’re growing, going, gone –
Our ashes flung into the sea or air.
The sun’s not in the picture. To the left
It oft resides. Off screen and out of sight,
It nonetheless lights every nook and cleft
It beams upon. It knows no shade. Just light –
Its own light, bouncing off each thing it sees –
Eternal sand. The grass. The wings of bees.
Here are some examples:
