Painting Sunsets (ah, the inspiration!)

by Karen Lynn Ingalls

Sunset Sentinels • 11" x 14" • Acrylics on canvas • © Karen Lynn Ingalls

Well, summer is truly here, it seems! And perhaps we won't have the amazing clouds we've had in recent weeks and months for a little while again… but we sure did have some gorgeous sunsets then, didn’t we?

Sunsets do come up periodically as  an inspirational, beautiful, and much-beloved subject to paint. And you may have gotten some great photos to work from in these last few weeks and months — that’s what we’ll be looking at in class this week.

Deer at Sunset • Oil on Canvas • Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902)

There are all kinds of different approaches you can take — mostly about light and shadow, colors and their intensity or subtlety, and soft and hard edges. You can take what we would now consider a  more traditional approach, like Albert Bierstadt (who was definitely pushing new boundaries in his time)…

Sunset Over Staffelsee • 1910-11 • Oil on Cardboard • Gabriele Munter

Or something more modernist and abstract, like the work of Gabriele Munter (note the harder edges of her clouds here!)...

​We can take our paintings in any direction we like! It’s up to us, and the directions WE feel inspired to take. ❤️

 Here's a direction I felt inspired to take in this painting of a sunset over Mt. St. Helena, using lots of texture. This is a 2.5 minute, VERY time-lapsed video of its creation, which I also posted on Facebook last week. 

So… have you been inspired by those amazing sunsets we’ve had in recent months? Have you done any sunset painting? It definitely can be fun — and remember, YOU are not a camera. What you see is only the beginning of where you can take it….