The duToits have been traveling in Germany, and the Mrs. has an excellent observation on the quality of light — it’s different there than here:
…you find yourself here, with the sun creating a light so different from home, and getting used to it as normal.
The grasses, valleys, and forests are different shades of green and brown that look different because of the different angle of the sun. You might match the color on a swatch exactly, but when you took it home, it would just be different, and look wrong somehow.
Oft times I will take in the whole of the place, with the grayness taking on a sense of vitality, rather than the dreariness associated with the climate elsewhere, and wonder how I got myself inserted into a 18th century German oil painting. The sky and clouds ARE unmistakeably German. The realization in that, and how accurately it has been captured in paintings, also forces you to realize that it wasn’t grayness or dreariness they captured so mastefully, but the energy and thrill of the place.
…[A]ll those images in your head, all the artwork stored in the outer limits of your brain, under the category “dreary-looking German Rhinescapes,†have to be recategorized. You see them differently–with the light the artist saw when he painted them.
I’ve been to Paris twice now, and both times was struck by how the sky — particularly the clouds — seemed very different than clouds in the Western United States. Hell, they looked like the clouds you see in paintings of France.
RTWT, it’s good.