Part 4: Foliage / Forest Interiors

Artists who reference only photographs are missing out on a lot. As useful as photos are, they typically capture only a fraction of what the eye can see.

This is especially true with forest interiors. In a typical photo, the camera interprets the green as a single monochromatic color. The tree trunks sink to black.



In this detail of the photo above, the layers of leaves compress into a jumble of shapes. The blue sky bleaches to white and burns out the openings of the leaves.

Such a scene would look different to an observer. With our stereoscopic vision, our focal accommodation to depth, and our incredible tolerance of differences in brightness, our eyes interpret the scene with far more nuance. Let's see what we can learn by looking at painters who specialized in this very challenging subject.

Here's a painting by William Trost Richards called "Woodland Glade" from 1860. At first glance, the staging of the scene, with the plants festooned around the foreground, may seem a little contrived or conventional. It's an idealized view, but it was painted entirely outdoors from observation. He probably carried his easel around to several locations to create the composite scene.

Although he paints every leaf in the foreground, the distant spaces are filled with a variety of colors and edges. Some of the leaves are suggested with a stipple technique, made with a splayed brush. Softness is alternated with crispness throughout. The branches do not go to black, but retain some of their local color.

Here's Ivan Shishkin again, the fellow who painted the weed study in the opening post of the series. This time he's interpreting a coniferous forest on a sunny day. It's probably a studio painting, but it's based on a lot of plein-air studies. (Incidentally, this is one reason why plein-air painters might not want to sell their studies in galleries. They're the seeds of future paintings.)


Look at the warm shadow side of that tree in the center right, catching reflected light from the ground. Shishkin offers some detail on the bark of that tree. Just to the left of that, he uses soft painterly suggestion to create the illusion of further depth, as he does with the broad handling of the young saplings at the lower right. Things can move in and out of focus, even in relatively distant forms.

Tomorrow we'll look at the secrets of another master of foliage and forest interiors: Peder Mork Mønsted.


Thanks to Heritage Auctions and Tim Adkins for the art images.
Photo is from the University of Kentucky Dept. of Agriculture

Posts so far in the foliage series:

Part 1: Painting Tools

Part 2: Every Leaf
Part 3: Super Soft