Benjamin Haughton

Slanting Sunlight - Oil painting, Victorian, Edwardian Landscape

John S. Smith 1921 - 2010 Fishguard to Rosslare Oil and gouache on board, signed lower left Image size: 35 × 22 inches (89 × 56 cm) Contemporary art deco style frame This wonderfull...

Eric Brown 1894-1955 Salisbury Cathedral Oil on board Image size: 20 x 14 inches Hand made frame Eric Pitt Brown was born in 1894 in Salisbury. H...

Impressionist style en plein air landscape painting on linen of a rural country farm with green fields and bright blue sky "Braymer Hill," an upstate New York landscape, painted plei...

Todd Carpenter's (US based) "Darkness Rises" is an oil painting that depicts a city in the distance glimmering in the darkness with a few sparse and leafless trees vaguely blocking its view Bio/artist statement: Todd Carpenter is a Los Angeles based artist who uses black and white paint to explore the perception of space and beauty. Carpenter's formal education is in science - he holds a MS in Neuroscience from UCSD and a BS in Psychobiology from UCLA - and he brings this background into service when making art. His paintings explore the mechanisms of perception and aesthetics, examining among other things how the depiction of light can impart realism and convey emotion. Like his paintings bridging art and science, Carpenter's career has similarly straddled the two fields, and he has taught subjects ranging from neuroscience and environmental science to photography and painting. Artist Statement As a painter, I am particularly interested in how the depiction of light contributes to our experience of paintings. Painting, as with any visual art, is obviously dependent on light. But painting can also have a more specific connection in that the accurate depiction of light is crucial for achieving realism. Realism in paintings largely arises from the portrayal of depth - perceiving a painting as being realistic is equivalent to seeing its subject as existing in more than just the two dimensions of the picture plane - and one of the mechanisms by which humans perceive depth is through lighting cues. Light creates features such as shading, shadow, and contrast that tell us about the three-dimensional arrangement of our surroundings, and artists often use these features to impart realism to paintings. Light also factors in to the emotional impact of paintings. The differential illumination of our surroundings can evoke different moods, as evidenced by the influence sunsets, candlelight, and darkness can have on us. Such effectssuggest that our perception of light could be tied to primitive instincts, with light signaling factors such as shelter, nightfall, and warmth, which were once crucial for survival. The depiction of light in...