This summer term the group focused on painting Contre Jour. This (as you will probably know), means Against the Light in French. We looked at famous artists’ work such as Sorolla, Pierre Bonnard, and Walter Sickert who painted dramatic light-infused masterpieces using Contre Jour. Also we studied works by the contemporary artists David Hockney and David Curtis.
Looking into the light softens the edges of objects between the viewer and the Sun, and casts rich, dark, interesting shadows towards the viewer. Working Contre Jour makes a notable difference to shapes and colours, softening edges and lightening as it catches the tops of rounded shapes. It was very good practice for colour mixing which everyone finds tricky and which is a most important skill to try to understand and improve. We tried to get as much colour into our shadows as into the lit areas, finding some lovely, rich, dark purples, blues and greys.
We found Contre Jour to be a rewarding topic and the technique is one we will return to in the future, I am sure. My painting here shows one of my grandsons excitedly heading towards the rock pools with his shrimping net one evening on the Dorset coast.
