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I just finished a Biography "Leonardo De Vinci" by Walter Isaacson and it was riveting! It's obvious he was a genius, but like any human, he had his fatal flaws, mainly that he had difficulty finishing anything. The unfinished masterpieces he left behind and the engineering and medical breakthroughs he illustrated, would have changed history if he had just published his notebooks! However; one of the discoveries he did pass down to us mere mortals is Aerial Perspective. He used the term "Sfumato" which derives from the Italian word for smoke. "Your shadows and Lights should be blended without lines or borders in the manner of smoke losing itself in the air," he wrote in a series of maxims for young painters. As an object recedes the "smoke" disperses the color and contrast as it slowly merges into a pale blue mist. Looking at his most famous painting, "The Mona Lisa", we see in the background strange blue mountains, as if finally all color drops away into a blurred distant horizon. As a painting teacher, I always try to find a location in a Workshop, where "Near and Far" are obvious. Like the scene above, if you focus your gaze on a tree close to you and then glance at the same type of tree in the distance, what Leonardo was observing becomes easily understood. Funny isn't it, how something that seems so obvious when a genius points it out, can allude to the rest of us for centuries. Don't you wonder what else we don't see?

After reading the book, "Leonardo De Vinci" I am still reeling with his unbounded curiosity. Here was a mind so curious combined with an acute ability to observe the world, that he wrote lists of things he wanted to know. "Why is the sky blue?", "Dissect a woodpeckers tongue", "How to square a circle?" are just a few of the things he wanted to know. However, the insistence that all boundaries in art and nature are blurred lead him to the idea that there should be no lines in painting. "Shadows and lights are all you should use to delineate form." This is a rule that many contemporary painters, including me, are now ignoring and it is mainly for effect. Purposely flattening the form and emphasizing and simplifying shapes gives a more graphic look to the scene. Simplification is just one tool artists can use to understand the relationships between different forms. Exploring positive and negative shapes become more obvious and therefore visible when the elements are flattened and stripped of their shadows and lights. And doing many small studies makes it easier to explore these different combinations. This is why I find plein air painting so valuable to any artist. Not for the finished product, but for the sheer joy of observing and finding new ways to see things!