Earth Shadow Statement:
When the sun sets on a clear night, you might notice a gorgeous blue band rising in the opposite direction. This is the earth shadow, the shadow the planet casts upon the atmosphere in the east as the sun sets in the west. As the sun disappears, the blueness rises until it finally blends into the deeper blue of twilight, then night.
I’d painted this years before I understood what I was seeing. A photo I’d seen of it in Color and Light in Nature by Lynch and Livingston, was lodged in my subconscious, but it wasn’t until I was out painting it on the Konza Prairie Biological Preserve one night, engrossed in the process, that it hit me what it was. Observing the shadow is another way to experience a “sense of planet” from any open space on a clear night at sundown. It is another way to connect the planet and its perpetual turnings.
Earth shadow is quite beautiful. With its pastel spectrum of vivid periwinkle blues, pink anti-twilight arch above and pastel minty green above, it’s almost too “pretty” for me to paint. The orange-ish line along the bottom of the paintings is the sun’s last light on the hills and our flatland version of alpenglow.
Seeing earth shadow, or the “twilight wedge” or “dark segment,” as it is sometimes called, reminds me that the earth is an object that casts a shadow, a shadow that we can see if we know where and when to look.