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I have never painted a sunset. I love seeing a beautiful sunset, and I sometimes take photos of them. I guess I have never felt I could interpret that sensation in any meaningful way. There are, however, many artists who are up for the challenge.

C. Anderson photo

First of all, if you want to try your hand at painting the sky at its most intense, consider that sunsets are generally better during the colder months of the year. This time of year usually means less humidity in the air, and dryer air means more pure colors reach our eyes. Sunsets in winter also last longer due to the angle the sun takes in setting, and cloud formations may be more defined as a result of a stronger temperature gradient between northern and southern latitudes.

I learned this from reading "Why sunsets are better in the winter," by Brian Resnick. He interviewed sunset expert and NOAA meteorologist Stephen Corfidi, who said he first got interested in meteorology because of sunsets. "I liked the way the sky changed day to day," he said, and he wanted to understand why. He prefers sunsets he considers 'spectrally pure', the ones, he explained, that have colors that look like they came from a box of Crayola crayons.

Paintings done with a box of red, yellow, and blue color crayons seemed to be the dominant theme when I entered a Google search for “sunset paintings”. 

Google search for sunset paintings

With sincere apologies to anyone whose painting may appear here, I have to be honest and say this is a pretty good summation of how easy it is for sunset paintings to go awry. In fact, I could only describe this grouping of paintings as the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard.

And yes, there is a good reason why a visual of disturbing colors could evoke a sound scientifically rated as one of the most unpleasant we can experience. The sound of nails on chalkboard triggers increased communication between a region of the brain involved in hearing and another region of the brain involved in negative emotions. Since we know the experience of color can be an emotional one, it is not too far-fetched to consider that the reverse could happen with discordant color triggering a response similar to an unpleasant sound.Anyway, I wasn't going to let my sunset painting experience end here, so I continued my search for more paintings. But first, let's talk about what creates a sunset, because understanding that can help explain why a painting may or may not work well.

Sunlight contains all the colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. Red has the longest wavelength and violet has the shortest. Not all the wavelengths of light reach the ground in the same concentration. For example, nitrogen and oxygen molecules in the atmosphere act as mirrors for blue and violet light, so not as much blue or violet reaches the ground. Instead, it bounces around in the atmosphere, creating the blue sky we are so familiar with. This is known as Rayleigh scattering.

When sunlight hits drops of water, as in clouds, every wavelength of light is scattered equally, rather than unequally, creating the illusion of white clouds. This effect is called Mie scattering.

As the sun sets, light has to travel a greater distance through the atmosphere, and even more blue light, along with some green and even some yellow light, gets filtered out. The warmer hues of visible light, the reds and oranges, those with the longest wavelengths, are left to reach the ground. This is what creates the vivid colors of a sunset.

The Scarlet Sunset by J.M.W. Turner

There is one more thing to consider that has to do with how we actually see color and luminance (value). There are two types of photoreceptors involved in sight, rods and cones. Rods work at very low levels of light and are used for night vision. Rods don't help with color vision, which is why at night we see everything in a gray scale. Cones require a lot more light and are used to see color.

Around dusk, however, when the light is dim enough that the rods become active, but not so dim that the cones can't operate, we see colors differently than during daylight. This is due to the perception of luminance changing and, as a result, reds become darker and blues become brighter.

Now if all that isn't enough to convince you that sunsets are amazing, complex phenomena, then let's talk about the inability of pigments to replicate the effect of light.

East Bergholt Rectory by John Constanble 1810

Color produced by light is different than color in artists' paints. Add all the colors of light and the result is white light (see Mie scattering above). Mix all the paints on your palette together and the result is what artists call 'mud'.

The warmer colors of red-orange-yellow are usually dominant in sunsets, but we can also see some cooler colors of green, blue, and violet. Allowing these warmer and cooler colors to mix equally is a recipe for disaster. While paintings, especially those with high chroma (think color, color, color), need some modifiers that tend towards tans or grays, these low-chroma colors, ones that may be mixed by using warmer and cooler colors together, still need to have a color-identity.

Very dark colors also need a color identity. We see color only in relation to other colors, so compare any tans, grays, or darks to other, brighter colors, and make sure they still have a color temperature, warmer or cooler, as needed.

Evening by Sergei Gerasimov, 1950

We can conclude that a sunset is all about light, how light and color changes, and how our perception of that light and color also changes. While we can't replicate or recreate light, we can interpret what we see, and emphasize what we consider to be most striking or most important.

Sunsets may appear to be all about bright, garish color, but they are actually about nuance, change, values and color temperature.

Market in Borysoglebsk by Ivan V. Sorkin, 1959