Plein Air Art Podcast · PleinAir Magazine

Carl Bretzke on Painting Sunrises and Sunsets

·1 hr 12 min·4 clips

Carl says the prismatic palette matters most for sunsets and nocturnes because the light and color shift together.

1. Plein Air Art Podcast episode 245 centers on Carl Bretzke and his method for painting sunrises, sunsets, and nocturnes. 2. Host Eric Rhodes, founder of Plein Air magazine, interviews Carl Bretzke, an artist who also teaches practical light and color methods. 3. The episode asks what the science of atmosphere changes in a painter’s approach to sunrise, sunset, and night light. 4. Bretzke says he studied textbooks, Google searches, and the physics of atmosphere before he trusted his eye at dawn and dusk. 5. He says understanding the science helped him prepare colors in advance, see the effect while it happened, and remember it after the light faded. 6. Bretzke says the main variables in sunset are clouds and haze, not a completely different background sky every evening. 7. He explains that white sunlight contains multiple wavelengths and that longer wavelengths like yellow and red survive farther through the atmosphere. 8. He names the prismatic sequence as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. 9. He says sunrise uses the same sequence as sunset, and the morning can look more vivid because the night air has dropped moisture. 10. He links cloud color to height and proximity to the setting sun, saying warmer colors appear closer to the sun and cooler colors farther away. 11. Bretzke traces his prismatic palette through Joe Paquette, John Osborne, and Frank Vincent Dumont. 12. He quotes Dumont’s line that “silently glowing over this entire landscape is a rainbow,” and says that idea shapes how he sees distance. 13. He says John F. Carlson’s chart helped him think about how yellow disappears and blue increases in distant landscape. 14. He distinguishes between illuminated forms and shadows, saying lit tree forms lose yellow while shadows become bluer with distance. 15. He uses a warm brownish-red silhouette near the dropped sun and cooler blues or greens farther away from it. 16. He says he can keep painting after the sun goes down because knowledge lets him remember the light effect instead of chasing it. 17. The conversation stays instructional and practical, with Eric Rhodes pressing for direct examples and Bretzke answering in step-by-step detail. 18. The tone is conversational and technical, with frequent back-and-forth clarifications about color, value, and sequence. 19. Painters who want a clear method for sunset color, nocturnes, and plein air travel. 20. Listeners wanting casual art chat without technical color theory.

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