Dappled Light

Looking at these vibrant paintings calms me in a way that surprises me. Acid yellow and olive greens are hardly tranquil and gentle, but these abstracted shapes convey so perfectly that feeling of walking underneath an umbrella of branches, basking in dappled light, enjoying its dance over the surfaces beneath.

A garden built out of light

South Korean artist Duri Baek creates these wonderful canvases around the idea of light and shadow, and the point where opposing elements meet. Her Hwijowon, or ‘garden built out of light’, is such a lovely description of what she is doing.

Rather than painting a woodland scene in any conventional sense, she reduces it to colour, shape and atmosphere. Yellow becomes light, green becomes shadow, and between the two she somehow creates depth, structure and a feeling of space.

Light and shadow

With just two colours, Baek manages to suggest far more than two colours ought to allow. The yellow can feel warm and brilliant in one area, softer and more distant in another. The green shifts from foliage to shadow, from something solid to something you might almost walk through.

That restricted palette gives the paintings a wonderfully graphic quality, but they never feel flat. The shapes overlap and interrupt one another, creating the same sense of movement you get when sunlight filters through leaves and changes with every step.

Why they feel so familiar

I think that is what makes them so calming. They do not describe a particular place in any great detail, but they capture a feeling most of us know very well: walking beneath trees while patches of sunlight appear and disappear across the ground.

Your eye fills in the rest. The shapes become branches, leaves, paths and pools of light without Baek ever having to spell them out. They feel less like paintings of a woodland and more like memories of being in one.

And perhaps that is why those acid yellows and olive greens feel unexpectedly peaceful. They are bold colours, but Baek uses them to capture something fleeting and gentle. A few shapes, two colours and suddenly you can almost feel the warmth of sunlight moving through the leaves.

I first came across Duri Baek’s work on Artsy and It’s Nice That.