The play of light on Britain’s countryside: ‘This is the light Debussy knew in Clair de Lune, the light that lets the poetry through’

The contemporary painter Richard Whadcock paints the effects of light on land, water and air with ethereal translucence. His work is painting, but its effect is music, creating troubling chords from the music of the mind. He paints the poignant stillness where pain and hope meet, like an inheld breath until light and water and air are one with the viewer, breathtaken in an evaporation of the self. 

Caspar David Friedrich portrays this pellucid veiled world in, for example, The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, seeking the imperceptible. Turner’s light is resonant and in his chiaroscuro Fishermen at Sea, the full moon turns night to day for a brilliant second, before the black clouds turn the skies dark again.