Paint a landscape that glows from inside

In 1433 Jan van Eyck painted a man in a red headdress, very likely himself. Across the top of the frame he painted his motto, "As I can." The portrait hangs in London now, and that red still glows.

Why his colors glow comes down to a lamp and a sheet of cellophane, and in March you'll paint a landscape with that glow.

Light goes in, and comes back out

Van Eyck built his colors in thin, see-through layers, each one over something lighter. Light passes through the color, hits the bright layer underneath, and comes back out to your eye.

Shine a lamp on a white wall and hold a sheet of colored cellophane in front of it. That's a glaze. Opaque paint bounces light off its surface. A glaze lets the light in and sends it back out from inside.

One painter darkened a whole room to show the glow

In 1859 Frederic Church hung one landscape, The Heart of the Andes, in a New York studio. He draped the walls in dark cloth and let a skylight fall on the canvas alone, so the painting looked lit from within. More than 12,000 people paid 25 cents to stand in front of it, and opera glasses were handed out so they could find the small things.

It sold for $10,000, the most anyone had paid a living American painter. The cloth and the skylight were theater. What people lined up for was in the paint, and it still hangs in New York, at the Met.

Hide the brush, keep the light

Around the same time, a few American painters made light itself the subject. They painted calm water in wide, level compositions, with the brushstrokes smoothed away so you forget you're looking at paint. Kensett's Lake George, from 1869, is water so still it reads as glass, and it's the one we'd send you to first. Nobody called them a movement until 1954, when an art historian named them the Luminists.

Hiding the brush was their trick. The glow is the one you'll learn in March.

Light your landscape from underneath

This is the method you'll paint with. You lay down a bright acrylic underpainting, which does the job of the lit wall behind the cellophane. Then you build the landscape in oil over it, layer by layer, the way the old paintings were made. If you've glazed before, here's what's new: the bright layer underneath is bold acrylic color, and the light that comes back out through your oil carries it.

Then you put a story in it, one small thing that makes someone look twice: a single lit window, or a road running out of the frame. Over three days you build a narrative landscape in oil, glowing from the acrylic underneath.