What harmattan light looks like in paint

Harmattan arrives in Lagos some time between November and January and stays as long as it wants. The dust comes in from the Sahara and diffuses the light differently to every other time of year.

Painting in harmattan means working with a light that is already warm, already slightly hazy, and that makes shadows softer and color temperatures harder to read. What registers as blue-grey in the wet season reads as almost beige under the haze.

For Harmattan Season, I started with the sky and worked forward: cadmium yellow pale mixed down with raw umber, a lot of titanium white to get the muffled quality. The foreground took longer. The ground in Lagos is red-laterite in most places and harmattan pushes that orange further into sienna territory.

The result is a painting that most people read as Mediterranean or Middle Eastern before they read it as Lagos. I find that interesting. The light is universal. The place is specific. The point of the work is the space between those two things.