Creativity Quote by John Dyer

A throwaway technical note, on its face, but it quietly announces an entire philosophy of seeing. When John Dyer says he uses "about 20 different colours to retain the luminance", he's not bragging about a well-stocked palette so much as confessing a problem: light disappears the moment you try to trap it in paint. Luminance is the slippery prize of landscape art, the thing viewers feel before they can name it, and Dyer is telling you he fights for it by layering hue against hue rather than leaning on simple brightening tricks.

The specificity matters. "About 20" lands between craft and instinct, suggesting a practiced system that still leaves room for the eye's improvisation. And "retain" implies he starts with light already present in the scene; the artist's job is preservation, not invention. That’s a subtle swipe at any approach that treats nature as raw material to be stylized into oblivion. Dyer is aligning himself with observation and atmosphere, not decorative colorism.

Context sharpens the intent. In an era when pigments were costly, inconsistent, and chemically temperamental, committing to that many distinct colors is both economic choice and aesthetic stance: he’s willing to pay - in money and labor - to keep the painting from going dead. The subtext is almost modern: luminance isn’t a single color you can buy; it’s an effect you build through relationships, contrasts, and calibrated restraint. The light, in other words, is engineered.