What the Arizona Sun Does to a Painting

This is one of the questions I get asked most, and I am always glad when someone asks it, because it usually means they are thinking about a painting as something they will live with for a very long time.

So let me answer it honestly, and then let me put your mind at ease.

Yes, direct sunlight will slowly fade a painting, and here in Arizona it happens faster than it does in most other places. But please do not let that worry you, and please do not let it change the room you fell in love with. Nearly every beautiful home in the Valley has walls of glass and wonderful natural light. That is a good part of why we all live here. There is almost always a way to have both, and I would love to walk you through it.

Why it is a little different here

We get about 211 clear days a year, and roughly 85 percent of all the sunshine we could possibly get. Somewhere around 3,778 hours of it.

It is one of the best things about living here. It also means a great deal of sun landing on everything inside your house, day after day, year after year. That is really all we are talking about.

What actually happens over time

There are two separate things going on, and I think it is easier to understand them one at a time.

The first is fading. Sunlight slowly breaks down pigment, and some colors give way before others do. The tricky part is that you almost never notice while it is happening. You notice years later, when you come across an old photo and realize the painting on your wall is not quite the one you remember.

The second has to do with the surface itself. Ultraviolet weakens organic materials, and a painting is made almost entirely of organic materials. Over a long stretch of time binders stiffen, varnish can yellow, and a surface that used to be flexible can turn brittle. On a piece with a lot of texture and relief there is simply more surface catching the sun.

And then there is our heat

We run about 111 days a year at or above 100 degrees, which is not news to anyone who lives here.

Heat does not fade a painting the way sunlight does. What it does is speed up everything already happening slowly inside the materials. If you have ever put your hand flat against a west facing wall in July, you already know what I mean. That wall is warmer than the room is.

What about UV glass?

It helps, and I would never talk you out of it. I would just hate for you to count on it to do the whole job.

Tested against museum standards, regular UV filtering glass removes about 83 percent of ultraviolet, and the compounds doing that filtering do break down over the years. Conservation grade acrylic gets closer to 99 percent. Window films land around 96 percent, though they typically last only ten to fifteen years indoors and they wear out faster in our heat.

Here is the part that often gets left out, and I mention it only so you can put your money where it will actually help. UV filtering does not stop fading by itself, because ordinary visible light causes fading too. So the glass takes care of one piece of the problem and leaves the other piece running quietly along.

So where should it go, and yes, you can keep your windows

Here is the good news, and I really do mean it. You do not have to choose between the room you love and the piece you love.

North facing walls are the easiest, and interior walls without a direct line to a window are easier still. If one of those works for you, wonderful, that is the simplest answer there is.

But so many homes here are built around big windows and open sightlines, and honestly that is the whole appeal of living in this part of the world. If the wall you want happens to be one the afternoon sun reaches, you still have very good options. A sheer, a shade you close in the afternoon, a solar screen. Any one of those does most of the work, and none of them asks you to give up your view.

One thing worth knowing is that it is usually the afternoon that matters, not the morning. Late day sun coming in low from the west is stronger and warmer than what you get earlier, and that is the one I would plan around.

When something is being made for your room

When I am making a piece for a particular space, I always want to hear about the room itself. Which way the windows face, whether it gets bright in the afternoon, what time of day you are usually in there.

I promise it is not a technical interview. I just want the piece to look its very best where it is actually going to live, and knowing those things genuinely changes what I make. A surface with a lot of texture is beautiful when the sun comes across it from the side, and it can go a little flat under bright overhead sun. That is something I can plan for, and I would much rather plan for it than leave it to chance.

You can see what I mean in the Sedona Earth pieces, where the texture is doing so much of the work.

If you only remember a few things

Keep original work out of direct sun where you reasonably can. Think about the afternoon more than the morning. Soften the daylight before you spend on the glass. And if there is a wall you love that happens to be a bright one, please do not cross it off your list. That is a solvable problem, not a reason to give up the wall.

If you are working through a room right now, I would truly love to hear about it. A commission always starts with a conversation about the space, never with a sales pitch. And if you would simply like to see new work as it is finished, the Collector's Circle sees everything first.

Thank you for reading, and for caring enough about the work to ask.

Warmly,

Dani