The Matterhorn caught during the four useful minutes of sunrise, when the top catches fire and the rest of the mountain is still pretending to be asleep.
Notes
Four minutes of orange
Some mountains are interesting because you discover them slowly. The Matterhorn is not one of those. It is one of the most recognizable mountain shapes on earth, which means the drawing problem is not identification. The drawing problem is avoiding the dead, souvenir-shop version of it.
The mountain itself is odd even before the mythology gets involved. Four steep faces meet at four ridges, shaped by glaciers into a near-cartoon pyramid, and the summit rock belongs to the African plate while the lower mountain is European rock. Even by Alpine standards that is showing off a bit.
What interested me here was the timing of the light. Alpenglow on the east face is brief and highly selective. The orange arrives at the summit first, slides downward for a few minutes, and then the face goes flat grey and everybody who woke up at four develops a sudden interest in breakfast. That is a better subject than the mountain in full daylight could ever be.
Five flat colors. The rule was simple: the warm light only touches surfaces facing east and up. Everything else stays in shadow. The green-grey sky is the one invented color, because the real pale blue was technically accurate and visually useless.
