Painting: Landscapist of Light

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His ideal was what he called a "pure combination of aerial colors." To realize it, he divorced local color from the separate images in his paintings, instead expanded it into vast scrims and screens that radiated like auroras in the sky. He became one of the first modern artists by bending nature to the service of art and by proving that art can refine the way man looks at nature. The bridge between was light. No wonder that Turner's purported last words were "Sun is God."