Say It With Strategy

What composing strategy do these four paintings follow?

Carolyn Anderson     Untitled

Qiang Huang    Demo at Sacramento

Joe Paquet     "Green Sea"

Jennifer McChristian     "Smoking Sugar"

Every genre has a host of methods for dealing with space. Individual artists seem to gravitate towards using particular strategies that fit their personal sensibilities.  Some poets, for example,  find their most authentic expression through the sonnet while others are more at home with haiku:  a simple three part poem of seventeen sound units can be every bit as powerful as fourteen lines in iambic pentameter.  Painters, too, select divisions of space that best communicate their ideas.   

All four of the paintings above use the same kind of spatial division--in each of them, areas occupied by the most activity make up one major shape while the background for that activity occupies the other. I find it intriguing that in two of these paintings, even though their subject matter is entirely different, there is an almost identical spatial division.

I have abstracted from these two paintings that spatial division and put it into Diagram A below.  The dark area represents main activity and the light shape represents background.

Diagram A

Can you find the two paintings from which I abstracted these patterns?   

The two remaining paintings share the same principle in a reverse pattern.  They, too, employ totally different subjects.  Here are abstract diagrams for these two works:

Diagram B

If you chose Anderson and McChristain for Diagram A, you are correct, leaving Diagram B as abstractions from Paquet and Huang.

All four of these paintings follow the L-shape composing strategy, meaning the artists have arranged the activity so that our eyes are guided through an L or reverse L directional path.

Subjects we consider for painting have a multitude of inherent qualities, giving us abundant choices of how we will compose them into our paintings.  We artists select what we will include and choose how we arrange and interpret what we see to express our response to the subjects.  The beauty of this is its power for giving artists so many options for manifesting their individual differences.

Take This Path

A path for a painter is like a melody line or chord progression for a composer.  It's our way of getting the viewers' attention then guiding their eyes to the areas where we want them to travel.   We use a variety of methods to achieve this.  Look at this painting by Jennifer McChristain.  Where do your eyes first go?

Jennifer McChristian         "Rue Saint-Antoine"
Oil on Canvas 

The first thing I see is two people walking toward us.  After that I notice the other two people,  cars, and then the overall scene. Then, as an afterthought, my eye goes to the red sign in the upper left of the painting then to the rear of a truck exiting the scene.  The sign and truck bring my eyes back to the figures.  That's the path.

Experiencing this work is like feeling a chord progression pulling us from one area to another before we come back to the major key.  To keep the chord moving, the artist uses temperature contrast (the warm colors used in the building, figures and truck within the cooler colors of the buildings, street and sky), isolation (the dark figures within a light space), and one-point perspective (angles of the street and buildings vanishing to a single point).

That's better than a bagel with butter and jam.

Note:  After a long hiatus, I hope I'm back to doing regular weekend posts on this blog.  Thanks for hanging in there with me.

Unity, Not the Same as Harmony

Last week, I introduced the idea that unity and harmony play different roles in our painting. I focused that discussion on harmony. Here's unity:

UNITY

Unity means that all the parts fit together. In music, we designate a piece for a key such as Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D Major. The title of the piece suggests that whatever goes on in the violin concerto fits somehow with the key of D. It might fit by contrast or by similarity. The same principle works in visual art--parts all need to belong either by contrast or by similarity.

The opposite of unity is fragmentation. In life and in art, to fragment is to fall apart, to break away from the whole, and the result is incompleteness. So how do we know if our painting is fragmenting and what can we do about it? Here is where I would like very much to do the unkind thing and show some examples of fragmented art, but it would be best to try to use another approach. Let's try explaining:

Generally an art work will not fragment if it has...

1. a strong connecting pattern of darks and lights that hold it together
2. a good balance so that we don't feel one-sidedness
3. a visual path to avoid aimlessness

Now, don't leave me yet. I know this little list looks like a bunch of art jargon, and I admit it does come close, but we have to use some kind of language to talk about these things. Let's look at a painting by somebody we know had it all working. Let's look at a John Singer Sargent.

Look at how the lights connect to other lights and darks connect to other darks. Let's throw it into a notan so you can see this better. That's what we mean by point number 1

Staying with Sargent, let's look for balance in point number 2. The strong vertical of the waterfalls and two figures is counter-balanced by the horizontal ornate rail in the background as well as the horzontal surface on which the woman is sitting. Nothing feels topsy-turvy.

And what about point number 3? A good visual path is as necessary to unity as a plot is to a novel. Without it, the eye just doesn't know where to go. Look at this wonderful path created by Sargent. Arguably other organizing methods can help prevent fragmentation, but I contend that if these three are working, the chances are better than average that the piece will have unity. And I believe that when a work has unity, it will stand the test of time.

Bad Photo Reference--Good Painting

Let's face it. There are times when we must work in the studio using resource material although, I agree, the best reference material is on location. But we'd be terribly limited as artists if we reserved our painting hours for when being on location is possible. So, what if you're in the studio with a yin to paint a certain subject, but all you have are poor photo references. Let's assume the composition is absolutely terrible. What now?

Of course the first thing is to pin down the idea. Why this particular subject? Here's an example of a not-so-good photo.What caught my attention--the idea or concept--is the squirrel at the foot of the tree scratching himself. So the first thing to do is to crop to the idea. Well, that's a little better, but what I've got to do next is to find a decent composition. One approach is to see if any visual path or pattern is suggested or even a hint toward one. Here's what I found.
Along side the movement of the tail a vertical path begins. It moves with the squirrel's cast shadow underneath his belly then on the other side to the left. Follow the arrows in the diagram.

Okay, this suggests to me that I might captilize on that movement and create either an "S" path or a reversed "C" path. One way to determine that is to heighten the contrast on the computer. If I do that, I get this.
Ah ha. I can use the dark of the tree's base and indeed create an "S" path.
The next step is to draw. Study the patterns of shadow and light and play around with the composition. Here's a double page from my sketchbook where I did just that though from other photos, but taken the same time as this one.

And here's a little watercolor painting that followed.
Sometimes there is absolutely nothing in a photo from which a composition can be pulled. In that case either abandon the idea completely or super-impose a composition. I will address that subject in next week's post.

Meanwhile, if you have a suggestion for a compositional topic you'd like me to discuss, leave a message.