tips & techniques: composition

it'd always been an idea of mine to include some discussion of technique on this blog since it's relevant and i get questions via email on occasion. so, in response to the anonymous reply on my last entry i thought i'd talk a little about composition, or the part of creating artwork that deals with the arranging of shapes on the page.

as with most of the formal things you might learn in art school, composition is one of the things my mentor stressed was important to learn so that you can forget. what this means is that while there are lots of basic tried-and-true guidelines in composition, those guidelines can become snares if you are rigidly attached to them. so, it is important to learn the basic lay of the compositional land and then throw away the map, so to speak.

so to answer the question posed directly, in composing the plein air piece i did not make a conscious effort to adhere to any rule of threes. while i'm not familiar with it as such, the goal of threes in compositions tends to be in establishing a triangle within the image: each point or object becomes one corner of it. from there, different moods can be expressed depending on the type of triangle you create and its placement: a centralized, equilateral triangle would express solidity and balance, and then varieties of irregular triangles will establish other feelings.

the main thing that influenced the plein air composition was simply walking along that path the week before, scouting out painting locations. i stopped at that very point and the scene just struck me. there was a little editing involved: a few bushes and distant trees that were dirtying up the hillside a bit in the distance, knowing the sun's path and being able to predict how the shadows would fall at evening, and then moving a little forward or backward so that the cypresses on the right didn't tangent exactly with the hill line behind them. in retrospect i should've pushed that last aspect a bit more. the cypresses themselves naturally lend themselves to an attractive composition, particularly the broken one at the left--had it been whole it would've choked off the left side of the piece entirely.

so lastly, as an example of the main point of sub-conscious internatlizing: i didn't mentally tell myself any of the above, i simply did it so that it felt right. it required me sitting down and thinking about it to describe the process. perhaps next time i do this i'll address the other question of photos translating to paintings and vice
versa.

The Smallest Studio

This is it: no walls, no library, no taboret, no closet full of supplies, no drawers of anything.

Painting en plein air is quite a unique discipline. Going back to music terms it's a lot more like improvisational jazz than anything else. You show up and you might have scouted out the area first (I had, at a different time of day, making assumptions about what it would look like at dusk, which in this case proved correct) and bring with you the barest of supplies. Ideally you'll set up a bit early and have a little prep time to sketch out the scene if such is to your liking. Then you wait a bit as you watch the sun slowly creep along the sky, observing the shadows being cast and the colors change until just that right moment...then it's showtime. That right moment is typically going to be a little earlier than the time you wish to record for the simple reason that from the moment you start, you might have 2 hours, max, until the lighting changes so drastically that you will no longer be able to square what's on your painting to what is in front of you and are forced to stop.

It's a pretty hectic pace, and if you're working at evening, a bit stressful (in a good way). I kept looking to my right, noting where the sun was. I had to beat it--it was on its way towards sinking behind some mountains and if it got there before I was done, I was going to be sunk as the lighting would instantly disappear. In this situation you have to make choices quickly, what you will show and what you won't, the level of detail you'll put here or there, when will you commit to the shadows you are seeing though they are lengthening by the minute?

In the end, I had this small 6x8" oil:

random beauty

you can't be in europe for very long--at least, the parts of europe that weren't rebuilt from the wreckage of WWII--without noticing what i call random beauty. it's everywhere in old europe, the painted ceiling in a local grocery store, the small carved faces peeping out of walls above doorways, and the statuary placed everywhere.

this piece here i found in siena recently, on the side of a building across the street from a cd/dvd shop.

far as i could tell it wasn't on the side of a church. now, it's entirely possible that i missed something special about the street or quarter where it was found that might've explained its significance. or, that its significance has been lost with the passing of time. but there is so much of this sort of thing around that it gets hard to imagine that it wasn't simply a love of beauty, overall, that caused such works of art to be commissioned for public display.

while i'm not one who pines for eras long since passed, this one aspect of western life up through probably the beginning of the 1900s is one that i do wish we'd kept. i feel no shame in sneering at what passes for public art these days and wonder how many artists (and i use the term particularly loosely) look to the art of prior centuries and think that they don't try to reach such greatness because it is simply beyond them.

yet, i know there are many out there who, though they come from an anemic contemporary art heritage, strive toward the ideals of beauty that seemed commonplace until very recently.

though i get these feelings often when confronted by the great art of past eras, something tells me that the books i've been reading recently have been resonating a bit. particularly that line, repeated over and over...

the world has moved on....