A foreground dilemma!

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF DUMB DESIGN IDEAS

A foreground dilemma!

Above is one of a pair of recently discovered paintings from the trove found quite by accident in the Nevelson wing of a large and important American museum. This sorry painting by a deservedly forgotten tyro from the seventeenth century, is a fine example of an artist placing the "footlights" too close to their viewing position. He believed by dint of hard work, soft edges and careful arrangement he could paint all that stuff around his ankles. But, up close, nature was teeming with legions of little assertive details that jostled for his attention. Somehow the whole foreground became its very own picture, with a cast of thousands!

If we only had our eyes set one above the other in our heads, we could see the picture at a glance. But since our eyes are paired side by side we must "lift" our eyes to travel from the foreground to the middle and background assembly area. This unpleasant 'lifting" of our eyes bothers our attention spans, and in that brief unconnected synaptic instant in which we are transferring our vision upward to the middle ground and beyond, our whole concentration is lost!

Below is a second painting, identical to the first, except on his second attempt the artist left out the first fifty feet in front of himself! Simply did not place it on the canvas at all. He didn't try to ameliorate its edges or rearrange it's twining complexity, he just frickin left it out!

What a better solution then, to the problem of bristling irrelevant detail ALWAYS splotching the bottom third of a painting? What if I want em looking elsewhere, perhaps at the little boats or the passing river? Why should my subject have to compete with, or indeed, wait behind a thicket of beckoning thorns and vines, and some little rocks. and that clump of grass over there, and the bush, there's the bush! ..............and its shadow.

Turn again to your pamphlets, and look at the broad history of landscape painting to see how able artists working with measured thought produced a better yesterday.