A little more about drawn planar recession

Here is an Aldro Hibbard. This is one of my favorite Hibbard. I have written about him before and if you search the blog using the box at the upper left, you can find more. This Hibbard has a great passage that uses the "stacked" recession I was talking about in the last post about the light house painting.

I think this is a big enough idea that I want to stop and make sure that all the readers "get" this one. There is another idea implied by this and that is :

YOU CANNOT OBSERVE DESIGN INTO A PAINTING

You can look all day and not see this kind of recession, you may find places where it exists, but this is something you "install" into the landscape. It is an arrangement that is forced onto the actual appearance of the scene to maker a better, clearer design, rather than the more random arrangements presented by a natural location.

The detail of the lower right hand corner of the picture shows this tactic, I have photoshopped this image to make the planes a little plainer for you. The upper image has not been altered.

Below I have outlined some of those "stacked planes that recede away from us like dishes drying in a rack, viewed at a 45 degree angle.

The beauty of this device is that it Gives recession and variety to arrangements of things which actually march straight across the canvas in real life. Rather than having stripey lines of landscape elements arranged equidistant from the viewer, they are arranged in serried rows one behind one another. Think of rows of marching Egyptians from some tomb bas relief. The Egyptian sculptors used this device all the time.