Balance or steelyard compositions

Above is a painting I just dropped off at Rock Point Gallery in Northeast Harbor. Maine. I painted it last summer out on one of the islands in the Penobscot Bay.

I want to begin with a few news items. The first is that one of my post has been published on Fine Art Views, an online magazine ( I guess that's what it is ) They have about 9000 readers. It seems kind of strange to be read by so many, as I am usually writing for the several hundred readers of this blog. You can go to that link and if you like sign up to receive their frequent articles via e-mail. I may be writing more for them, I guess it will depend on whether their readers enjoy what I do.

The second news item is that I have the dates and more info on the workshop ion Jaffrey New Hampshire. It will run from September 19th a Saturday through September 221 a Monday. The price will be $300 dollars per student. I will post a link soon to a sign up form that will allow you to reserve your spot with a deposit using Pay-Pal. The hills of Southern New Hampshire will be beautiful at that time of year and we should have a great time. The class will be kept small enough that everyone will get individual instruction. I can help you paint better!

I have posted the image again so you won't have to scroll up to see what I am referring to. This painting is built on what is probably the most common design stem. The Balance or Steelyard. The group of trees on the left is counterbalanced by the long line of the distant shore to its right. If you imagine it a see-saw, the fulcrum, would be to the left of the center of the painting, like so...

If you imagine visual interest as having weight, the trees have more "weight" than the shore behind , so it takes a greater length of them as a counterbalance. Its just like a lighter child who must sit further from the fulcrum of a see-saw to balance a heavier child. The fulcrum is seldom in the middle because most of the time artists are deliberately balancing a heavier mass with a lighter one. That is an artistic balance of unequal parts. There are some symmetrical pictures, usually religious scenes that use an equal balancing scheme.

This triptych was painted by Giotto 1267- 1337 image courtesy of artrenewal.org. Even this piece is not totally symmetrical but the side panels both balance with the middle panel. Extremely symmetrical compositions give a feeling of stillness. That can be used to give a feeling of Holiness to a painting. But be very careful with that, unless you are doing altarpieces, that level of symmetry can be very oppressive in a painting that people will have to live with. It can give a real severe and primitive look.

Here is a beautiful Inness. The two sides of this painting balance one another. There is more weight on the right and it is balanced with a more interesting area on the left.

Well that should do for tonight. More tomorrow.

The Z or S compostion

Here's a Fredrick Waugh. Waugh has used a Z or an S design to lead your eye through his painting. The lines of the composition take you through a series of switchbacks to the crashing wave.
The Z is really a classic composition and artists use it routinely in the landscape. Sometimes the Z is in the form of a receding road, that's been used so much it is sort of a cliche. If you do that one, you have to hide it a bit. All of these design stems work best when they aren't too obvious.

Here's a painting of Vermont, by Emile Gruppe. Every time I go to paint in Vermont the weather looks like this. Those mountains around Jefforsonville are gathering places for gray weather. Gruppe "bent" this landscape into its Z configuration


It may have suggested this treatment, but I am sure he made this design happen.

Here is an example by William Wendt, the California impressionist. And below you can see the Z in his design.

The S design is particularly compelling and will lead the eye of the viewer through your painting nicely. It also has a rhythmic quality.

If you are currently painting from photos, and want to go on to the next level, imposing a deliberate design on an image will improve your work. When you look at the photo, ask yourself, how do I want the viewer to move through this painting. Where within this picture do i want to lead their eye? If you could draw that onto your photo you would probably have the root of a good, effective design. The Z design is a good one tom begin with if you are just starting to add some subterranean geometry to your paintings.

I am still collecting images for the next reader critique, please send them to stapletonkearns@gmail.com. I will of course remove your name from the art and not reveal whose art it is that I am critiquing.

The details are being finalized for a workshop to be held the weekend plus one day, either Friday or Monday ( so it will be a three day workshop ) of the 19th of September in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. September will be beautiful in the rolling hills of southern New Hampshire. More on that soon.

A diagonal composition

Aldro Hibbard. Lanesville

I have been thinking about the question asked by deepbluehue and want to speak a little more about that.
I'm interested in learning more about concealed geometric arrangements. How do you decide what kind of geometric arrangement to use? I'm guessing that you design your landscape, still life, etc. to express that arrangement but subtly.

I don't need to know music theory to enjoy Debussy. Most of the viewers don't know about the structure operating within a painting. They don't really need to know about that structure to enjoy the art. But if you want to MAKE a painting you do need to know about the concealed geometry underlying a designed image.

There was a period a few years back when dentists offices often featured wall sized photomurals of forests and other subjects. I think that has passed and now they are back to those lovely charts about gum disease and posters of happy chipmunks wielding over sized toothbrushes, in the pastel shades those sorts of rodents prefer. The over sized photos didn't really work. They lacked that spark, that humanness, that a painting has. They were of course as accurate as they could be, but they weren't arranged. That geometry concealed below the surface of a traditional painting appeals to something in us that craves order. I think that is why photography hasn't really destroyed painting like many thought it would.

Now lets talk about that Hibbard. It is of Lanesville, Massachusetts. That's a place I know pretty well. It is still a good place to paint and hasn't changed all that much. Many artists have painted there. The design is built on a diagonal leading the viewer up through the painting to the right.

All the way around that diagonal there are other lesser lines running in the opposite direction to counterbalance the design.We usually expect a picture to "balance" . A line generally needs to be countered by an opposite line to balance.

The arrangement of the lines in the picture, gives it

AN ORDER CALLED BALANCE.

I think a few of you are surprised that I call balance a design element, but it is. In fact it is the most basic design element, for those of you who imagine you can make good paintings without having to use an underlying geometric structure, remember balance. You can sometimes just crop a picture to balance, but if you are merely copying photographs, you will have problems with your pictures balancing, even if nature should accidentally occur before your lens in a pleasing arrangement, that leads the eye well, and gives a feeling of enough arrangement to satisfy that human need for order.

Above is a Willard Metcalf (from artrenewal.org) That also has a diagonal design, see it running right up the middle of the painting? The rising diagonal has a positive and major key feeling. Like the Hibbard before it has the same counterbalancing lines intersecting and setting off the main diagonal of the composition.

So there is another design stem. A rising diagonal with smaller lines counterbalancing it. This is a very useful composition and is found frequently not only in landforms but in skies too.

As you look at paintings, try to discover the geometric structure upon which the artist has built his design. Often just knowing that there is a hidden geometry there is enough to help you spot it. Tomorrow I will talk about another design stem.

Why is design important

Joseph Decamps, The blue cup

deepbluehue asked;
I'm interested in learning more about concealed geometric arrangements. How do you decide what kind of geometric arrangement to use? I'm guessing that you design your landscape, still life, etc. to express that arrangement but subtly.

The design IS the painting.
Tonight will be I guess , a restatement of one of the basic ideas of this blog. That is the idea that design is where the art is, in a painting. The art isn't found in the subject matter, and the technique must of course be there, but it is in the artists unique decision making about color, handling and arrangement that the art happens.

Creativity implies choice. If you are merely transcribing what is in front of you, you are making no choices, that is not art. Art arises from the artists decision making. A drum machine may play a rhythm, but it is not making choices about that rhythm, therefore a drum machine is not an artist. Even though, at a glance it seemingly does what a drummer does.

Transposing the landscape onto your canvas is not art until you make decisions about how it will be arranged intelligently, colored poetically and handled expressively.

When a painter sets up on location, they decide on their subject matter in a minute or two. I will paint this, not that. All of the rest of what the artist does to the painting is not about subject matter, even though they might work on it a thousand more hours. All of that time goes into the presentation of what the artist decided was the subject in the first several minutes. Almost all of what the artist does is about that presentation.

The scaffold upon which the artist hangs his image is the design or root. There must be dozens or more basic "stems" but a dozen or so are most common. The circle is one, a balance (steelyard) is another. Often a picture has some combination of several different design stems. The artist, familiar with a great number of these design ideas, sorts through his library of arrangements and finds one that seems to promise an orderly means of presenting the subject at hand. Imagining that scaffold onto the canvas and using it to "order" the picture is how the artist begins to bend the randomness of nature into a conscious arrangement.

I am terribly tired ( posting everyday has a marathonness to it sometimes ) and must close, however I shall begin in the weeks ahead to lay out the basic design stems available to landscape painters and show how some of them might be used.

I am still collecting images for the next reader critique, please send them to stapletonkearns@gmail.com. I will of course remove your name from the art and not reveal whose art it is that I am critiquing.