Controlling M-Faces

Above is a Sargent watercolor of Venice. I have written before about unity of effect and subordination of detail to the larger masses in which they are contained. In this post I want to show what happens if you don't control your emphasis. To do this I have messed up a few fine paintings using Photoshop.

Where you put your emphasis is desperately important in picturemaking. You might have intended to say "building with some windows", but instead said "building with some windows" by not subordinating the windows to the facade of the structure. Below is the same Sargent with the windows and details in the building exaggerated.

 

The building is no longer subordinated to the Gondolas in the foreground. It fights with them now for our attention . The picture no longer clearly tells you where to look, it is beginning to have two subjects rather than one, the boats. In the upper version the gondolas are dominant, in the lower they no longer are. This is a matter of emphasis. Just as in a stage play there is a star or lead role and there are supporting actors, if one of the supporting actors gets self important and begins blocking or outshining the lead he has to be chided, if not eviscerated by the director.

You as a picture maker are the director and it is important to keep the actors on your stage in check, lest they steal the show from your lead and distract the audience from the story that you want to tell. 

IF EVERYTHING IN A PAINTING IS OF EQUAL IMPORTANCE, THEN NOTHING IS IMPORTANT!

When making a design it is usually a mistake to give everything an equal emphasis, although it might be good in a blueprint or a schematic drawing. Part of a design is deciding what is important and what is not, what is the dominant, and what needs to be subordinated to that. Often this is about keeping your masses "big". That is, not chopping up every shape into an assemblage of the smaller shapes within it.

© The Estate of Edward Seago, courtesy of Portland Gallery www.portlandgallery.com

 Above is an Edward Seago, I know I post a lot of his paintings but he is a great hero to me.  Below is the painting again, after my tender ministrations.

I have overemphasized the detail in the buildings behind the pointy feet children. It throws the whole thing out of whack.  Seago  subordinated the windows and doors beautifully to the larger and more important shape of the building itself. I have reversed the polarity, now the details are more  assertive than the larger form upon which they ride, and the unity of the painting has been destroyed. The building, formerly a supporting actor, has taken over the stage like a girl in the chorus line naked with a traffic cone on her head.

© The Estate of Edward Seago, courtesy of Portland Gallery www.portlandgallery.com

 Here is another Seago, and below is my damaged version.

I have exaggerated the windows in the ocher colored building on the left, and lightened the contrast in the group of boats at center. Now instead of quietly occupying that side of the painting, the building is too assertive. It is stealing the show from the boats which were the artist's intended focus in the painting. Now the boats lead you through the painting to the building.

Every element you put into a painting has to be appraised for it's importance. Ask yourself "is this object important or should it be subordinated to the whole, so what is important can shine?" Sometimes during a critique an artist will hold their hand up to block from their view a part of the painting. When they do that it is usually because some element  has been overstated and is interfering with either the balance or the unity of the painting. You only get one subject per picture, if you try to have two the picture will fail. It has a problem I call "one for each eye" There must be

 one dominant subject and the other forms must be subordinated to that.

How you set your emphasis is a matter of your personal choice, and when you make choices you are making art. There are cameras that are made to be left strapped to trees in the forest to shoot pictures of passing wildlife. When the unwitting animal steps into the machines vision, it takes a picture. The machine is not an artist. It makes an image, but no decisions as to what that image will look like. Transcription is only accounting. Noise is not music. Like form, or arrangement of shapes, emphasis is a design decision and a human imposition of selective order onto nature. Nature in itself is not art, art is the product of a human decision about how to portray nature. This explains entirely why so little truly great art is currently being produced by the deceased.

A snowscape flayed

A Village in Vermont

Something I occasionally do on the blog is critiques of readers' art that is sent to me . I choose those that I think will be most instructive to other readers. I cannot critique the work of everyone who would like me to do so, though.  I open them  in photoshop and quickly scribble some corrections on them with the brush tool, not very slick, but it shows what I intend and doesn't deface the original art. The picture below was sent to me and since it is winter and there is snow (at least in the north) I am going to take a scalpel to it. Thank you to my victim, who will remain unnamed, for allowing me the use of the art.

Above is the piece as submitted, and below is my Photoshopped version.

Here is what I did, and why;

1.  I worked to create more diverse and interesting shapes. For instance, I felt the three pines across the foreground were too similar. I downplayed the one at the furthest left and I made the shapes of the two remaining trees more individual. I made sure each of the trees had a different size too. I want to get as much variety of shape as I can. Repeated shapes, sizes and intervals between shapes make a repetitive and uninteresting design.
2. I dropped the pine on the right down behind that little bench. That is visually more interesting. I am value stacking, it helps get recession and  is another way to vary the shape of that pine from the pine on  the left. This ONE has  something in front of it. I like to stack lights on top of darks and then lights behind those. It gives more punch to a design.
3. I opened up and simplified the middle of the painting. That makes it  circular design, a vortex. This makes the eye travel around the circumference of the painting like a big "O". Read  Edgar Payne if you want to know about design "stems", that is large geometric patterns concealed beneath the representation that give order and arrangement to a painting.
4. I felt that the path leading through the foreground was to obvious,  I just hinted at it using shadows catching the now half concealed trail through the snow. It is really easy to be too obvious in painting. Often it is best to give less information rather than more.
5. I varied the line under the pine trees, rather than HERE'S THE TREE AND HERE'S THE SNOW! I wove the two of them together. I used the shadows and lumped up the snow to avoid too straight and obvious a line where they met the ground. Dropping that right hand tree a little lower helped keep the three trees from sitting on the same straight line also.
6. I added recession to the snow as it went back. If the foreground snow and  the background snow are the same value and color the eye will read them as being equidistant. I painted the foreground snow with a smidgeon of  cadmium yellow, the midground snow with a little  cadmium orange and in the distance I added a little cadmium red. As the  snow recedes the yellow gradually drops out and the red  increases.
7. I  threw another layer of distance into that background line of trees too, and varied the line of the trees against the sky back there. There were two groups of two pines back there that I felt were too symmetrical, so  I removed one of the pair on the right.
8. I warmed up the sky a little too, that explained the color in the snow, the sky being warm makes the picture more unified in the temperature of the light. I felt the color of the light was unexpressed, or too neutral.
9. I added hazy drybrush "twigs to the weeds in the foreground. The transparency of that is more interesting and it allowed me to sneak a subtle violet color in there.
10. I threw a little snow up in the  branches of the deciduous  tree at the right. I did this to add a little accent there, and also it is another example of a way to do a little value stacking. It is a little accent to enliven the passage. I often like to throw one little detail into each passage, the viewer perceives it and moves on assured that there is something going on in there. Passages don't need to be bristling with detail, one little observation of a detail will carry the whole area. It also adds sparkle.

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WORKSHOPS

There are now several on tap, I have already announced the White Mountain Snowcamp, I do have space left in this one, if you  are interested, please click here. Snowcamp is the most fun I have all year! The workshop is held at a rambling, late 19th century inn, The Sunset Hill in Franconia, New Hampshire which is very romantic and old timey. It might be cold, but the inn is right at our backs as we work, so we can run inside by the fire and drink more coffee if it becomes too much.The workshop will be held January 26 through 28.The inn is the perfect place to do a class and the scenery is fabulous. The White mountains are spread before the inn like a movie set.

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Sarasota, Florida

Sandcamp! This will be held February 8 through the 10th.  I have had a local ask me to do this one,  actually several  people inquired about a Florida workshop so here it is. I will follow the usual protocol. In the morning I do a demo, and in the afternoon the students will  paint and I will run  from easel  to easel doing individual critiques. I will explain my methods and materials and give individual attention to each student. I will also do a seascape demo, as we will be on the water it is useful too know a little about how the surf works. 

This workshop will extremely intense, we will meet for breakfast and work until the light fails. Then we will eat dinner together and I will draw on napkins and wave my arms. I try to cram as much as I possibly can into the three days. I will, (as usual) work you like a borrowed mule.

If you want to come, here is the link.

About finding landscape subjects

Rembrandt, Adoration of the shepherds

 I get a lot of e-mails from readers, and I guess they are a big part of my reward for writing the blog. It is nice to hear from people who have read it. I have received a lot of Christmas e-mails and New Years greetings from blog readers, thank you all. I try to reply to them all briefly, but some do get by me.  I received this e-mail the other day.

Stape;
I just finished reading your blog, its taken me close to 2 years!  It took so long because I tended to savor it.  Some days reading just one post, other days reading a couple.  Its been a fantastic insight into the life of an artist.  I really have learned a tremendous amount, and it has helped steer me in directions for further study. --Thank You.

  I would really like to know how you pick your spots for doing plein air.  Is it just one thing that grabs your eye?  A bunch of things that you move around on your canvas?  Does it matter that much since you are designing your painting anyway?  

This may sound trivial to you, but I have a devil of a time trying to find a good spot.  I think I want everything to be perfect.  Inevitably, I spend a good first half hour or more just walking around trying to settle.  And then, once I am half way thru painting, wishing I had picked one of the other spots.

 ----------------a reader

 

 I have written so much, I think I have written about that too, but the blog is a giant labyrinth of over a thousand posts and even if I have written about that before it is a good suggestion for a post just the same. 

There are few if any perfect locations. Those that do exist  must be out west. Every location I find in New England has SOMETHING that resonates with me, but they all have problems. I too used to drive for hours trying to find the "perfect" place, I haven't for a long time. I joke with my painting buddies that I feel it through my feet when I am  in the right place, it is somewhat a matter of intuition. I think that I register the feel of a place. I know there is something there. A lot may be wrong with the scene, but there is a "feel' to it. But, I do have New England, a very special place, to work with. I have New Hampshire, the coast of Massachusetts and Vermont at hand which are very evocative and American. Pure nature is good everywhere though. A couple of trees and a field is really all you need to paint a fine landscape.

The important thing is not to be subject driven. Look  for collections of shapes that work well together, rather than the perfect group of objects. Try to feel the scene. be aware of how it makes you feel and then think about how you can amplify that to make  the viewer respond to it. I often feel a quiet wistfulness or nostalgia in some places, even when I have never been there before. Some seem  haunted, others are triumphs of natures beauty and  make me feel the joy of being alive and out in nature. Some places have great architecture or a historic  interest. The important thing is to develop a sensitivity to the POETRY of place. But mostly I look for interesting collections of abstract shapes that work well together. I look for design possibilities. I have painted thousands of landscapes so I am aware of set ups that have bitten me in the past. Those are problems that I have run into before that I know are going to be hard  to resolve.

Thinking design makes lots of places paintable. I used to paint with some old guys who are now dead. They would stroll out into a location and set up their easels and I would wonder "what the hell do they see out there?"I was looking in front of them, rather than at them, for the secret.

THIS IS IMPORTANT...... You bring the art with you into the landscape. Maybe out west in Montana there are perfect places to paint, but in the rest of the world, what makes the picture, arrives with you. It is in your excitement, your intent and your empathy.You have to be looking from the world of art at the actual world, not looking at the world for art. A painter with lots of art flowing in their veins can make a fine painting in the most ordinary of places. 

There is a knack for choosing spots, I am sure it is a developed skill. The master landscapist finds subjects in places the rest of us would walk by without recognizing. Besides being on the lookout for attractive arrangements of shapes, a good landscapist knows ways to deal with the imperfect designs presented to him. If there is something in the landscape that seems to offer a possibility, the practiced painter probably has discovered a way in a previous painting, of dealing with that problem. A beginner looks at the landscape and asks " What does it look like", a more practiced hand asks "what can I do with this?" Here then, are some bullets;

• Ask  yourself, what is there that is appealing to me about this place? what could I make here?
• Think about how you would say that in paint, not how you would copy the look of the place, but how you would express it in the language of paint.
•  Develop a tool box of solutions for dealing with the problems in the landscape before you.To do that you must of course learn to recognize them.
• Know what direction you are facing. As the day lengthens the sun is going to move and that is going to present either opportunities or problems. You will need experience and perhaps a compass to do that. 
• Look at lots of historic paintings. It is very useful to have a mental library of how great painters who came before you dealt with similar scenes. It is useful to know how others  have handled the problems with which they were also faced.
• Keep a couple of different format canvasses in the trunk of your car, "maybe that scene would work on a long rectangle instead of this squarish 16 by 20 I planned to use? maybe I need a vertical canvas?"
• Simplifying is the root of design, maybe the scene before you is too fractured and complex, would it work better if you left out something, or reduced it into a few simpler forms?
• Read Edgar Payne! (Composition of Outdoor Landscape Painting) Learn about design stems, sometimes knowing that will give you a way to impose a design on a scene that doesn't quite work.
• Try to be empathetic. See if you can become attuned to the "feel" of the landscape. This is sensitivity. Cultivate that.
• Read Emerson.
• Make thumbnail sketches. The first thumbnail you do will be the obvious and  often lackluster "take" on the scene. After you have done a few you might hit on something more creative. It is like returning several times and taking a couple of more runs at the project.
• Find a place that has lots of possible pictures. Monet did that with his garden and those radioactive haystacks.There are locations, like grand views that offer up for the painter but a single subject. There are others from which you can pull a hundred different paintings."What if I stood over there?" There was a stream through the snowy woods near where I once lived in Maine, that I painted over and over.When I didn't want to search for a new location or drive too far, I always went there.

You won't  learn this in a single season, you have to make lots of paintings. That would be true of anything you want to learn to do, incidentally. People develop  the ability to do things through repeated effort.

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I have scheduled another Snowcamp, a winter painting workshop in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Snowcamp is the most fun I have all year!The workshop  is held at a rambling, late 19th century inn,  The Sunset Hill in Franconia, New Hampshire which is very romantic and old timey.The workshop will be held January 26 through 28.The inn is the perfect place to do a class and the scenery is fabulous. The White mountains are spread before the inn like a movie set. 

 

It might be cold, but the inn is right at our backs as we work, so we can run inside by the fire and drink more coffee if it becomes too much. The views from the inn are so stupendous there is really no reason to leave the grounds, so we don't lose any time to driving to our locations. At lunchtime the inn brings our sandwiches etc, right to us. The inn has helped me do workshops for years now. They even provide us with our own dining room, where we can eat together around a big round table every night.  I do a talk  on art and design while our dinner is prepared by the inn's chef. 

The workshop is very intense! It is as intense as I can figure out how to make it, in fact. We will run very long days from breakfast till evening. I try to cram as much information as I possibly can into three days. That's a short time, I always wish I had three months. I do a demo every morning  and then in the afternoon the students paint and I  run from easel  to easel doing individual instruction. I can save you YEARS of screwing around!

If you are coming from far away, many have, it is easy to fly into Manchester airport. That is a full sized regional airport serviced by several carriers. You can rent a car there and be at the inn in an hour and a half. Boston Logan Airport is another hour to the south, but may save you a connection. 

If you have never painted in, or been to New  England, it is a very special  part of  the country and the White Mountains, where the workshop is held are both beautiful and historic. There is much here that hasn't changed since the 19th century. I am  originally from Minnesota, but I have been in New England  for about 30 years. I love the special feel of  the place and New  Hampshire is a very authentic part of  it. Besides New Hampshire has no sales tax .

If you are interested, please click here.

Simplified designs in iconic paintings

Winslow Homer, Fog Warning   The Museum of Fine Arts Boston

I write often about design. Design is what I call that part of  painting which is neither color or drawing. I prefer the word "design" to the word "composition" because it implies deliberate  and thoughtful human action.

YOU MAY CROP TO, OR FIND A COMPOSITION, BUT YOU MUST  ARRANGE TO DESIGN!

 I have been playing with some images in my Photoshop program that divides everything into either a black or a white pixel. Looking at paintings that way is rather like squinting at them, which is something I routinely do. Like squinting it eliminates all the detail and reduces them to their basic value structure. Simplification is the root of design. There is a concept in Japanese art called notan

 ( I will smugly let you assume I know my way around Japanese art). Arthur Wesley Dow 1857 –1922 who was from Ipswich, Massachusetts wrote an influential book published in 1912. In it he discusses Notan. That is the use of  simplified arrangement of the dark and light in an image. The book is a classic text on the subject of design in painting.

  Below is Winslow Homers painting above reduced down to only two values.

Not all   fine paintings are as reduced as these but I think many iconic paintings are. They have a big and very spare design. Like the ability  of great orators to succinctly say something with a few words that stays on your mind, these paintings make a bold and unforgettable statement without many complicated and busy shapes. Brevity  is  eloquent. The Homer has a  big dark of a somewhat bizarre shape (the pointed shapes of those clouds is so strange!) accented by a slash of light, the fish.  The clouds look eerie as befits a dangerous development in the weather for the Gloucesterman in the small boat. Those spiky shapes say threat. Homer has played the lights and darks in the water close enough together that it remains one big shape. Had he pushed the lights and the darks there further apart he would have destroyed the unity in the big shape of the water. The sea remains a single shape decorated with variation rather than a  collection of different and separate shapes. Subordinating value changes within an area preserves the large shapes and yet still allows for the variations necessary to convey the drawing.

 

Here is a favorite Rembrandt of mine, A Woman Bathing, from the National Gallery in London. This is likely Hendrickje Stoffels his housekeeper who became Rembrandts lover and common law wife. That was a scandal that sorely affected his standing in Amsterdam.

Below is  the reduced version.

It is a big, somewhat complicated, but single light shape against a dark field. Not much question as to where we are supposed to look and what the subject is here. There is enormous bulk and solidity in this figure. It has weight and mass. The picture also has the earthy humanity for which  Rembrandt is famous. The impossibly rich darks contrast brilliantly with smash of light on the simple gown she raises to a nearly indecent height. Only the shadow of its hem hides her underneathies from our prurient gaze.

 

Here is Bougereau's Nymphs and Satyrs belonging to the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamsburg, Massachusetts.  I understand this is now on loan to the Metropolitan in New York. I have always felt they had a weaker Bougereau than was fitting given the superlative quality of their collection and their place as the premier American museum.

This painting reduces down to a diagonally placed oval anchored at one end by the  female wonderful figure that counterbalances the struggling satyr.This oval is an intricate rhythmic collection of shapes silhouetted against the darkness of it's background Evidently, according to myth Satyrs fear water.

 

Above is a Dean Cornwell, a great American illustrator, and  below is it's reduced version.

This design is a loop of intricate shapes, dark against a light background. Notice that each of these shapes is totally different from each other. That gives it the maximum visual interest, as opposed  to  repetitive quickly read too similar forms. All of those darks are  linked by  the way. You can  place your finger on it anywhere and trace its entire circumference without lifting your exploring digit. If you divide the picture at the center the weight of the two halves balances. The largest most bizarre  and alluring dark shapes surround the man in the chair at the middle left, as he is the main actor in this drama and Cornwell wanted to make sure you knew that.

 © The Estate of Edward Seago, courtesy of Portland Gallery 

Here is Edward Seago again, a superb designer. This thing could be a  Franz Kline it is so abstract.This is a powerful and arresting design, brutal and like the harsh world of the arctic  where it was painted. The bold and aggressive design carries the story as much as the rendering of the objects.There must be only about three different values in this painting. This thing is boiled down to it's essentials also.

Again, all of the darks are linked. Notice the white negative spaces, they  are each different in area, giving maximum variety to their shapes.

Here is The Hundred Guilder Print by Rembrandt You can squint at this and see it's simple arrangement also. It is really a big dark field with a pointed wedge of light extended into it. Within that doorstop shape is a triangle at whose apex is the figure of Christ.

Here is an early 20th century etching by Edward Blashfield (1848-1936)  an English artist. The Breaking up of the Agamemnon. This is an example of the use of bold shapes in design. There was a great revival of etching in that era and in the better works of that day were great examples of design. I have studied them to learn their moves. I guess I should do a post on etchings of that period. Perhaps I already have, I forget, I have written so much.

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I have scheduled another Snowcamp, a winter painting workshop in the White Mountains of New Hampshire . Held at a rambling late 19th century inn.  The Sunset Hill in Franconia, New Hampshire which is very romantic and old timey.The workshop will be held January 26 through 28.  I have done this for a few years now and it is my favorite workshop of the year. The inn is the perfect place to do a class and the scenery is fabulous. The White mountains are spread before the inn like a movie set. 

 

It might be cold but the inn is right at our backs as we work so we can run inside by the fire and drink more coffee if it becomes too much. The inn has helped me do workshops for years now. They even provide us with our own dining room, where we can eat together around a big round table every night.  I do a talk  on art and design while our dinner is prepared by the inn's chef. If you are interested, please click here.