The Well-Knit Picture

A well-knit picture is hard to define, but is instantly recognizable when you see it.  Here is one, a painting by Palma Il Vecchio:

One of the devices by which this picture is made to look whole and integrated is the use of "passages," places where the figures in the foreground are knitted with their surroundings and the background.  A couple of places where this occurs are: Where the dark hair of the woman holding the child is set against an architectural form behind her.  A sort of gate is opened up between them; one flows into the other with only a faint definition, tying two parts of the picture together.  The left shoulder of the child is separated from his mother's shawl by only a light line - the same for his wrist against his mother's hand.  Those are "passages," and they can be found all over the surface of the painting.

Artists of widely differing schools use this device in varying degrees.  Maurice De Vlaminck:

Claude Monet:

My contribution:

Post postscript:  A special hello and thank you to my readers in the Philippines.

Enough But Not Too Much - An Extension

Here are 7 more drawings from my files which attempt to set down the maximum amount of information using a minimum number of pen strokes.  I considered giving each a caption, but I reconsidered.  Displayed without text they should explain themselves.



Enough But Not Too Much

A spare, clean drawing, composed of a few lines put down with conviction, can sometimes suggest a world.  I have chosen the work of 4 artists for the first 4 illustrations and taken the last 4 from my own files.

Andy Warhol sketches Truman Capote and gives us a glimpse into the play of their rapport.

Diego Rivera made this drawing of flower vendors and their customers, and the composition is made complete and wonderful by the inclusion of horsemen gliding along behind them, one of whom turns his face to look at the activity.

Milton Avery has taken up a brush and set down, almost offhandedly, a mother in the midst of her day of care giving.

Henri Matisse hired a pretty model to pose.  The textures of foliage, hair and fabric combine with her person to form a consummate decorative pattern.

Who can fail to understand something of how this man feels?

Here one is made to feel the terrific misplaced energy which sprung the frame, wrinkled the sheet steel, flattened the tires and punched out the glass of this former automobile.

Admit that these animals, made of a few hasty strokes of a pen, nevertheless look very heavy.

Am I the only one who sees the poignancy of this tableau drawn at a state fair?

Effective Distortion - Emotions

To illustrate effective distortion, done for the purpose of conveying emotions, I have selected 4 works of art.  None of them is pretty, but they are effective - even haunting.

This self portrait drawn in pencil by Wyndham Lewis aims at a sort of sullen, steely scorn expressed in a clean, economical style which resembles cut and folded paper..

Georges Rouault takes the prize for agony.  His head of Jesus features large eyes looking upward, begging for surcease, while the jaw is clenched in pain and black smears and lines shred the face into sections.

The emotion expressed by this nude from Auguste Rodin is harder to pinpoint, but it clearly has nothing to do with any kind of happiness.  The powerful, fit, athletic man is apparently unharmed on the outside, but he is so extremely and painfully distorted that he must be undergoing an inner agony.

Picasso's head of a grief-stricken woman almost shrieks and sobs aloud.  Broken and made ugly by her emotion, she, too, is disturbing to look at.



Effective Distortion - Streamlining

Though they contain complex systems with irregular shapes, vehicles from rockets to autos are designed with simplified outlines to improve efficiency and performance.  Similarly, the artist Michelangelo furnished Jehovah and an elaborate cluster of youthful figures with a simple enclosing outline which conveys the quality of fleetness and freedom from gravity.

Albert Ryder combined a rocky eminence, a wooden rowboat and the shadows they cast into one simple shape which seems eerie and mysterious, yet is rational.

Diego Rivera encloses an involved pose of a woman and child in a simple outline which produces a compact, snug effect of protection and devotion.

The Belgian artist Constant Permeke has streamlined the outline of this tough character.  The distortion causes him to appear self-contained, unapproachable and stubborn.



Effective Distortion - Elongation

This sensitively wrought portrait of the Egyptian king Akhenaten benefits from elongation.  The trimming away of the mass of his face subtly forces more attention on his features.  He is known for bucking the religious establishment of his time and focusing devotion to one god: the sun.  Nefertiti was his wife.

This portrayal of a Roman General is fashioned to resemble the very epithet which was perhaps  commonly, maybe even universally pronounced among the Legions he commanded.  Use your imagination.  I think he looks like a cruel martinet and an all-around jerk.

The habitual practice, by Amadeo Modigliani, of distortion by elongation is at its best in this painting of his young girl friend.

Finally, the most familiar and systematic stretching of the figure, apart from the elegant work of Sandro Botticelli, is fashion illustration.

Effective Distortion

A rooster is spiky and aggressive, witless and LOUD.  Pablo Picasso stressed those qualities exclusively when he made this drawing:

Some of the streets in San Francisco are so steep, you feel you may tip over backwards driving a truck up one of them.  This street painted by Wayne Thiebaud is as precipitous as a waterfall; you would tip over backwards if you tried to go up it.



My entry here is a picture of a wave which, if you were close to it, might send a thrill of fear through you as it rose to unnatural height.

It isn't easy to get it right.  Failed attempts abound, but I prefer to seek out successes; so far in my own work I can only identify this one.

http://www.buffettstudio.com/



Marching Band Part 3

Another figure used to animate my marching band composition is sketched from a film of a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans.

His gesture is perfect for my purpose, but he has to face in the direction the whole spectacle is headed.  For the sake of a reasonably convincingly drawn young man, I worked from a live model.

Now almost everyone in the picture, including the dog, is part of a noisy commotion, moving across the canvas from left to right.  For contrast, I included three static figures, including a young woman taking it all in with wide open eyes.

The scale of the painting, I decided, had to be large, because it is a very busy design, and I'm looking for LOUD.  It is six feet four inches wide.

It took a long time to create, and the original costs about as much as a new car.  But in case somebody wants one, I can deliver a full size exact replica (giclee) on canvas for a fraction of the cost of the original.  See the post "Flatfoot Floogie" from Nov. 13, 2010. http://williambuffett.blogspot.com/2010/11/flat-foot-floogie.html

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Marching Band Part 2

Another figure demonstrating the infectious pulse of the music with spirited body movements was the young man in the striped shirt.

His gesture is purloined from an illustration by Morton Roberts.  This artist drew a cluster of "second liners" for an article in Life magazine which caught and concentrated the excitement of the music better than any artist's work I have seen.  I made an outline drawing of the whole group and chose the 3rd figure from the left to steal.

Again, the attitude and motions of the figure were so complicated I had to use a model.



Marching Band Part 1

A traditional New Orleans marching band can fire off as much joy and exaltation as any art form I know.

A task I set for myself was to try to bring some of it indoors and hang it on the wall.  The musicians don't cavort; mostly they walk and play their instruments.  Therefore I reasoned that the only way I could convey the excitement of the music was through the people who were affected by it and expressed it with movement.

My first version of this canvas ("Red Wing") depended entirely upon two dancers and a strutter to objectify the infectious rhythms of the procession.  The center of the picture had only walking musicians.

However, I searched through photographs of parades and found a shot of a tenor man who was doing a little more than marching.  His head was tilted over, one shoulder was dropped, and his knees bent a little more than the others', causing him to dip slightly; his hip, at the same time, swung ever so subtly to one side.  It was just enough.



I had to employ some knowledge of drawing in order to bring the figure more into profile; the photo was too frontal.

Now there is a bit of a swing in the step.



Passion in Portraits Part 4

I'm touching on 4 painters in this post, about a century apart, all of whom painted a lot of portraits.

Rembrandt always gave it his best, even when commissioned to paint, for instance, a pair of portraits of a couple to flank a fireplace, a merchant, perhaps, married to a potato.  The artist's attitude seemed to be: she's a person and her daddy loves her.

In contrast here is a sitter of his own choosing who struck a deep chord in the artist.

Goya was not so charitable.  When obligated to paint someone which to him was not of interest, he nevertheless had to produce a passable portrait.  Often his solution was to paint an innocuous doll face and dazzle the client with a beautifully rendered costume, with fine stuffs, bows and lace or ribbons and medals and gold braid.

Who could doubt that this woman interested him?

Sargent appears to have been pretty even handed when setting out to portray people of more or less interest to him.  The two examples I have picked don't contrast all that much with one another.  However, I would guess that all of these 4 artists would choose to paint the lady in black if they had to choose.  I would.

I went carefully through about 250 of Hockney's portraits looking for an empty-headed dip, or a flatulent pseudo-intellectual, or a commonplace dullard or a blank.  No such thing.  He is careful; they all have the spark.