Pitfall

When undertaking a complicated composition, an artist often divides the attention of the viewer by creating two (or more) centers of interest.  When that is done, the picture's integrity suffers.  I exposed one of my own mistakes in a previous article.  http://williambuffett.blogspot.com/2011/11/using-photographs.html

The two houses, in this sketch, were threatening to divide, like microbes, into two cells.

Paul Gaugin painted fine and original and complex pictures which are treasured everywhere they hang.  Only a very few, painted early in his career, exhibit this flaw.

Giovanni Bellini:

I could find only one somewhat borderline example from the work of Andrew Wyeth:

Gabriele Munter:

Artists, be aware of this pitfall.

 

Dancers

From stages, streets, clubs and movies, here are some dancers from my files:

Using Photographs

In order to paint the pictures I imagine, I need the ability to draw accurately from life.  It is true even when I use photographs for reference.  To illustrate:

While riding through a residential neighborhood in San Pedro on a quick trip to California, I spotted an outstanding motif - two Spanish-style houses on a hill with a view of the Pacific in the distance.  There was only time for a few snapshots.

No one point of view was satisfactory; the sketch I made later required me to synthesize the three.

Comparing the photos with the watercolor it is obvious that many changes had to be made:  adjustments of walls and garages, exaggeration of the steepness of the hill, a drastic change in the direction of the light, omission of cars and trash cans, addition of clouds and trees.

At this point I had made one of the most common mistakes in art: I had put two pictures into one rectangle.  The house and garage on the left was one picture, the house and garage on the right was another.  It isn't always so easy to fix; this time I just shoved them together.

Two more steps in the development:

The wall and steps on the left seemed too stretched out; the redrawing is showing in the above version.

This is where it stands today, after 14 days of work:

 

Details Continued

Pierre Bonnard often painted complex still lifes which included a figure.  This example illustrates how he treats the features of the woman in the picture with less detail than the apples or the pattern on her shawl.

Rembrandt did the opposite in this portrait.  The garment of the sitter is nothing more than a flat, out-of-focus shape of black, and the interior is suggested only by a few broad strokes.

This close-up shows the care he reserved for the face.

Details

Another choice which an artist has, when setting to work, is the use of more or less detail.  I have chosen portraits to illustrate the extremes.

This (portion of a) portrait by Edouard Manet employs little detail; the eye on the left is a mere marking.  But the simply and boldly painted figure strikes the viewer from a distance and conveys energy and resoluteness as well as the likeness of an important statesman.

This self portrait by Hans Holbein is equally effective even though the whole surface is carefully worked over and rendered in sharp focus.  The finely detailed information provided draws the viewer in for a closer look.

Here we have a cosmopolitan man-about-town painted by Amadeo Modigliani in a spare style, with only the essentials included.  We immediately feel that we've got this guy's number.

What a contrast is this character painted by James Wyeth.  Little is left out, including scores of individual whiskers.  But we've got this guy's number, too, right away.

The last pair represent even greater extremes.  The woman painted by Milton Avery is almost reduced to an abstract pattern, and the lovely, harmonious colors are relied upon to tell us about her.

We get almost more than we want to know about this laboriously rendered man by Ivan Albright.

The conclusion is not that anything goes, as far as detail and the lack of it, but that anything CAN go.

 

Raw Material

On a recent trip to California, I made some scribbles in a small notebook, in hopes of capturing something which could one day be elaborated into a composition.  Here is some of the undigested, undeveloped raw material:



Vincent's New Wrinkle

There is no more direct expression of the underlying energy in nature than in the work of Vincent Van Gogh.  In this early drawing, he used the obvious device of a storm to communicate power.

Compare it with this drawing made the last year of his life.  Here there is no wind and bowing tree; the ground and the things growing out of it are drawn with separate, staccato strokes which simultaneously describe the landscape, and suggest the power in it.  See my post "French Fries and Potato Chips"  http://williambuffett.blogspot.com/2011/04/french-fries-and-potato-chips.html  His achievement is in showing us this vigor even on a calm day with a clear sky.

I made this ink study of a mature tree in the same spirit:

Van Gogh's innovation is exemplified in this famous and popular landscape painting.  With this technique, the flickering bars of thick paint delineate, color and animate the landscape all at once.

Of course the artist can't have it all; in the interest of expressiveness, some verisimilitude is sacrificed.  You have to choose what you want and lose what you must.

The self portrait with the swirling background and the coat that seems alive is sometimes cited as evidence of a troubled, unbalanced mind.  It could also be offered as the manifestation of an intense joy in the act of painting, of exultation in his own discovery.

 

Landscape Action

A landscape such as this one by Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes is benevolent, tame, calm, still and orderly.  It invokes a feeling of serenity:

But a string of verbs apply to landscape as we know it to be.  Water evaporates and precipitates, freezes and thaws, flows and surges.  Plants grope for dissolved nutrients, erupt from soil and compete for the space and light they need.  Hills and savage mountains are pushed up by the same ponderous forces that crack open canyons under the sea.

If she or he should want to, how does an artist go about capturing some of this action to put into a still picture?  One way is to paint a storm.  This one is by Winslow Homer:

Here is a successful and more subtle solution by Peter Paul Rubens.  The slanting light suggests the change from day into night; some of the tree trunks and branches are reminiscent of the shape of a bolt of lightning; bright and deeply shaded areas are distributed across the surface of the picture so as to imply restlessness and motion:

Jacob van Ruysdael has gone all out.  Clouds billow and roil, water tumbles and froths, trees strain towards the sky.  As with Rubens, there is no sizable area of calm.

El Greco gives us energy bordering on apocalypse.  The fragile-looking buildings of the city almost look as though they are being chewed up and devoured by the irresistible forces of nature: