Avoiding The Image Trap: Trust Your Light

On the mast of my easel I have scribbled these words: squint-observe-select-aim-stroke. I know that whatever's in front of my eyes has within it all the information I need to lead me toward a good painting. It's a matter of learning how to see what is actually there.

Artists who continually fall into the image trap limit their attention to what they assume about the appearance of the image. If it's a red umbrella in sunlight, it gets painted red and shaped like an umbrella whereas in the raw image, the eye might not see that much red at all. Actually there might be strong pinks or oranges or even white in direct light and perhaps purples or even greens or blues in the shadows. Values in one shape might be similar to those in an adjacent shape and each might be merging with the surroundings both in light and in shadow.

To fix our attention on the paths that light and shadow are making is to allow us to discover things we otherwise would have missed. If there is a light pattern moving throughout the scene from background to image or image to image, we might capitalize on that visual quality rather than focusing on just the definition of the image. Look what a delightful path of light Pat Weaver found at a racetrack in Kentucky.

Pat Weaver
"Lookin' For A Winner".
Watercolor on Paper

Pat has set the human images within a strong path of dark (you might even call it a shadow path) and celebrated their activity with pools of light flowing in and out from figures to spaces around the figures. Rather than encapsulate each figure with defined edges, she has allowed the light to merge from figures to their surroundings with grace and fluid gesture. The contrast of the strong dark path enhances the brilliance of the light.

When James Gurney speaks of "shape welding", he's talking about this sort of thing where we find similar values among adjoining shapes and merge those values without defining an edge. To look for these things and to paint them is to shift our attention away from the image, finding surprises and excitement that can lift us right out of the image trap toward a successful painting.

The Image Trap

Probably the one thing that causes repeated mediocre and poor paintings is what I call the "image trap". The artist is so concerned with the images in the painting that image take priority over sound composition. Things get painted as individual pieces in local color rather than being related to the whole, considering how color masses behave in light and shadow.

A term I'm using these days is "raw image". Not very elegant, but to me it conveys images out there before they're ever touched by the artist. We select images within their environments to carry our content (or as some say, concept). They are why we're doing the painting to begin with, but if those very images are painted out of context with how light and shadow behave the painting feels disjointed, fragmented, disconnected.

There are many ways to put images in a creative context which visually connects them and, at the same time, enhances their purpose. All these methods are the heart of what good composing is all about. Any single set of raw images contains potential for a profound, mediocre or poor painting. That's why the painter learns strategies to stay out the image trap, therefore strengthening the quality of the painting.

During the next few days, I will talk about staying out of the image trap and keeping a painting connected without making it boring.

Value: Composing With Notan

I address value--light and dark--in the beginning of these discussions because I believe it to be the mother of all elements, even more fundamental than color. (Hawthorne and Hensche probably just took a tumble in their graves.) It's because of light that we see color. Turn down the lights and things become dim, turn them off and you can't see a thing. So it makes profound sense to me that light/dark reside over all visual elements.

Our surroundings make sense to us because of how light hits their images causing consequent shadows. We can reduce these lights and shadows to black and white and it will make a visual thought, show us a visual structure where darks connect and light carries a path within and around the darks . And this will give us the Notan of the scene.

Photo to notan

Notan, pronounced "no tan", is a Japanese concept meaning "light dark". It is related to yin yang where yang is light and yin is dark. One way to give solid structure to a painting is to do just that--designate all lower value notes to black, all higher notes the white. I used the word "notes" because if we can use music as an analogy and we can easily understand the vocabulary of value.

On a piano there is middle C which is the center of the notes available on the piano keyboard. Notes to the left of middle C are lower in tone, notes to the right are higher. Light and dark notes can be similar, but because the value range in nature is so vast, we get a better grasp to limit value notes to 10 where 1 is the lightest or highest and 10 is the darkest or lowest, 5.5 would be equal to middle C.

Using this system of thinking, we can find our true pattern of lights and shadows if we create a notan, placing value notes 1-5.5 in the white areas and notes 5.5-10 in the blacks.

This is most easily done in a tiny drawing no bigger than 1" x 2". When creating the drawing, we can decide whether we want the light pattern as we perceive it to be or if we want it

higher key

or lower key .

From here, we can create our painting, keeping our color values one-ish to five-ish where the notan indicates light and five-ish to ten-ish where it indicates dark, referring back to our source, whether plein air or photo, for the colors we want to use.

Notan is only one way of guaranteeing a successful value structure, but it's also a surefire way of getting a strong design within which to compose a painting. Go here then here to see I use notan.

The Language

When we paint, we communicate through a rich visual language. Images speak, yes, but how we present them influences what they say. In their raw form each is in a context of a unique light and/or shadow. We can paint the image in strong light, in weak light, in strong shadow, in weak shadow. We can make the image light and it's surroundings dark, make it dark with it's surroundings light, make it include both lights and darks in a variety of surroundings. The same image repeated in a variety of lighting will communicate
differently. The element of our language making this happen we call "value". You know that. But had you considered it as a part of your language's vocabulary?

Our language's vocabulary includes value, hue, intensity, temperature, shape, size direction, lineand texture. These are the elements with which we "speak" as painters.

Rules?

Artists tend to be mavericks, tend to reject rules of any kind. It's the creative side of our nature to question assumptions, to extend beyond the accepted, to test many waters, to argue. Without our rebel side, no worthwhile art would exists at all. No good music, no decent paintings, no important poetry. None of the good stuff that holds our attention. Music that we can listen to repeatedly, paintings that we keep going back to, poems that we tend to read again and again--they simply could not exist without disregard for status quo.

Then what about these rules of composition that many artists reject, but seasoned artists hold dear? They are not rules at all, but principles. There's a vast difference: a rule is fixed, a principle is flexible. A rule is man-made, a principle is the cause of an effect. A rule assumes a bias, a principle is a fundamental truth.

Our principles for visual composing are the results of observations made by artists over ions. They are our guidelines within which there are limitless possibilities for variation, expansion, alterations and elaborations. These principles are not static, but organic. They are like the gravity that holds us to the earth.

The posts to follow will be my thoughts about visual composing. I hope you enjoy the ride.