Open and Closed

Composing is not just about the design of the painting, nor is it just about the subject.  Rather it is about choices:  it is about how we select the subject, how much of it we select, then how we express our choice on the two-dimensional space we've chosen.

Sometimes painters choose to engage the viewer by giving a limited number of clues about their work's content, giving the piece a sense of mystery. One classic method for doing this is something called an open composition.

Whereas in a closed composition the entire subject appears within the edges of a painting, the open composition shows only part of the subject .  In photographers language, the image is cropped.

Look at the photos below:

We know this is a person, but where is she? Outdoors or looking out an open window?  What is she doing?  Is she gazing out over a landscape?  Is the wind blowing her hair?  An open composition might crop out any degree of information allowing us, the viewers, to complete the story or simply ask questions.  

Still an open composition, this selection and placement gives us more clues.  Now we know she's on a bicycle, but is she riding or resting?  Is she wearing shorts or slacks or a skirt?  Is she making a turn or about to crash into a fence?

Here we have a little more information--we know she's wearing shorts, but we still don't see all the image.  We still don't know whether she is riding or resting or about to crash.  Her hair tells us motion is coming from somewhere, but is it from how she's moving or is it wind?  The composition is still open.

But in this photo, the story is complete giving us a closed composition where the entire image is shown to us.   The girl is riding her bike and about to make a turn from one trail onto another alongside a fence. About the only question left is whether the wind is blowing or whether she's making a speedy turn.

One thing we might note is that the closed composition doesn't engage us so much as the open compositions did.  Making this selection for a painting will require making additional choices to keep our audience engaged.

Twentieth century artist Georgia O'Keeffe often used open composition, zooming into the center of things to find her subject.  At first glance we see an abstract design, but looking closer we realize we are gazing into the center of a flower.

"Red Canna"    Oil on Canvas     Georgia O'Keefe  1887-1986

But twentieth-century artist Edward Hopper uses the device in another way.  Is it to kinder our imaginations or for it's spatial design?  Or perhaps he was teasing us.

"Light at Two Lights"   Watercolor   Edward Hopper  1882-1967

The visual language speaks to our senses, our intellects, our intuitions and our emotions.  The use of open composition stands a good chance of strongly tapping into all four.

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See my most recent painting at One Artist's Journey.  A new painting is posted each Sunday.

Light Has Temperature, Too

Imagine someone strumming a guitar slightly out of tune. No matter how lovely the melody or how well it is played, if even one string is out of tune the rendition is bothersome.   We get the same sensation when a painting's color temperature is “out of tune”.

The temperature of light--whether it is warm or cool--is the one element that keeps a painting "in tune," that gives the feeling of harmony.  If the ambient light in a scene feels warm, then all the colors need some degree of warmth whereas if the light is cool, even  colors we recognize as warm will be slightly cooler.

I'm including this color wheel as a reminder of the warm and cool colors when not effected by ambient light.

Notice the sense of overall warm light in this Richard Schmid painting.  Even though they are cooler than the buildings,  the grays of the street, sidewalk and sky contain some degree of warmth.

Richard Schmid     Oil on Canvas

Now look at the overall cool light in this painting by Charles Reid.
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Charles Reid    Watercolor on Paper

Although we think of skin tones as being warm, when in cool light, they are perceived cooler, leaning more towards violet than orange.  Even the yellows of the boat and distant building are cool yellows.

Here's a little experiment I did:

Below are four versions of a single scene, the original and three others each with a different light temperature.   Using my photo editing software, I created varying light temperatures, then sampled three areas of each photo to see how the change in temperature effected the original colors.

For larger version, click on photo     Original photo by Cathy Hauck

Each little box of color labeled A is taken from the large shadow on the grass.  Those labeled B are taken from the woman's white shirt, and the C's are taken from the sunlight grass.  Comparing these we can see how even the sunlit grass becomes  a bit bluer under the blue light, a bit more olive in a magenta light, and a brighter, yellow green under the yellow light.  And notice how even the hot red of the firetruck changes consistent with each new light temperature.

Taken individually, each of these versions is "in tune," giving the feeling that the same color of light is present within the entire scene.

The Role of Edges

An edge in a painting is like a pause between two musical phrases:  it marks the ending of one shape and the beginning of another. The two sides of any edge can be isolated from each other or transitioned into each other, depending upon how the artist has handled the painting of the edge itself.

Look at this little painting by Qiang Huang.

"Away From the Heat"     6' x 6"    Oil on

 Notice that edge B clearly differentiates its shape from the one adjoining it whereas edge A is diffused into its surrounding area.  But in edge C, the bottom of the shape completely disappears into its shadow.

Qiang has used here the three devices for handling edges--hard edges (B), soft edges (A) and lost edges (C).

Whereas hard edges bring shapes to an abrupt halt, calling our attention to them, soft and lost edges enable shapes and images to flow from one area of the painting to another. The soft edge makes a gentle transition, but in the lost edge, we don't see a break between where one shape begins and the other one ends. Look how Qiang has worked his edges in another little painting,

"Afternoon Tea"     9" x 12"    Oil on Canvas

Examine how he has painted the handle to the tea kettle.  By interrupting portions of the handle, losing its edges into the background rather than isolating them into one continuous shape with hard edges, Qiang has given a greater interest and unity to the image.

Here's a challenge for you:  Examine this little painting by Qiang and find all the lost edges, soft edges and hard edges. 

"Limes and Grapes"    6" x 6"    Oil on Board

 Now, look specifically at just the hard edges you found.  Notice how your eye migrates to them.  Next focus on the soft edges.  Notice how they create a transition from one area to another.  Finally, the lost edges.  Imagine how stilted the painting would be if these were clearly defined rather than being lost.

Our eyes want to participate, to become involved in paintings we view.  We want to be challenged, not spoon fed. When an artist uses just enough hard edges to bring us into the painting, then employs soft and lost edges, our eyes become involved.  We feel like we've been invited to become a part of what the painting is all about.

How One Painting Is Composed

Frequently folks want to take issue with how much composing a painter does.  But the seasoned painter knows that to get it right, it must be rightly composed.  It's not that difficult:  it's just a matter of practicing one principle at a time until it becomes a natural part of your working process.

One beautifully composed painting I discovered recently is "The Dancer," a watercolor painting by Carla O'Conner.  Today's post is about how she made this happen.

What do we see working here?

"The Dancer"  30" x 22"   Watercolor

The first thing I see is an underlying structure of triangles, one of the most powerful organizing methods available to the artist.

 Notice how the image is anchored to the painting's edges at each point a central triangle, enabling the negative shapes--those shapes outside the image-- to form their own triangles.  And look how each of these is a different size and configuration:  that's using the principle of variation.  

Next,  look at  the painting's notan.  All the darks are connected  forming a visual path guiding the eye from one area to another giving  unity to the entire piece. In quantity though, there is more light space than dark, the principle of dominance at work here.   

Back to the painting.

Notice the strong vertical alignment of shapes, the strong vertical edge of the head,  the head looking downward,  the stretch of the arm aligned with the vertical edge of the painting and the vertical format itself, all giving balance to the entire piece.

And finally, study how O'Connor uses the contrast principle by juxtaposing strong darks within a field of strong lights and how she achieves the color harmony principle using both low intensity and analogous colors.

And we don't have to know all this to enjoy this painting.

Getting To the Point

An adroit artist can focus our attention without our being aware of what's happening. One easy method to make this happen is a visual device called  one-point perspective, an approach artists have been using for centuries.

Photographer unknown
Notice in this photo how all lines converge to  a single point.  That's how one-point perspective works.

Take a look at how artist Joe Paquet uses this device.

"Classic Saint Paul"      8" x 12"     Oil on Canvas

Pretty elementary, right.  One-point perspective works when the artist arranges major shapes or points of emphasis so that our eyes are guided toward a single area called a vanishing point.   It's a natural consequence of how the eye sees parallel lines in real life.  It comes with our natural ability to see depth as when we're looking down a hallway.

Photo by MarvinOS

Just like they do with all of nature's organizing systems, artists find intriguing ways to employ one-point perspective.  Look at how Paquet found it and made it work here.

"Santa Rosa Creek Road"     12' x 16"   Oil on Canvas

 He's a  bit more subtle in this next piece.

Eagles' Nest Stage Stop    8" x 10"   Oil on Canvas

And he does a similar thing here.

"Queen Anne's Lace"       8" x 10"    Oil on Canvas

One-point perspective is not so much a composition principle as a structural device that can guarantee an artist both an eye path and correct visual perspective.  Sometimes a scene will contain exactly what you need; at other times the artist will make a few adjustments to enable the images to fall within the structural intention.

Probably one of the most ingenious one-point perspective painting ever was done more than 600 years ago:   Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper."

Have a fun weekend.
Dianne

Take This Path

A path for a painter is like a melody line or chord progression for a composer.  It's our way of getting the viewers' attention then guiding their eyes to the areas where we want them to travel.   We use a variety of methods to achieve this.  Look at this painting by Jennifer McChristain.  Where do your eyes first go?

Jennifer McChristian         "Rue Saint-Antoine"
Oil on Canvas 

The first thing I see is two people walking toward us.  After that I notice the other two people,  cars, and then the overall scene. Then, as an afterthought, my eye goes to the red sign in the upper left of the painting then to the rear of a truck exiting the scene.  The sign and truck bring my eyes back to the figures.  That's the path.

Experiencing this work is like feeling a chord progression pulling us from one area to another before we come back to the major key.  To keep the chord moving, the artist uses temperature contrast (the warm colors used in the building, figures and truck within the cooler colors of the buildings, street and sky), isolation (the dark figures within a light space), and one-point perspective (angles of the street and buildings vanishing to a single point).

That's better than a bagel with butter and jam.

Note:  After a long hiatus, I hope I'm back to doing regular weekend posts on this blog.  Thanks for hanging in there with me.

Alzheimer's Has Not Taken Her Art

One of my students of many years is now 92 years old and has Alzheimer's, yet even though she had not touched a brush in several years, when her granddaughter set her up for painting, not only did she paint as if she was picking up from yesterday, she spouted out the art lingo as if she'd been painting every day.

So this week's post is in honor of Mignon Bruce, artist and lover of the arts.  Here she is with her son holding her newest painting.

Mignon is one of those rare human beings who in addition to being an artist herself devoted her long life and an indeterminate amount of energy enabling an awareness and appreciation of the arts in an artless community.    Her determination and support for artists in our area has been as tenacious as it has been fruitful.  Whereas forty years ago interest in the arts was sparse, today this same community sports an abundance of artists, a community theater, an active and growing art department at our local college and several art galleries.  In every single one of these areas I can find Mignon's footprint.

And today even though Alzheimer's has stolen from her far too much, she is proving what I've always known, that art is an extension of the soul and does not perish.

Understanding Intensity in Color

Color contains three attributes:  hue, its location in the spectrum;  value, how much light or dark it holds, and intensity (also called chroma) or the saturation of hue within the color.

Look at this graphic.  The colors are full saturated even though one hue merges into another.   

 Fully saturated means the hue is not neutralized by a complement.  The hues closest to the center are darker in value, but they remain as saturated as their lighter versions close at the edge.  All these hues are at their highest intensity.

Here's the same example with some of the saturation taken away or neutralized, each having a bit of its complement mixed into it.

The hues remain the same, but the intensity is slightly lowered, a bit more neutralized.

And here it is again with all the hues totally neutralized.  Notice that with the hues totally neutralized they disappear and the intensity is gone, but the values remain.  

So, why is this important to a painter?

Being aware of the complexities of color and knowing how to manipulate them opens up for the painter an abundance of options so that the ability to see nuances increases both in observing and in making decisions.

An Argument for Principles of Composition

BOUNDARIES
We live in an era of artists rebelling against boundaries.  It's nothing new-- questioning boundaries is a driving force that keeps humans evolving.  But too often a principle gets mislabeled as a boundary and consequently gets abandoned, to the detriment of the artist.

ASIDE
There are artists among us who consider composition principles boundaries.  These folks complain that if they spend their energy concentrating on the principles while painting, they'd give up.  And some argue that principles serve only to inhibit the creative process.  They complain that they're not interested in making great works of art, just finding some joy in life.  They just want to paint and not be bothered with having to think about it.

BOUNDARIES VS PRINCIPLES
A boundary is a wall or a line of demarcation.  It's intention is to define two sides of a place or thing or to limit access.  It's purpose is to divide.

A principle is a fundamental of how something works.  Its function is to hold something together, not to limit or divide.

CONCLUSION
To reject learning and using principles of composition is to limit the scope of ones creative potential.  The boundary is not the principle itself, rather the projection we place on it when we make assumptions about it rather than to take the effort to explore its possibilities.

When NOT To Compose

Earlier this spring, I visited a sheep farm to watch the annual sheering.  I had expected to see the sheering process, but had not anticipated that everywhere I looked there would be subject matter. It was close to overwhelming.

I saw potential paintings in every direction, hundreds of them.  At first I was a bit stunned by the overload of images. 

 ...a newly sheered sheep on the way back to pasture...

...freshly sheered sheep grazing... 

...a young girl riding her bike... 

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...lamas in the back pasture guarding the sheep...

 ... unsheered sheep in the holding areas...

...sheep being shifted in place for a sheering...

...and the sheering, itself.

And it all was in motion.  Positioning the camera and taking pictures as fast as I could, I was still missing stuff in between shots. There was no time to think. And certainly no time to compose.  It was simply gathering raw images while trying to stay aware of all the surrounding sensations--the smells, the sounds, the atmosphere.

This is another side of being a painter. It's a time NOT to compose, just to tune into whatever images get your adrenaline going and gather as many as you can.  It's the flip side of having your subject in the studio with plenty of time to study it or of setting up to paint on location where the light moving is the only thing that makes you hustle.

What is done with the images gathered may or may not be significant.  They could get filed into the archives of my computer or they could become the subject of a spate of work.  That doesn't matter.  What matters is that I not miss an opportunity to record something that spoke to me, even if I didn't understand at the moment what it was saying.

The 20th Century Argument

This post is more editorial than tutorial.  Important nonetheless.

In a recent issue of Southwest Art, Richard Schmid was asked, "What are some of the biggest changes you've seen in your career?"  His answer:  "I've seen a widespread turn away from what we call modern art, and a strong turn toward highly skilled and serious content in American painting."

Left:   Pablo Picasso  "Seated Woman with Wrist Watch,"  1932
Right:   Richard Schmid, "Portrait,"  1990's

Schmid's answer got my attention because, being close to his age, that probably would have been my answer as well.  Those of us who were university art students in the sixties know quite well the influence of 20th century dogma on our various directions as artists.  For decades, the mainstream required that we absorb its attitudes if we were to be successful.

What I admire about Schmid is that he was able to transition through those attitudes, taking from them teachings that could strengthen his painting while staying firm to his own identity as artist.  What does that mean?

20th century dogma considered developing drawing and painting skills archaic.  Ideas and expressiveness, uniqueness and invention and manipulating space were paramount.  Visual thinking ruled over skills.  Another way to say it is that the pendulum of visual art swung all the way to one side where either total distortion or extreme order over-rode craftsmanship.

Heroes of the day were artists like de Kooning, Rauschenburg and Mondrian.

Willem de Kooning    Robert Rauschenberg   Piet Mondrian

But pendulums often swing in the opposite direction when a thing wears itself out, when those involved began to demand something different from what they are being given, when preachings of the day become hollow and empty.  And so gradually, artists with university degrees began to enroll in workshops and apprentice themselves in order to develop the skills their colleges did not give them.

Workshops and tiny art schools mushroomed, founded by instructors who had managed to locate and study with rogue artists who had chosen to develop their skills outside of the university setting.  The universities and mainstream were the last to catch on and still today old attitudes prevail, but in spite of that, once again the painters and sculptors of our era are finding out that to be highly skilled is to enable creativity, not the other way around as preached by our 20th century heritage.

One Idea, Many Variations

How many variations can you put on a theme?

Turkish pianist Fazil Say shows us how Mozart, being both playful and naughty, took "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and did this:

 
Similarly, visual artist Pat Weaver has put more than two dozen twists on a single theme, a container of flowers.  Go HERE for a moment and take a look.  (Don't forget to come back.)

Just as composers like Mozart often elaborate on a simple tune, it's not unusual for a visual artist to explore a single idea in an array of works, each complete within itself, yet having its own unique take on the chosen theme.  One way to do this is to play with the color key like Pat Weaver has done.

Look at two of Pat's still life paintings:

Still life paintings by artist Pat Weaver

You can see that one of these painting's key registers on the warm side of the Color Wheel while the other falls in on the cool side.

But look what happens in this one:

Pat has used two keys in her pot of geraniums and with a sweet twist:  most of her green notes (green being on the cool side) are predominately a warm green whereas her red (red being warm) notes are on the cooler side of red.  

If you listen to all the spins Mozart put on "Twinkle, Twinkle..." you can hear how each dances around the tune, yet retains our recognition of it.  Pat Weaver's many variations on "flowers in a container" each carries a specific use of color giving it a singular interpretation and expression.

Each of these creators took a given and found multiple ways to expand it into something new and unique.

It's Set in the Key

This is my vacation piece.  I'll be on medical sabbatical for a little while getting my right hand--my dominant one--repaired and recuperated.

Meanwhile, this is fun:

2700 years ago a Greek philosopher named Pythagoras standardized musical tuning into a system he called the Circle of Fifths.   It was he who diagrammed the relationship of our twelve major keys, an invaluable tool for composers and musicians in Western music.

 Within Pythagoras' Circle of Fifths, we can locate any key and find its related chords.  Here's how it looks:

The Circle of Fifths designed by Pythagoras in the 6th century, BC

(Disclaimer:  This particular design of Pythagoras diagram is posted on several internet sites.  It is unclear to whom it should be credited.)

To see how this works, locate C on the circle.  Glance to the left of C and you'll see F, look to the right to find G.  C, F and G are the three major chords in the key of C.  In the little circle underneath them are the minor chords related to the key of C.

Now here's the fun part: four hundred years ago the traditional Color Wheel was diagrammed  by Sir Isaac Newton.  This wheel also is a twelve-part unit.

The traditional Color Wheel as designed by Sir Isaac Newton in the 1600's.

No different from the Circle of Fifth's importance to musicians, the Color Wheel is the work horse of visual artists.  The more a musician learns about the Circle of Fifths, the richer the music can be, and the more a visual artist learns about the Color Wheel, the more fertile the possibilities are in painting and design.

And not unlike how a composer sets a musical piece in a key, the artist has the ability to set the key of a painting, giving it the same sort of unity as a key gives a piece of music.

Left   "Weaver" by Richard Schmid
   Right   In a Moscow Cafe"  by Robert Genn

The paintings above are similar in that each features a person engaged in doing something, but their major difference is their key.   Robert Genn's has keyed his piece in cool colors (colors in the bluish range) whereas Richard Schmid's painting is keyed in warm colors (colors in the yellow/red range).

Here is how each is positioned on Newton's Color Wheel:

Schmid and Genn paintings each placed in their key of colors. 

What's so much fun about all this is the similarity between the two diagrams we artists and musicians depend upon and the many parallels in the ways they are used.

And once my hands are working again, I plan to explore this in upcoming tutorials.  Meanwhile, enjoy this thought:  however you look at it, everything is connected.