Why Notan?

Let's take a little journey with notan.

Using this photo as our subject without doing a notan study, we might ignore some key shadow patterns that unite the composition.  Because we know there is white on both horses and a light colored fence behind them, we might not notice that the majority of the fence is in shadow and that portions of the white of the horses also are in shadow just as portions of their dark colors are in light.  Neither might we see that terrible tangent where the top of the horses' backs mesh with the bottom fence line back of the pasture.

Any strategy that causes us to refocus our attention enables us to discover things that otherwise we might not see.  By switching our focus from horses to shadow shapes, not allowing ourselves to see the images themselves, we discover an inner-connectedness within the fields of light and the fields of shadow.

Notice how the upper field of light merges into one shape when we get rid of the tangent by lowering the edge of the pasture shape.  And notice the pattern of not-in-shadow that emerges when we acknowledge the light on the dark colors of the frontal horse.

Notice how the upper field of light merges into one shape when we get rid of the tangent by lowering the edge of the pasture shape.  And notice the pattern of not-in-shadow that emerges when we acknowledge the light on the dark colors of the frontal horse.

Translating Notan Excerpts

Notan: A Creative Journey

The subject is Herefords grazing.  One cow is looking out at the audience while the other three go about their business.  Light coming from the left joins with shadows entering from the bottom and upper right to create the context within which we see these subjects in their environment.  This interrelating of shadow and light creates the Notan of the scene. 

 

Notan is a Japanese word meaning dark-light.  Its original visual use was to create two-dimensional designs in black and white, the purest and most ancient we know being the yin yang symbol.

 

The Notan concept relating to visual thinking didn't enter western art until the 19th century when we believe it was introduced by Oriental art scholar, Ernest F. Fenollosa.  In the early 1920s, American artist and teacher, Arthur Wesley Dow, a colleague of Fenollosa, was the first to apply Notan as a principle to Western art in his book, Composition.  In this text he attempts to blend the Eastern concept of dark/light with the Western approach to negative/positive.

  

But Dow was handicapped by the mainstream trend of his time.  Consequently, his efforts could not transcend that attitude beyond abstraction.  With that era's concern being two-dimensional space rather than a translation of images within space, shadow as a construct of light was not a consideration.  He took the idea of Notan as far as he could within the context of his time.  We sometimes forget that during the Abstraction Expressionist era, shadow and light gave way to negative-positive shapes and value relationships.  

What Dow did though was to introduce an idea that has become a valuable tool for realistic painters today.  Even though he could not quite see the Notan construct in the natural world, subsequent artists have seen it clearly.  Like any discovery, this one began with an insight that eventually became a working tool.  Today we understand it as a principle with which we can comprehend shadow and light and one we can use to undergird the composing process.

Winter Morning on the Tallulah   Oil on Canvas

For several decades, my personal work has been based on Notan. It is the basis for all our instructional videos.  Our newest series digs deep into the Notan process, showing how we capture and create Notan, how we can find variations with in it and how we can creatively translate it into a painting.  We hope you will find within these tutorials a breakthrough that will burst your creative stream wide open.

The Power of a Repoussoir

What do I do if I want to get your attention?

In his popular Fifth Symphony, Beethovan gets our attention with a precise da/da/da/DUM.  And Welsh poet Dylan Thomas opens one of his poems, "And death shall have no dominion."  Not so unlike these attention grabbers, Andrew Wyeth in "Christina's World" does this:

"Christina's World"   Egg Tempera    Andrew Wyeth  

The female image in Wyeth's painting is a repoussoir in action:  it captures our attention and leads us to the distant images.

re·pous·soir

   [ruh-poo-swahr]  

(From Dictionary.com)

What fascinates me about this device is its flexibility, its potential for free expression within a traditional pattern, one that yields unity while bringing us into a painting.  (In case you'd like a more in-depth definition, I explained how repoussoir works in one of my Empty Easel articles a couple of years ago.)

 I particularly enjoy paintings whose notan (see last week's post) is interlocked within a repoussoir.  When I see this working in a painting, it reminds me of an Italian sonnet , a device that acts like a repoussoir:  two major parts where the first is an argument, the second a resolution.

Paintings employing a repoussoir within the notan  pattern have two major parts as well:  one overall light or dark value usually anchored at the bottom of the painting leading the eye to an opposite value anchored at the top.

Anchored at the bottom of each of the three paintings above is a major light leading our eyes to an important dark area anchored at the top.   Richard Schmid does this in his landscape painting on the right, I used in my painting of squirrels on the upper left, and Pat Weaver does a similar thing in a painting of people on the lower left.

If as you look at each of these paintings you squint your eyes,  you can see this happening.  You experience in each piece a repoussoir built within a notan pattern,  three totally different paintings each saying entirely different things, but employing the same device:  a visual sonnet.  Now, that's captivating!

Note:  If you'd like to receive these tutorials by email, sign up in the left column at the top.  And if you'd like me to do a tutorial on some individual composing principle or problem, let me know in the comments section below.

Limits Or An Open Door?

There are no limitations except those we impose.  No form or pattern any artist selects need be confining, rather a glue that holds the piece together.  Today's doctrine that yesterday's pattern inhibits creativity is flat out wrong:  an artistic structure is a scheme, a path the artist chooses to enable an explosion of expression while keeping it unified.  The notion of breaking out of the box misleads us.


One structure I keep revisiting, one visual pattern that continues to lure my attention is the notan,  a simplified arrangement of two major shapes found in the overall collection of lights and darks.

Original photo of Herefords in pasture.

Notan study of original photo.  Notice how each inherent set of lights and the darks link together into one connected shape creating a pattern.  While discovering this pattern, I deleted the frontal trees because they divided the composition.

"Sautee Herefords"   oil painting based on the notan pattern

  

Notan exists as a concept invented somewhere in time and then given a name.  Today I use it as a guide for discovering light and dark patterns in nature.  It is that discovery that I use as the unifying adhesive of a painting.  Confident the notan will hold it together, I'm free to discover and explore all sorts fun stuff.


Chopin did that with the mazurka,--another concept invented and named somewhere in time--as pattern for at least 58 of his compositions.  And Shakespeare used the sonnet pattern--same process, different mode--exploiting it to spout forth more than 150 poems.  (See last week's post.)

Neither notan nor mazurka nor sonnet is a restriction, rather each is a container within which we can discover unlimited possibilities.  We need only to be alert.

Unity, Not the Same as Harmony

Last week, I introduced the idea that unity and harmony play different roles in our painting. I focused that discussion on harmony. Here's unity:

UNITY

Unity means that all the parts fit together. In music, we designate a piece for a key such as Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D Major. The title of the piece suggests that whatever goes on in the violin concerto fits somehow with the key of D. It might fit by contrast or by similarity. The same principle works in visual art--parts all need to belong either by contrast or by similarity.

The opposite of unity is fragmentation. In life and in art, to fragment is to fall apart, to break away from the whole, and the result is incompleteness. So how do we know if our painting is fragmenting and what can we do about it? Here is where I would like very much to do the unkind thing and show some examples of fragmented art, but it would be best to try to use another approach. Let's try explaining:

Generally an art work will not fragment if it has...

1. a strong connecting pattern of darks and lights that hold it together
2. a good balance so that we don't feel one-sidedness
3. a visual path to avoid aimlessness

Now, don't leave me yet. I know this little list looks like a bunch of art jargon, and I admit it does come close, but we have to use some kind of language to talk about these things. Let's look at a painting by somebody we know had it all working. Let's look at a John Singer Sargent.

Look at how the lights connect to other lights and darks connect to other darks. Let's throw it into a notan so you can see this better. That's what we mean by point number 1

Staying with Sargent, let's look for balance in point number 2. The strong vertical of the waterfalls and two figures is counter-balanced by the horizontal ornate rail in the background as well as the horzontal surface on which the woman is sitting. Nothing feels topsy-turvy.

And what about point number 3? A good visual path is as necessary to unity as a plot is to a novel. Without it, the eye just doesn't know where to go. Look at this wonderful path created by Sargent. Arguably other organizing methods can help prevent fragmentation, but I contend that if these three are working, the chances are better than average that the piece will have unity. And I believe that when a work has unity, it will stand the test of time.

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.