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.

What's In This Greatness?

We wonder why some art works live for centuries while others get lost in archives of communal memory. Visual artists, writers and composers create works that excite us humans hundreds of years later.  What is there about Chopin,  Shakespeare and Michelangelo whose works continue to awaken within us a spirit of excitement, a desire to experience their them over and over again?

One thing that keeps getting my attention  is whether by conscious choice or by intention, they all have in common their use of an internal pattern:  Chopin's mazurkas, Shapespeare's sonnets and Michelangelo's triangles. Something about that structure enables artists to express the impact of a moment in time and make it eternal.

What's exciting to me is not the pattern itself, but how the the artists transform their pattern of choice while retaining it's underlying formation.

Michalengelo's "Pieta"


And so discovering patterns and finding ways artists transform them is what I'll be exploring as I resume my Compose tutorials.  That should keep me busy for a while!