A Visual Challenge

What do these paintings have in common?

Karen Jurick

Clyde Aspevig

Richard Schmid

Jennifer McChristian

Colin Page

Edward Hopper

Every single composition principle and composing scheme in existence is derived from either patterns in nature, from laws of physics or from how our eyes work.

The beauty of past artists' having discovered and verbalized these principles is that today we can study them and learn how to use them in a brief time, especially compared to the centuries it has taken to understand and explain them.  More exciting than that is how each of them can be utilized in so many ways, many of those still being discovered today.

So have you found what the paintings above have in common?

The answer is converging lines.

This composing scheme is in essence one-point perspective.  Italian Renaissance architect Filippo Brunelleschi is credited with discovering that when we're looking at parallel lines, our eyes make those lines converge to a single vanishing point.  What's amazing is that this scientific fact is also an artistic principle.

By exercising this principle onto a two-dimensional surface, we create the illusion of seeing into three-dimensional space.

Whether painting people or an interior or the outdoors, artists use this principle to add the dynamics of distance and movement in space.

Karen Jurick uses it in this painting to show the depth of a room and to show the distance between the couple on the right and the individual on the left.  And the lines' converging outside the paintings gives us the sense that there is a continuation of something beyond the painting itself.

Clyde Aspevig shows a similar continuation beyond the painting with the same method.

Colin Page, Jennifer McChristian and Richard Schmid each use the covergence to keep the viewer inside the painting, each showing a different variation on where the lines come together, therefore each placing the viewer in a slightly different vantage point.  Whether the vanishing point is place inside or outside the painting,  we have the illusion of being in a three-dimensional space.  

Like Aspevig and Jurick, Edward Hopper's lines converge outside the painting,  He made a choice to place the viewer slightly to the left of the sitting man rather than peer directly at him head-on, giving a feeling of his sitting on a walkway that goes outside the painting.

Using converging lines gives both order and dynamics to a painting:  order in that shapes are aligned rather than being randomly placed and dynamics in that converging lines keep the eye moving.  Keeping this in mind, the artist need not be bothered with having to memorize rules of perspective.

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Note:  My pre-Christmas auction of little paintings has now begun with two paintings.

  You can bid on "After the Rain" HERE

and/or on "Downtown Tate City" HERE.

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