Breaking rules

You are never really alone in your studio if you have an art blog and pose a question. I find this aspect of blogging so helpful. I appreciate the time my readers take to participate in any discussion that is prompted by my posts. My last post is a perfect example of contemplative input from my readers. I struggled with this painting to move it beyond an ordinary floral painting and provide something new for the viewer to consider. This intent drove me to break rules that are pretty basic in composition. Never lead the eye out of the top of the composition with strong vertical lines.

There's always a but.... I drove the eye up to consider the aspect of daylight and the connection. I added textural elements with organic overtones to connect the daylight with the plant and its growth. My intention was to stop the eye with texture and move it around rather than out.
Don stated it very eloquently...
"I get the sense of the flower starting its day in its infancy growing thru the day into its glorious maturity at which point it suddenly shatters against the ceiling of its short lifespan. My last impression ends there, since nothing takes me back into the composition to show this cycle recurring. We only get one shot at life...

Do I leave it there or do I provide some hope for remaking ourselves? I'm torn.

While one particular daylily has a short life of glorious bloom and withers, they, like most plants, live through cyclical rotations and I love them for this passage of hope. I feel a need to provide a subtle route for the eye back down to begin the cycle of consideration again - through fiddling with the right top side.

I'm still toying with some dark webbing texture at the bottom of the painting.... it content v.s. composition. Time will tell. More hanging in front of my painting table and movement around the house.

Something tells me that this work will get a lot of consideration in the next while. I have a 24 x 36 inch board staring back at me and I'm scared by the 864 square inches of space. My largest painting to date has been 20 x 24. I'm challenging myself. Nothing's happened so far. Gesso would be a safe bet and a wash of yellow. How is that for commitment?

Compose: Pulling it all together

There's so much to attend to as you paint ! The wise artist is planning from the beginning and referencing that plan as the project develops. I am not always wise and often work myself into corners that require quite a bit of digging to get out of. My strength usually lies in subject selection and making the painting say what I want. Even that is a problem with Daylilies; I seem to have fallen down with every aspect. This is my last Compose post for awhile and I will try to pull the painting together.

There is good, overall movement in the classic s shape of the composition. The large open flower as the centre of interest in believable, but it could be advanced more in the picture plane (probably by making the flower below/behind it recede.

I think most of the problems lie in the upper right section. I need to sink the flower in this section back beyond the open lily. The stem is much too pronounced and needs to recede too. I've drawn even more attention to this problem by having the leaves form an x. What was I thinking? Obviously I wasn't! I need to tidy up this whole corner. The other area that is unfinished is the lower left where the red blob is located. It's not formed.

Now for the grayscale which effectively pinpoints any difficulties with values. My usual problem is evident - not enough darks, too many midtones. I am just not a dramatic painter. I plan to darken the lower left corner more. The leaf tip in the upper left is also too bright. Creating a 4 value scale of this painting in the beginning would have saved me a lot of problems!

Onward to the most difficult aspect - my conflict about what I am trying to say. As I pointed out in the second post in this series, this is an issue and probably accounts for why I'm struggling with the painting.

From my second post:
What part of the subject should be emphasized to maximize the emotion /impression?
The colour, elegance, structure and their freedom are easy to emphasize. I am not capturing the transience that is so important to my perception of them. Perhaps I need to refocus and paint one or two obviously withered ones, but I also need to somehow portray the melancholy I feel about these flowers. That is very subtle and right now I'm at a loss about how to show it. I'll keep going with the questions/suggestions ...

My answer to me:
You can't say everything in one painting. Focus on the colour, elegance, structure and freedom of the flowers. Transience is well represented in other works in the series.

I hope to have 18 paintings in this exhibition and each one represents at least one aspect of my reading of this particular garden. It's time I created a carefree, happy atmosphere. I am too attracted to melancholy !

Now off to the studio to start making corrections. I may find more are necessary once I dig in. I'll post the final painting with the corrections later.

Compose : Expression

Expression wasn't a planned topic for my compose series but a post on Kathy's blog created a spark that I wanted to respond to. I think it's important to remember that our knowledge of composition and design is acquired for one reason - to create strong work, work that communicates. Having a large menu of options to choose from provides an opportunity to select just what might be needed to invite your viewer to consider what you have created and why. Work by artists who slavishly follow every rules to perfection can be quite exquisite and perfectly rendered but lacking in soul . I think when we first begin in art there is so much to learn and our heads are consumed by this learning. It's a huge juggling act.

I can remember my excitement at creating my first work that was a perfect(in my eyes) rendering of a landscape in a Walter Foster book. I was 20 and interested in art. I lived in a small community. I had no formal training and owned only two art books, one of them a book on composition and the other on landscape. That was my beginning in art. I didn't paint again until I was almost 50. I had a lot to learn and designed a course of study that I pursued and am still pursuing. I feel like I have consumed art book, talked about art, created art and skyrocketed in 10 years to where I am at this point in my career. I can mark my progress by looking back through my work.

In the early stages of my new career, I was warmly welcomed by a group of artists interested in botanical work. These sessions held at Memorial University Botanical Gardens taught me how to really look at something and represent all of its parts. I appreciated belonging to a group of painters who were interested in the subject matter I was interested in and I learned a lot by watching them work and listening to their conversation. My realization that I would never be a botanical artist came quickly. I kept interpreting and exaggerating. I put too much of myself into the work. Flowers always had their own vocabulary for me and I wanted to use it to create paintings that communicated my feelings.

Tenacity(2003) 11 x 14 in, acrylic on canvas

This work represents that moment when I knew I needed to move on and find my own voice as an artist. Can you identify when you found your artistic voice?

Compose: The quadrant test

Do you have any techniques you use to determine if you have an interesting composition? One that I learned early in my practice was the quadrant test. I've long forgotten where I first read about it, but I came upon it again the other day in a wonderful book called A painter's guide to design and composition: 26 masters reveal their secrets by Margot Schulzke. This book is well organized and illustrates many of the points discussed using paintings through their stages of development.

Years ago I created a quadrant "mat" out of a large sheet of clear plastic that I cut from a heavy weight plastic bag art stores often use when you purchase sheets of paper. I used a permanent black marker and a ruler to divide the plastic into quadrants . I can place the mat over many different size paintings by laying it on top of the painting. Because my work is often intimate in scale I created a smaller one to. When you overlay it the quadrants are visible underneath. The idea is to look at each quadrants to see if there is visual interest in each areas (no dead spots).

A story told (2007) 6 x 6 in. mixed media on board

It works well with most paintings. Even when there are areas where there is open space you usually have some interesting bits of visual energy going on to help your eye move through the piece.

10 x 30( 2004) acrylic on canvas

Then of course you always get the exceptions. The work above titled Breathe is all about the open space to the left. I am a yoga enthusiast and one day while looking a this particular amaryllis it gave me the same feeling I get when I fill my lungs with air and slowly exhale. Yoga gives me energy and peace at the same time. I think in this situation the empty space supports the composition. If I had used a less vibrant background it might not have.

Compose" Shape Critique

Critique time
Where do I begin with my discussion about the Summer Fire painting? It seems I've gained a lot of knowledge since 2004! I find it very difficult to talk about shape without including value somewhere in the discussion, therefore I won't try to isolate them. My photo reference for this work is long gone and I can't squint at it or the real scene. I'm left with the image I created.

• My first big mistake was not having the distant island, sky and water as one large shape rather than three smaller shapes. That would mean painting the island in the same value as the sky and water and setting it back in the distance as it was in real life.
• The tree line with its jagged points provides a nice relief from the straight lines of water and island. They also serve to interlock with the shape above it (always a good thing). In terms of value they are possibly too dark because they advance rather than recede. I would lighten them to set them back. In his response to the previous post Don mentioned the tips of the trees on the right being too close to the horizon line (that kissing rule) and that the eye is driven to the tips by the movement of the paint below. It's a very valid point and one I agree with. A bit of change in shape is in order.
  
• The next large mass (shape) is the line of fireweed and the clump of grass to the left of it. The soft diagonal works well and creates a gentle sway of energy. I would work with the values in this shape and include the grass beneath it using the same value which would be a bit darker than at present. Kathy suggested that I vary the shape of the flowers more as the edges are all "active" and therefore dominant. I agree with this point.
• The lower right shape is much darker in value and works to balance the strong diagonals above it. I had a simple solution for keeping the viewer in the picture plane. - I darkened the left side and the foreground right side. A bit too obvious ! In my own defense I did have three areas of dark to move the eye around.
• I feel there's variety in the shapes : simple and complex, small, medium and large, lights and darks. A big drawback is the lack of passive areas. If the sky, island and water are painted as one shape with lighter values this will become a more passive area and a foil for the more active fireweed.
  

The greyscale tells the tale of my penchant to paint in a tight value spread. Even my darks are not that dark. I have painted like this since the beginning. I am able to see the most minute change is value and when I think I am being very adventurous, I'm really not. To this day I have to fight with myself to include both ends of the value scale.

The response to my last post provided a number of suggestions for checking the shapes and values in a painting. I'd like to include them all in this post so they don't get missed.

Look at a greyscale of the painting
Kathy at Katherine A. Cartwright Studio suggested converting my painting to a greyscale in Photoshop. My proficiency in Photoshop is almost nonexistent, but having a reason is a great motivator. It was as easy as Image, Mode, Greyscale. I was just patting myself on the back about my new found skill when Don sent a comment to explain how to do it. hwfarber also suggested previewing the grayscale picture in print preview using different sizes. If you don't have Photoshop or a similar program, you can scan a coloured photo of your painting as a grayscale and print it.

Reduce an image to black and white
One of the things Ann Buckner does after taking a photo and converting it to b&w is to put the contrast all the way up. This reduces it to black and white and gives a good idea of light/dark ratio, rather like a Notan. She learned this from Rhonda Carpenter.

Look at the work in a darkened room
Kathy also suggested a technique learned from Susan Webb Tregay. Take the painting into a very dimly lit room or closet with the door slightly ajar. That way, there isn't enough light to see the colors, but there is just enough light to see the values.

Look through your camera viewfinder
hwfarber suggested setting your digital camera on black and white and looking at your painting through the viewfinder( a techniques learned from a Caroline Jasper workshop).

Look at your work in a mirror
Don Michael Jr. suggested one way to get a different perspective of your shape structure and the overall quality of your composition is to look at it in a mirror. If you go into the room with the light off, get the painting situated, and then turn on the lights you get an instant "snapshot" in reverse which tells you volumes.

Use a reducing lens
"Another good tool is the reducing lens, which Renaissance artists used and is still sold today" recommended Kathy.

Use a red tinted value finder
I made mine from plain red glass from my husband's stained glass selection. You can also buy ready made ones here. The first time I was introduced to this I thought it was magic. You see everything in shades of red which makes it easier to spot the value relationships and massing of shapes. These work best for work when cool colours are predominant.

Compose: The answer is shape

"A painting built on a boring design is like a house built on sand, destined to fall apart." Dan McCaw.

There is no doubt that artists who understand and utilize their knowledge of shape create the most effective designs. When you look at a subject you want to paint you have to look past the details and see what lies before you in terms of shapes not objects. Squinting is your best option for decreasing the amount of detail perceived and reducing the subject to dark and light masses. Another approach is to step back far enough to see only the contours of what you are focused on.

The big shapes that you reduce your subject to are the backbone of a strong painting. Train your eye to see no more than 3 or 4 big shapes in the subject and hang on to these through the whole painting, especially when you start adding detail. Aim for variety in the shapes: large, medium and small, simple and complex, positive and negative, light and dark, active and passive.

Suppose your subject isn't co-operative and there are many discrete shapes, uninteresting shapes or irritating shapes. This is where you get to practice "artistic license". Tom Lynch in Watercolour Secrets: A master painter reveals his dynamic strategies for success suggests changing "bad" shapes by:

1) altering the shape slightly; this is an easy one and artists do it all the time

2) connecting one shape to another; this can be achieved by moving objects closer to each other or connecting them into one shape by using cast shadows; if you have several elements of almost similar value you can unify them into one larger shape later by softening the edges or painting them in similar values.

3) adding something to camouflage the shape or cutting it out; adding in new information to make an original shape more interesting or to bulk it up to increase the size is easy to do, but even easier and often more essential is cutting information. Simplify and eliminate clutter is my mantra.

4) abstracting or stylizing it. This is not one I've used much myself, but there are times when you can solve a problem by abstracting most of the formal information and letting the shape prevail.

Dan McCaw in A Proven Strategy for Creating Great Art recommends making quick thumbnails of the initial organization of shapes using white paper and a pencil for the dark/shadowed areas. Two values are all you need if you have a good structure of shapes. Keep changing different aspects of the shapes until you have a pleasing design . When you finally settle on your shapes it is then a good idea to develop at least a four value study- white, 2 mid values and dark. Assign one of the four values to each large mass of your painting. Value and shape are your most important tools to hold a painting together.

From personal experience it is no good to have a shape value sketch and not use it! It's meant to be a useful tool not an academic exercise. I know many artists who create beautifully rendered value sketches for their finished paintings. Every last detail is worked out. I can't go there. I did try, but I lost interest in the subject as a result. If I figure out the minimum with shapes and values (4) I can add the rest as I go along.


An additional element to using shapes to strengthen your design is the importance of interlocking shapes like puzzle pieces which is addressed in detail in How to see underlying shapes in a painting by Deborah Christensen Secor at Wet Cavas. This is a very comprehensive overview of all aspects of shape with excellent illustrations.


In my next post I will return to my previous landscape and consider the information from this post with what my readers have supplied to see how Summer Fire might be improved. Until then here is a grayscale of the painting. It tells quite a bit about the "bones" of the painting.

Compose: Critique to learn

There was a time when I created credible landscapes using good instincts and not a lot of knowledge. This work called "Summer Fire" created early in my career , was based on a view from my art teacher's house window. I love fireweed in summer because it creates such a blast of colour in the environment. I wanted to capture this energy in the painting.

Using your understanding of shapes and how they are used in composing, critique this composition. The next post will summarize what I have learned since I created this work and I will suggest how I think it could be improved.

Compose: An example of content

I know when I've been upstaged! My readers' comments have captured the audience and I'm bringing up at the rear. So I'm riding on their coat tails in this post. They all have great blogs that I visit regularly and interesting takes on many topics. Layers (Donna Watson) brought up another example of two art terms - abstract and non-objective art - that often get used interchangeably. Perhaps someone would like to take this on for a post because I'm certainly hazy on the difference.

Kelly Marszycki concluded that reading a painting depends on the viewer, their background, life experiences, etc. Beauty comma, had the same take. Kelly saw another version of the Garden of Eden and questioned who or what is locked behind the gate- the viewer or the natural world and why is this the case. Don has a similar take and puts himself behind the gate and is resentful that nature is out there ready to enjoy and he is stuck waiting on someone else to let him out (or is it in).

I think that any artwork that causes a viewer to question or consider is a success. Questions that leave one wondering are good; it often means that the work has engaged you to a point that you will think about it after your no longer have access to the image. There are really no right and wrong answers for the viewer. What a powerful position to have.



A little context will help me explain my content in the Gate painting. This is a photograph of the gate in my painting, but this one is in a closed position. It is one of the entry gates to the Millennium Garden in Birr Castle Demesne . When it is closed you can look through it and ogle the beauty that is beyond it. You can be on the outside looking in, but I was actually on the inside looking out because I had access to the garden through my "secret" door in the wall that connected the property where I stayed with the Millennium Garden. For once gates did not keep me out or in. I felt powerful.

In this particular instance, I photographed the gate when it was opened up and pressed back on top of a hydrangea bush. I was interested in the idea of containment, how compressed the leaves were and how some of them were seeking ways out. It was man against nature and nature was winning. My earliest experiences with a cultivated garden was being barred by a gate. All I could do was stand on the fence and look longingly at what was inside. Gates always bring me back to that time. The leaves are a methaphor for me in that situation.

Through her comments, hwfarber shows a good sense of plants and the uselessness of trying to contain them. They will have their way in the end. If there is any possible way for plants to spread beyond man made boundaries it will be found. That brings us nicely to Kathy who wisely asks "Can nature really be contained?"

I was pleased with Kelly's reference to the suggestion of threat she perceived in the dark background. This made me realize that I had successfully created an emotive response in the viewer.

Compose: Subject vs. Content

Often in ones attempt to clarify, more confusion is created. I hope that will not be the way this post goes. Read on.

Definitions in the visual arts field are not always consistent and various artists choose to personalize terms based on their understanding of a word. I'm no exception. I was once sternly corrected for using subject and content interchangeably when these two words have discrete meanings according to my knowledgeable friend who went to art school (I didn't, but I can research!).

Subject matter is the literal, visible image in a work while content includes the connotative, symbolic, and suggestive aspects of the image. The subject matter is the subject of the artwork, e.g., still life, portrait, landscape etc. Gerald Brommer in Emotional content: How to create paintings that communicate notes that "Content is the reason for making a painting." He further elaborates:

"Content is not subject or things in the painting. Content is the communication of ideas, feelings and reactions connected with the subject...... When we look at a painting its content is what is sensed rather than what can be analyzed. It is the ultimate reason for creating art." Something in the painting must appeal or speak to the heart, spirit and soul of the viewer. He specifically calls this "emotional content".


If you refer back to my first and second post of the Compose series, you will see that my use of the word subject also inlcludes the characteristics of content noted above. I guess that is why I am comfortable using subject to cover everything.

Here's an image I posted before from my "Reading a Garden" series. The subject matter is a still life consisting of a gate with leaves behind it. What is the content?

Compose: Selecting a Subject 2

This is a painting I am having difficulty finishing and I am going to use it as an example as I go through the various posts I plan to do on composition. Hopefully at the end of the series I'll resolve the painting by using the information for reflection . There's nothing like a problem to get you thinking.

About the series:
As this piece is part of my Reading a Garden Series, it has to focus on something that stood out to me in my two week stay at Birr Castle Demesne. It must references my understanding /response to some experience. My process in selecting topics to paint starts with culling my photographs taken during my two week stay . Once I knew I wanted to create a work based on the daylilies , I proceeded to choose four photographs to use in image transfers, which I create in gel skins and apply to the board. These would be my starting point, evidence of my "real experiences". ( If you look closely you can see the edges of these transfers. I want them visible.) From these I begin to change the images by adding to them and creating whole new sections using paint and paper or eroding the details they provide until I have captured what I remember (mostly sense memories) from the experience. As more time intervenes I'm forgetting much and embellishing more and more of the details.

In my last post I listed a series of things to consider in selecting a subject to paint. I will try to answer them with reference to this painting. My point is if I had considered them in more depth before I began the work rather than just barging in , I might not be in this trouble. I plan to post the questions next to my paint table for future reminders.

Why are you attracted to the subject? Why does it appeal to you?

This is my fourteenth piece in this series and one of four works focusing on flowers chosen for different reasons.

These Daylilies grew in abundance along a path I walked each day in The Millennium Garden in Birr Castle Demesne. There were orange ones and yellow ones which I photographed on several different days. The vibrancy of the orange/rust ones captured my attention and the yellow ones were left in the background.

Daylilies (hemerocallis) are very interesting structurally. I am attracted to tall graceful plants with more complicated flower structures. The daylily also has long, narrow, blade like leaves that move in the wind and seem to grow in all directions. The most fascinating thing about the flowers on these plants is that they open at sunrise and wither at sunset. Each day new ones are in bloom so you are never seeing the same one twice. It is this point that most interests me because it represents the essence of the temporary nature of beauty and how fleeting our lives are. You have to hand it to daylilies they give it their all for one day.

What emotion grabs you when you look at it? How can you express this emotion?

I'm attracted to their vibrant colour, elegance and freedom to move so readily in the wind. One one hand I like the fact that I'm seeing new blooms every day and the scene is continuously changing, but underneath there is melancholy because they are so short lived and in this way not free at all. I'm conflicted, this is probably why I am having so much trouble finishing this work.

What part of the subject should be emphasized to maximize the emotion /impression?
The colour, elegance, structure and their freedom are easy to emphasize. I am not capturing the transience that is so important to my perception of them. Perhaps I need to refocus and paint one or two obviously withered ones, but I also need to somehow portray the melancholy I feel about these flowers. That is very subtle and right now I'm at a loss about how to show it. I'll keep going with the questions/suggestions ...

What colours/key suits the mood you want to impart?

This might be my area where I have to solve the melancholy issue by toning down the vibrancy. I have really played up the leaves which support the flowers - maybe they are a bit too energetic and playful. The flowers are more low key and seem to be working better with the emotions I am interested in imparting.


What will identify this painting as yours (showing yourself in the painting)?
The process I am using beginning with phototransfers and manipulating them based on the erosion of memory with the passage of time has become a constant in my work of late. The close up, controlled view adds to the me-ness of the work. The subject matter is consistent with my interests and past work.

That's my effort at reflection. I don't want to invest hours into the process because when I reread it tomorrow i'll have a whole new set of ideas. I'm sure the able comments of my readers will move me along with this. Comments anyone?

Compose: Selecting a Subject

The first step in the creation of an outstanding artwork is the selection of the subject matter. In the early phases of ones practice subject matter may be partially influenced by teachers in school or workshops, through reading popular art magazines or viewing art produced by others. This is a time of finding your way, of having faith in the knowledge of others, of deciding what you want to do and how you want to do it. The search for subject is often overshadowed by process, by the time spent learning to use different media and to render well.

Then comes the time when you are in your own studio with a blank canvas , and you realize that it's not about the techniques you worked so hard to learn, but that the work you create should be about something. Art is a form of communication and all the decisions from topic onward are yours to make. In my own situation, I had taken dozens of classes and workshops, read numerous art books, seen thousands of art works in my travels, been to local art galleries and had friends who were successful artists. I wanted to be an artist who created thoughtful work. About what? Panic!

It's a scary time, a time when you realize that if you are going to be successful, you have to bring something unique to the work you do. If you don't have something that is unique to add, why bother? Around the time of this epiphany I was reading a book called Design and Composition Secrets of Professional Artists.

This was an important book in my career that taught me that there are many roads to follow, and that they all begin with a personal view of the world. It was also at that time that I accepted that my past experiences in another profession were an advantage rather than something that was setting me back. I'm sure Donna Baspaly has no idea that several points on one of her composition checklists changed how I began to think about subject matter. Donna relies heavily on a series of checklists to keep her in tune with her work through the whole process of creation.


While I've made some minor additions these are Donna's questions about subject:

• why are you attracted to the subject? why does it appeal to you?
• what emotion grabs you when you look at it? how can you express this emotion?
• what part of the subject should be emphasized to maximize that emotion/impression?
• what colours/key suits the mood you want to impart?
• what will identify this painting as yours (showing yourself in the painting) ?

Every design decision you make should bring you back to your primary reason for creating the work.

Tom Huntley in this same book agrees that all starts with subject and advises "do not record what you see, interpret what you feel."

Torn

When I want inspiration, ideas for natural compositions or just plain old visual "eye candy", I go to my period wallpaper collections gathered from various old homes under renovation on the Bonavista Peninsula, Newfoundland. I have hundreds if not thousands of shots. I sort and resort them in various ways. I imagine the lives and stories that these remnants store. Each is a perfect composition in its own right. Here are my selections for today.

And then there are floors...

Continuum

Continuum (2009) 10 x 24 in.
mixed media ( photo transfer, acrylic mediums &paint) paper) on board

There is inspiration in the simplest things. How many times do people walk by aspects of nature intent on their own inner world and completely miss what is happening around them? At times I feel I have the opposite problem - a continuous bombardment of stimuli that must be filtered out or it becomes overwhelming to process. This rose shrub is a good example of my usual " nature experience". I was strolling along in the Millennium Garden, Birr Castle Demense, and was beckoned by both the buzzing of bees and a glorious smell. Drawing nearer, I could see that some rose blooms were still in tact serving as landing pads for bees busy playing out their role in nature. The thing that really interested me as I looked more carefully was the presence of every stage of blossom development in a rose. It was like the passage of time caught in action and I was there to experience it. Two days later and all the blooms would possibly have disappeared, an hour before the bees might have been busy with other concerns.

This was a difficult painting to execute. It lay around my studio for six months in various stages and configurations of elements. There were so many elements to include that I could not get the composition to work. I used a great deal more paper than in the other paintings in this series. The evidence of the original photo transfers is almost totally obscured by the inclusion of additional information from my memory. The work grew to be much more sense bound and less about the actual rose bush itself. With the addition of each element, I felt I was building my own understanding of the the passage of time.

Sky calligraphy

Every tree has something to say to those who bother to look. While out for a walk one day in Birr town in County Offaly, Ireland I came upon a lovely garden on the grounds of Wilcot B & B. The branches of this dead tree stood out because of their graphic quality against the overcast sky. The strange beauty drew me away from the lushness of the leaves and blossoms everywhere esle in the garden. What were their secret messages?

Nice is nice

This is one of my favourite shots from my vacation last year. We passed through Nice on our way to St. Paul de Vence and spent just long enough there to know we wanted to go back for an extended stay. I was fascinated by the order of the umbrellas. It was almost as if there were rules for placement that everyone adhered to.


Not too far from the beach, there was a surprise waiting on a rooftop.

And how is this for a wall decoration?

Surely there's inspiration for a postcard collage here somewhere? Time will tell.

New work

It's over a week since I've been in the studio, but my mind is constantly on art. I now honour these lapses in physical production as part of my process. I've been asked to create a painting as a surprise birthday gift for a friend of mine. We've already settled that it will be mixed media, but the subject matter is totally up to me. Sometimes that is a good thing and sometimes not. In this case it is good. I plan to create a diptych with two very different images having the same theme. The content relates to the interests and sensibilities of my friend. It is so much easier to create something when you know the person who will recieve the work. Here's a look at the source material I'm considering . It will be a challenge to pull this off. I'm feeling positive.

Reflection

An artist's photograph collection reveals more than topic choice. When you take the time to view your collection, you will find direct references to how you perceive the world and how this translates directly into the work you create. While I have always used photographs as reference material, it is only recently that I've begun to discover many links between the photographs I take and how I create work. At this point you may be thinking "duh" and have already made these links in your own practice.

Two previous posts Looking down and Looking down again testify to my need to always be aware of where I'm walking and what I am walking on. While I find panoramic views beautiful, they never hold my interest for long. I am drawn to the close up- the bits and pieces of information that many miss.

Registering too much visually often leads to problems in my work. When you are constantly inundated with too much information, it is difficult to screen most of it out and focus on several elements. Looking back over my body of work makes me realize this viewing pattern could account for my forays into layering. This technique allows me to include quite a bit of information initially and then to push some of it back or totally eradicate it, and let the important bits float to the surface. Layering gives me time to decide what is important. Wow, I just realized that! So much of what we do in art is instinct.

My favourite orientation for my work is vertical. I choose long, nonstandard size verticals that are difficult to compose. The eye is so accustomed to viewing horizontally that there is a tendency to move quickly over horizontal orientations in art. It is what the eye expects. It also encourages the use of too much information for me personally. The vertical forces you to change your usual viewing pattern; it makes you stop. This small pause captures the viewer in a way a horizontal orientation doesn't. Then there is the energy of the vertical that is hard to ignore. Verticals also mimic the coveted glance - what is seen through doors, gates, and windows. They also provide a slice of information, like looking through a partially opened door.

The most difficult task compositionally when you are attracted to vertical orientations, is to slow the viewer's assent through the work. When you include a path this makes the job that much harder. While I guess some of these thoughts about working vertically were always with me in varying levels of recognition, many came to the forefront when I was responding to a work Miki Willa posted on her site. That testifies to the value of looking at another artist's work with a critical eye, which is what Miki had requested.

The vertical is my preferred orientation in photography also. It appears I like to look up as much as I like to look down. These shots all come from one community near my summer home. Keels is where my mother was born and where I spent my summer holidays when I was a child. It is a spectacular little community with interesting architecture and geological features. Looking at some of these shots makes me wonder how much of the walking and climbing as a child influenced my interest in the vertical.

You can choose which orientation tells the story best.

Working on

Sometimes good ideas mutate into something unrecognizable. Today I will have to face the "what do I do now?' question. After cutting up two larger mixed media works (yes, two) into five small squares, I had to face the fact that I cropped the images a little too much. Yes, too much of a good thing. Yes, I got carried away. Yes, I should have taken a breather before cutting up the work. Yes, Yes, Yes. I know.

Today I have to add to some of the pieces to support the compositions. When you crop this tightly from a larger work, you end up with several strong pieces and others that are very weak because there's nothing left to anchor them. You might think that a smaller work would need less in it, but that is not what has happened. I've posted two that need a lot of help. I plan to spend much of today in the studio working on to success, hopefully.

I'm thinking about adding a faint photo transfer of my grandmother holding a baby over the lower right. It needs human presence.


There seems to be too much recognizable print in this. I like the bottom section. It is strong enough to support the image . Right now, I don't have one clue what else it needs. It just is not working.

Enhancing a centre of interest

Sometimes I get so caught up in the act of painting, in the sheer joy of the process of manipulating the materials, that I don't see obvious compositional difficulties with my work. For that reason I like to place work out of my direct sight for a period of time, and then return to it with fresh eyes to see what needs to be tweaked.

I spent part of today self-critiquing the paintings nearing completion in my Reading a Garden series. I felt that several of them had a "weak" centre of interest (focal point, area of empahsis). That led me to search for a handoutt I had compiled several years ago when I taught a class on Creating Interesting Compositions. Reviewing it today helped me focus on what I could do to improve these paintings. If you have tricks up your sleeve that I haven't mentioned, please pass them on.

Defining the centre of interest
The centre of interest in a painting is not a single point or one person or object , rather it is a cluster of "objects" and can comprise up to 10 - 15 % of your painting. It is the area you want your viewer to be attracted to in your work, but you do not want it to be so strong that the eye stays there and doesn't follow a visual path through your work.

The best of everything
Your centre of interest requires the best of everything to make it stand out. Reserve strong value contrasts for this area. If you add a dark value directly behind or near a lighter centre of interest it will hold the eye. More detail, sharp/hard edges, strongest chroma, most texture, larger shapes, etc are all tricks for this area.

Bull's eye technique
Think about the centre of interest in your painting as a bull's eye. As you move out from the centre of interest, the areas should decrease in visual importance. That might mean including less contrast, smaller shapes, less detail etc. as you move out to the edges of your work.

Colour "splash"
Adding small touches of colour that are "outside" your colour scheme will draw the viewer's attention to the area.

Breathing space
Provide an area near/next to your centre of interest where the viewer can rest to allow "breathing space". This area could have less detail, subdued colour, large shape etc. This less interesting area will enhance the the energetic centre of interest.

Just right!
If your centre of area is too large it will create visual overload, if it is too small it will be insignificant. Pay attention to the proportion of it in relation with the size of the canvas.

Additional resources
And... here's another way to look at it. Check out this great article by Dianne Mize on Empty Easel - 6 Ways to Create Emphasis in a Painting. Also see The Focal Point Debate by Dianne.
Her blog Compose is a valuable resource for anything having to do with composition.


How can this composition be improved?