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Showing posts with label Composition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Composition. Show all posts

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Linking Darks

December 12, 2013 0
It's a design strategy you've probably heard of before, but it bears repeating:

If you link together your little dark shapes into bigger units, you can simplify your value organization and give your composition more impact.

Stanhope Forbes The Seine Boat
This is not as easy as it sounds, and it takes deliberate effort to do it. Note how Forbes doesn't use too many values when rendering the dark garments and the net. By keeping them flat and nearly uniformly dark, they join together to frame the important light shapes.

Edward Simmons Old Woman Peeling an Orange
Simmons connects the woman's dark shawl to the door and the wall behind her, giving her head and hands more importance. I sometimes call this "shapewelding," and others have called it "notan" or "massing." It was an idea that was current in academic painting and illustration between about 1880 and 1920.

John Singer Sargent Padre Sebastiano
Sargent links the hat to the coat on the bed at left and the priest's shirt to the garments and other dark shapes behind him. He also unifies the white papers to the sheets on the bed. Then he takes it a step further and concentrates an oval of illumination in the center of the composition.

This concentration of light brings attention to his face, and raises our awareness that he is gazing out of a window behind us, where, judging from the plants on the desk, there must be a garden. These design choices give psychological power to the portrait: Am I reading into it, or does it make him seem embedded, ensconced in his cloistered cell, reflecting on his inner and outer life? Sargent didn't find this composition, he made it.

All of these paintings are nearly monochromatic; you could copy them with black, white, yellow ochre, and burnt sienna....Except for that wonderful little dash of blue in the Forbes.
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"Shapewelding" is one of the compositional devices mentioned in my book Imaginative Realism. If you order a copy from me today, you can get it signed and shipped tomorrow. It's also available unsigned at Amazon. 
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Thursday, August 8, 2013

Breaking the foreground line

August 08, 2013 0
When composing a picture, it's sometimes effective put an element in the direct foreground, cropped by the bottom edge.


Here's an example by Henryk Siemiradzky (1843-1902), which doesn't break the foreground line. The bottom of the composition along the frame edge is empty. Nothing wrong with that, but it can make the picture feel a bit more formal, more like a stage play. Keeping the foreground line open like this is what artists have usually done. 

Let's consider some other possibilities. 


This is the "Proclamation of the code of Emperor Dušan, by Paja Javanovic. That one figure partially cropped in the center left foreground opens up the picture.

Harry Anderson portrays Coronado's men discovering the Grand Canyon (thanks, Jim). The foreground figure is cropped just above the knees, and his gesture involves us and implies that the rest of the group is behind us. "Breaking the fourth wall" like this is more suited to an illustration than a mural, perhaps.

Here's a landscape by James Perry Wilson. Not many painters would think of putting the bushes right smack in the extreme foreground, but that decision gives him a lot of depth. We can step around the bushes on the left and enter the world he has created. 

Wilson spent most of his career painting diorama backdrops, so he was extremely conscious of foreground/background issues.
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More about Wilson in the book Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History
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Saturday, January 19, 2013

Part 5: Last question about the golden rectangle

January 19, 2013 0
I arrived at the end of my search for the truth about the golden mean. But I had one last question. Is the "golden rectangle" really more attractive than other rectangles? 

The answer was not what I expected, and not what I wanted to hear.

I had always accepted as an aesthetic axiom that the golden section rectangle (1.618 long by 1 wide) represented the ideal, even "divine" proportion. Was there any way to prove it?


In the 1860s, a psychologist named Gustav Fechner conducted experiments to explore this question. He presented subjects with an array of varying rectangles, and asked them which was their favorite.

The results showed that 76% of all choices focused on the three rectangles with ratios of 1.75:1, 1.62:1, and 1.50:1. The winner was the "Golden Rectangle" (D, above, with ratio of 1.618:1).

That seemed to settle the question for decades. Beauty, it appeared, could be defined in terms of a specific mathematical harmony of proportions.

Unfortunately, Flechner's conclusion unraveled as later scientists tested the hypothesis more rigorously. According to math expert Mario Livio,
"[University of Toronto professor Michael] Godkewitsch concluded from a study conducted in 1974 that the preference for the Golden Rectangle reported in the earlier experiments was an artifact of the rectangle's position in the range of rectangles presented to the subjects. He noted: 'The basic question whether there is or is not, in the Western world, a reliable verbally expressed aesthetic preference for a particular ratio between length and width of rectangular shapes can probably be answered negatively.'"
So, it seems, no rectangle stands out from the others as "golden" or uniquely beautiful. If a certain one gives us a warm feeling, maybe it's because we've trained ourselves to appreciate it.


The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. If the golden rectangle (1.618:1) really was the ideal shape, why didn't it appear everywhere in our carefully designed environment? Why don't we find it in the proportions of movie screens (1.37:1, 1.85:1, 2.35:1), photographs (1.50:1) television monitors, (1.33:1, 1.78:1) computer screens (1.33:1, 1.60:1, 1.78:1), credit cards (1.5858:1), not to mention iPhones, tablets, and office paper? Those rectangles, each so commonplace in our daily lives, vary greatly, and none of them quite matches the supposed ideal.

Perhaps there's a deeper aesthetic truth to be gleaned from all of this. A masterpiece, it turns out, does not issue from fixed mathematical rules. It comes from a happy mixture of all the elements of composition cohering with messy particularity. For one painting, a 3x4 rectangle might be the ideal choice; for another, a square might yield divine results. The picture's central idea must drive the decision. Just as there is no optimum running length for a film, no optimum key for a symphony, and no optimum structure for a poem, there's no optimum shape for a painting.

I welcomed these revelations as inspiring rather than disillusioning. Art cannot be reduced to any absolute formula. The golden conditions are situational, not preordained. A great creation pierces our hearts through an unexpected combination of factors. Beauty arrives in the night and hovers just outside our window, shifting and shimmering, floating just beyond the reach of our strings and calipers, unwilling to fit into any box we build for her.
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Thursday, January 17, 2013

Part 3: How the golden mean caught on with artists

January 17, 2013 0
After considering the Parthenon and Leonardo Da Vinci, let's see if we can continue taking a rational look at the claims about "phi," (or the "golden mean" or "golden ratio") that has been so popular with artists.

The story gets more complex in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as artists begin to consciously adopt it in their work, and so it gets harder to separate fact from fiction. Let's start with what we know for sure.

One of the nineteenth century champions of the golden mean was German psychologist Adolf Zeising (1810-1876) who found the golden mean in nature, especially in branching patterns, leaves, and seed patterns. These manifestations of the ratio are acknowledged by even the most skeptical scientists.

Over the years scientists have found other places where the golden mean turns up. In 2010, the journal Science published a paper about how these numerical patterns appear in crystals at the atomic scale.

The golden mean appears most often in terms of numerical relations, such as the Fibonacci numbers that appear in flowerheads, seeds, and shells.

Zeisler promoted the idea that the golden mean could be found in the Parthenon and the works of Leonardo. He made broad claims that the golden ratio was: 
"the universal law in which is contained the ground-principle of all formative striving for beauty and completeness in the realms of both nature and art, and which permeates, as a paramount spiritual ideal, all structures, forms and proportions, whether cosmic or individual, organic or inorganic, acoustic or optical; which finds its fullest realization, however, in the human form." 
Whether or not Zeisler's ideas had a solid grounding in observable fact, they caught on with artists and mystics. 

A group of painters led by Jacques Villon and called "Section d’Or," (French: “Golden Section”) held exhibitions in Paris between 1912 and 1914. They included Juan Gris, Robert Delaunay and Giro Severini and several others, though not all used the mathematical principles. Later artists such as Salvador Dali also claimed to use golden mean principles. 

In the 1920s, Jay Hambidge, a student of William Merritt Chase, published a book called Dynamic Symmetry  which presented a grid system based on the golden mean. The system was picked up by artists such as Maxfield Parrish, whose preliminary drawing for the famous painting "Daybreak" is above. Here's one person's analysis of the structure behind Daybreak. 


Above: Architects' Data (German: Bauentwurfslehre) First published in 1936 by Ernst Neufert,

Golden mean principles were adopted in extremely different aesthetic quarters in the twentieth century. Many readers of this blog have encountered golden mean principles in the context of contemporary realist ateliers.

The methods were also embraced by the Bauhaus school (literally "House of Construction"), founded by Walter Gropius in Germany between World War I and II, and run by influential architects such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. 

The Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who championed the international style of building design, used the golden ratio and the Fibonacci series as a central tenet of his work and teaching. He described the patterns as:
 "rhythms apparent to the eye and clear in their relations with one another. And these rhythms are at the very root of human activities. They resound in man by an organic inevitability, the same fine inevitability which causes the tracing out of the Golden Section by children, old men, savages and the learned."
Many Bauhaus teachers emigrated to America, where their ideas about the golden section became incorporated in university art educations, where they are taught to this day. 
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