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The Outside Shore
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| Snowy Path (Pastel, 12x16") |
So, if skill in painting is not skill in applying paint, what is it? The simple answer is that it is skill in knowing what paint to apply and where to apply it. That is, it is not a matter of forming a perfectly shaped spot of red paint on the canvas or paper. It is a matter of recognizing the correct shape and color to make that spot. Once you have figured out what you want to get on the surface, it is usually a fairly simple matter to actually make this happen.
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| Scones And Tea (Pastel, 18x14") |
What this means in practice is that for the representational painter, skill in painting is skill in seeing. If we all saw dispassionately, as a camera does, realistic painting would be mostly a matter of taking each pixel of color we see (our eyes do interpret what they see in something resembling pixels) and approximating it as best we can can on the canvas or paper. And in fact, this is akin to how Monet described the process of painting: you do not paint a nose, or whatever object you have before you, but rather, the simple shapes of color that make up the object. Yet seeing these shapes correctly is something we can rarely do well without a lot of study and practice. Our brains are so good at recognizing the meaning of objects that we tend to regularly miss what the actual clues were that allowed us to recognize the object.
Perspective is a great example of this. As you may be aware, perspective is the name we give to the optical illusion that makes distant objects appear smaller than nearby ones and parallel lines appear to converge as they recede. Yet even if we are aware of this phenomenon and attempt to capture it in our painting, we are unlikely to do a convincing job of it unless we understand the mechanics of perspective. Even though we actually see the river appear to get narrower as it flows away from us, our portrayal of exactly how much narrower it gets and how quickly it narrows is almost always off - and off by enough that the resulting painting will not "read" correctly. Again, the problem is not that we failed to get the paint exactly where we wanted it; the problem is that we failed to understand exactly where we should have wanted it in the first place.
For abstract painters, of course, knowing what paint to put where is not about seeing, but it is still the primary issue faced. Instead of basing these decisions at least in part on what they are seeing, abstract artists decide what spots of color to put where based on their own creative instincts. Once again, the results will be dependent on their aesthetic choices, not their skill with the brush.
Enough about that topic. There are some very specific areas of knowledge that can help an artist decide just what spots of color he wants to put down, and I wish to introduce you to those now. In future essays, I will discuss each at length.
First of all, a drawing, as opposed to a painting, is often defined as an image that is composed of lines. Whereas a painting is composed of shapes. Of course, the lines in a drawing may outline shapes, but the difference is that in a drawing, the shape was created by drawing its outline, and in a painting, the shapes are usually just painted without first drawing the outline. Now, many artists begin a painting by drawing the outline of the major shapes, and then they begin painting. Other artists forego an initial drawing and simply begin putting down shapes.
However, even though the latter artists are not said to actually be drawing, there is another sense of the word "drawing" that is relevant here. This more general definition has to do with getting the shapes, sizes, and positions of the various objects in the painting correct, regardless of how those shapes are actually placed on the paper or canvas. And it is this more general definition of drawing that I will be concerned with here.
Perspective, which I already mentioned, is one factor in good drawing. It is not enough to have more distant objects smaller than nearby ones; they must be the right amount smaller, and they must be placed correctly. For example, consider a large flat field with one person standing close to you and another a hundred yards away. Not only is the further person smaller, but his feet and the ground under them appear to be higher - perhaps at shoulder level relative to the nearby person. If the ground is level, and both people are the same size as you, their heads will appear to be on the same level, but if they are both taller than you, the head of the closer person will appear higher than that of the further person, and the reverse will be true if they are both shorter than you. These relationships must be maintained correctly in order to create a convincing representation of reality, assuming that is your goal. For abstract painters, this is not much of an issue.
The fundamental principle of perspective is that, as they recede in space, all objects appear to approach a line level with our eyes. This line is called the eye line or the horizon line. Something that is ten feet off the ground will appear very high if it is close to us, but the further away it gets, the closer the top of the object appears to being level with our eyes. Something two inches off the ground appears very low if it is close to us, but the further away it gets, the closer to our eye level it appears.
Much of what concerns us about perspective has to do with how straight horizontal lines - like the top of a roof - appear to recede. If the line is above our eye line, then the nearest part of the line will appear highest, and it will appear to slant downward toward the eye line as it recedes. Lines below the eye line behave in the opposite way. Furthermore, two receding lines that are parallel will appear to slant toward the same point on the eye line, called the vanishing point. Each set of parallel lines will slant toward a different vanishing point, but they will all be on the eye line if the lies are in fact horizontal. If the lines themselves slant upward or downward, then the vanishing point will be above or below the eye line.
Another aspect of good drawing is proportion. An example of this is getting anatomical relationships correct in people and animals. You do not want a head that appears too large for the body, arms that are too short, or a knee that bends in the wrong place.
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| Vinny's Bar (Pastel, 14x18") |
In theory, we could draw or paint perfectly without any special knowledge if we were always completely accurate in rendering what we see. Unfortunately, it hardly ever works out that way. Most of us would make a number of errors if we had only our eyes to guide us. Even accomplished artists would make obvious mistakes if they only trusted their eyes. Instead, most artists resort to a number of "rules" to help guide them, such as measuring proportions of the body and comparing them to certain standards. For instance, the eyes are normally about half way down the head. Unless one is aware of this and is measuring, most beginners are likely to put the eyes too high on the face. There are many other such guidelines that help us check our work and make sure we draw accurately.
One of the most fundamental concepts in art, and one that non-artists hardly ever think about, is value. This is simply a term for how light or dark a particular shape is. We normally think in terms of color - a leaf is green, my hair is brown, an apple is red - but we are not as aware of how light or dark each of those colors are. In truth, value is actually considered by artists to be just one attribute of color, but it is such an important one that artists often discuss it separately. To appreciate the importance of value, consider that a black and white photograph contains no color as we normally think of it. Only the differences in value between shapes enable us to recognize the image. Many artists are fond of saying they can choose any colors they want to paint a scene, and as long as they get the values right, it will be convincing. Value is a big clue in helping us interpret three dimensional shapes in two dimensional paintings. It is also a key element of the next concept I wish to discuss.
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| Color Field (Pastel, 16x20") |
Most artists start out thinking that what is going to interest them about a scene is the subject matter - if you like horses, then any scene that features a horse is going to produce a good painting. Soon enough, however, one realizes there is more to it than this - independently of how well the horse is painted, there are certain aspects of how the painting is arranged that make some horse paintings more interesting than others. A similar thing happens in abstract art, where there is no subject matter. The success or failure of the painting ends up depending at least partially on how the painting is composed. In the case of a horse painting, this might mean, where the horse is within the borders, or if any part of it extends outside the painting, what the negative shapes that surround the horse look like, whether the painting is mostly dark or mostly light or whether dark and light are balanced, where the dark and light areas occur within the painting. In short, the painting is going to be judged as if it were an abstract painting, where we are not concerned with whether it looks like something, but how pleasing the arrangement of shapes and colors is. The term composition refers to this arrangement; the term design refers to the process of planning the composition of a painting. There are all sorts of theories about what constitutes good composition, and a number of well-known models that artists often follow in designing their composition, but often, these boil down to understanding how to create contrast and balance. In a future essay, I will explain this further.
Color is the artistic element that is most a part of our everyday thinking. Still, there are aspects of color that concern artists greatly and yet remain unknown to the general population. Color is usually described as having three properties: hue, value, and intensity. The latter is also known as saturation or chroma. Value is also known as luminance. Some people also refer to a property of temperature, but this is actually just another way of looking at hue.
Value, as explained earlier, means how dark the color is - pink is just a light value of red, or in practice, red mixed with white. Artists sometimes the term tint for lighter values of a color, and shade for darker values (mixed with black).
Hue is what we normally think of when we think of color - whether a color is basically red, violet, blue, green, yellow, or orange, for instance. The colors red, yellow, and orange are called warm colors, and blue, green, and violet are cool. The language of temperature is also how we distinguish between, say, a cooler red that appears to be on the violet side (like a ripe apple) from a warmer red that appears to be on the orange side (like a not-so-ripe tomato). Similarly, a warmer green is one with more yellow in it, while a cooler one has more blue.
Intensity is the hardest to explain, and has to do with how bright or dull the color appears. For instance, the red of a strawberry and the red of a brick may be roughly the same in hue and value, but the strawberry is a more intense red. Certain kinds of dirt may be essentially the same hue and value as the brick but duller still. In general, browns are dull warm colors, while grays are dull cool colors.
Colors can also be described in terms of how they are mixed. The theory behind color mixing is actually rather complex, but the model we all learn in kindergarten still works reasonably well: we start out with a set of primary colors, and the other colors can be created by mixing these in different combinations. For example, blue and yellow make green, although the specific hue of the green will depend on the specific hue of the blue and of the yellow, and how much of each was used. A color formed by mixing two primaries in roughly equal amounts is called a secondary. Assuming we start with primaries of red, yellow, and blue, then grene is one secondary; others are violet, which is red plus blue, and orange, which is is red plus yellow. You can also form more combinations using all three primaries - a duller green, for example, is formed by mixing blue, yellow, and a little bit of red. In reality, there is nothing particularly magic about red, yellow, or blue that makes them more primary than any other color, and in fact, if you are going to use just three colors as primaries, there are more optimal choices. A future essay will discuss this at greater length. But most artists continue to think in terms of red, yellow, and blue as their primaries.
The various hues can be arranged in a diagram called a color wheel. This is a circle with labeled points around it. The wheel can be represented with any color at the top, but I like to use orange. The order of the colors then goes orange, red, violet, blue, green, yellow. You can also insert colors between these six - between red and violet, for example, is red-violet. In reality, there is an infinite number of possible colors along this wheel. The color directly opposite any given color is called its complement. For example, on this color wheel, yellow is the complement of violet. Again, this representation is actually somewhat inaccurate, as will be explained elsewhere, but it is still a useful enough abstraction.
The notion of color temperature is easily explained with reference to the color wheel. Orange is considered the warmest color, blue the coolest. If you divide the color wheel in half with a horizontal line, all the colors on the top half - yellow, orange, red - are considered warm. Those on the bottom - green, blue, violet - are considered cool. Between any two similar colors, the one closer to orange on the color wheel is considered warmer, and the one closer to blue cooler. So for example, given two reds, one a little towards the orange side and the other toward the violet side, the orange one is warmer, the violet one cool.
Knowledge of these properties is important to artists in that it helps them analyze the color they are seeing and reproduce it more accurately. Knowing a color is a dull greenish blue gives us information we will need in figuring out how to mix that color on our palette. Knowing about these properties also has relevance in understanding how real objects in the real world are affected by light, atmosphere, and water, as mentioned below.
The intrinsic color of an object is called its local color. This means, the color it would appear in plain white light. In the real world, however, the light itself usually has a color, and an object placed in the light will have a side that is in the light and a side that is in shadow. With a typical incandescent bulb shining brightly on a red apple, for instance, the side closest to the light will appear rather lighter and more orange than the apple would look on the tree outside on an overcast day. And the shadow side of the apple under the light bulb will appear darker and more violet.
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| Late Spring Runoff At Prospect Park (Pastel, 10x12.5") |
The atmosphere affects color as well - it acts like a pair of blue sunglasses. Objects get bluer as they recede, which is why a mountain that is covered in ostensibly green trees looks blue from a distance. The mountain will also normally look lighter in value than it would up close, among other differences.
Water, when present in a scene, also affects the appearance of objects. An object reflected in water tends to appear less dark or less light than the object itself, and the color will be affected by the color of the water. The appearance of an object within the water is also changed in predictable ways.
These effects are obviously concepts that concern the representational painter more than the abstract one.
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| Bark Study (Pastel, 8x11") |
At the beginning of this essay, I stated that skill in painting is not skill in applying paint, but rather skill in knowing what paint to apply where. While the principles I outlined above are part of what I mean by that, these can still be considered technical skills. An artist can master them and still not produce great art. In this respect, they are more like the technical skills of a musician - complex and difficult to learn, but still not the whole picture. What is missing, of course, is creativity. The role this plays in art is huge. For representational painters, it influences our choice of subject matter, how we choose to compose our paintings, how closely we choose to duplicate the colors we see, how detailed we make our rendering, how accurate we make it, the appearance of our brushwork, and much more. For abstract artists, it plays an even larger role, as the specifics of drawing skill and light and atmosphere effects diminish in importance. In a future essay, I will explore the role of creativity in art. More so than any other single aspect of art, this is the one that will lend itself to analogy with music and other creative artistic endeavors.
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All content copyright © The Outside Shore Marc Sabatella /
marc@outsideshore.com |
