Pssst! Come over here!
Yes, I've got the secret to becoming successful painter! Guaranteed to make you rich and famous as an artist. To be lauded and toasted amongst your peers and patrons alike. It's soooo simple and easy! All you have to do is follow the one rule revealed between the covers of this book and generation after generation will remember your name forever! . . .
Greg's rule? 'Never make any two intervals the same.'
But Greg's rule is something else.
It offers a flexible and encompassing way to fix a compositional problem on the fly. As humans, we have a wish for things to be neat and tidy in a way the natural world isn't, and as a result we have a tendency to make things alike in our work. If we find our paintings aren't going as well as we like we can take a break, inspect the work, and ask a few simple questions such as, "Should I vary the height of the distant mountains? Would it be better for me to place two trees to the right of the shed, and three more on the left, but further away? Did I allow for enough difference between what will be above the horizon, and what will fall below?"
But applying Greg's rule in such a manner is still too simplistic.
Why? Because it is like asking Sir Lawrence Olivier to play a sit-com. Greg's rule has incredible potential and it demands to be used to a fuller extent. If we can suppress our self-awareness that we are painting an object then we may begin to see the shapes and rhythms which make up our composition. We can start asking more interesting questions such as, "Would it be better for me to make the negative shape around the boat larger, and to express it more simply than the boat itself? Can I lose an edge here, between my boat and the the one next to it in the shadow area? Will it make my painting stronger if I vary this passage of paint in thickness, scale, and texture? Will it make my painting stronger if I minimize the color that is there and then strike in one strong accent instead?"
All of the above is a more interesting way to apply Greg's rule of unequal intervals. And to his credit, Greg is perfectly straight forward about pointing that out.
Greg's other important point is this: 'The eye constantly looks for variety. Too little becomes dull, but too much can become confusing. So the painter must find a balance between the two.
I went back to look at some of my older work – and some newer work I feel indifferent about – with the above in mind and I came to the conclusion Greg is spot on here as well. Whenever dullness appeared in my work it arrived in the form of sameness, be it my arrangement of the pictorial content, or in my treatment of the paint. And whenever confusion showed up it was due to there being little contrast between the simple and the complicated, or a failure to present an organized point of focus for the eye. Nice, eh? In one respect, what Greg has to say about this stuff isn't much different from what any other artists from Leonardo to Edgar Payne have said. But Greg puts it in such a succinct way, for our time, that if you can spot the problem then it is likely you are seeing the solution too.
So buy his book if you want a deeper explanation. Or, you could simply keep his rule in mind as you paint. Remember, it's not that complicated. Just hard to do.
'Never make any two intervals the same."
So buy his book if you want a deeper explanation. Or, you could simply keep his rule in mind as you paint. Remember, it's not that complicated. Just hard to do.
'Never make any two intervals the same."
1 reader comments:
I have that book here somewhere (hmm what stack might it be in?)..on your advice I will look at it again. I remember reading it originally and thinking...this is simple! When one reads these books, often things won't really "kick in" until one reads them again later... Thanks for the reminder!
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