A boat would help define the center of interest which is the second tower to the right and the wooden (?) pavilion. There are also some dark splotches there which I cannot figure out. Oh. hell, it is such a bad work I would just paint over it if it were me.
Modern impressionism
Looking at that river scene again, I see that the tree branch is longer than the tree is tall! I never saw a tree like
that 
it's dreadful! - boring, formulaic, cliched, no colour sense, no composition, no drama or interest .......yuk!
...and these sell???
If they sell -- that remains to be seen. I think he has figured out he's milked all he can out of the sacchrine lighted cottages imagery. The others aren't really much better. He has one desert scene which looks like a John Hilton.
Modern impressionism
Back to perspective - it ssure ain't everything in a painting, but it is most successfully altered (or even ignored altogether) by artists who have learned how to handle it in the first place.
And there are cultures where perspective is handled very differently from the way it's dealt with in Western art. But, again, this is not from ignorance, but in a different traditiion.
It's not as much perspective as compostion. Artists distort perspective all the time, even in classic paintings like those of Ingres. When the picture plane doesn't blance out assymetrically is when the image really doesn't work. It is true that there is a lot of artistic license taken with compostion but there still remains a balance within the image.
What is interesting about this painting is that the longer you look at it and see the artist's faults and failures, it becomes increasingly irritating to look at. It boggles the mind that some people would actaully pay for this painting.
You should see the rest except I don't provide airsick bags so it would be at your own risk.
We show an artist in the gallery who is a retired architect. His perspective is perfect and it does add a spectacular depth to his paintings. It's all in the final product -- it either works or it doesn't work. If the composition is even a little off balance, it creates a awkwardness for the eye. This is especially true in abstracts. The most successful painters do break a lot of the basic principals of painting but they know how to get away with it. Kline would brush in a huge form that seemed to fly off the canvas and then balance it with another form that drew the eye in the other direction. Many of them want the visceral effect of making one's eye penetrate the image and move vertically, horizontally or diagonally. There's always something in the image that draws the eye into the picture plane which is asymmetrical. The best basic instruction I ever experienced was to fill in a grid with various shades of grey. Each square was filled in using no straight black or white so that the image balanced but was never symmetrical. This design exercise actually helped me paint.
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LW, Your grid exercise sounds interesting, but I can't tell for sure what it's about. Could you elaborate a bit? I studied design in Chouinard's decades ago, and remain sensitive to certain principles. I don't think of my work in terms of "composition" in the landscape sense of pictorial organization--more like design. But I have not been concerned to be conscious of design "principles" when painting. I just let my aesthetic sense run the show (it looks right or it doesn't--the basic response is simply "yes" or "no"). But after our discussion of the Spanish landscape disaster I find myself becoming self-conscious. It's very uncomfortable to design "consciously"--somewhat like "thinking logically" or "speaking grammatically". If it's not done unconsciously, it's too stilted to be creative. Maybe your grid exercise will shake me loose.
It was a Design 1 class and it was one of the most difficult projects I've ever done although I knew after I did it that it improved my eye for composition whether I would be doing an advertising art layout or creating a painting. I don't know how to describe it unless I actually was teaching in an art lab. The art instructor graded according to how successfully the grid of values was balanced -- probably with some subjectivity involved. It's what people don't realize is inherant in all imagery -- a balance that draws the eye towards and into the picture or design. If you look at Caneletto painting of Venice, there's a reason for everything in the image. Take something out and the image is unbalanced. In a musical composition, there's balance in the instruments. In choreography there's a balance in the dancing, even the wildest jazz ballet. In painting it seperates the amateur painters from the professional (even though there's a lot of amateurish, bland decorative art on the market with compositional and color balance transgressions enought to write a large book about). I would qualify Kincaid as a mediocre illustrator who has managed to build a market which makes him professional. That just means there's a lot of amateur "collectors" out there who don't have any idea the difference between good art and bad art. It is their money, after all, and they have a right to spend it on what they see fit. Most of the commercial "fine art" marketed in the US cannot find a market in Europe, although some of the better artists have found a market in countries like Japan. Eyvind Earle, the French naive painter Michel Delacroix and Yamagata (a native of Japan living in the US) have all make millions in the Japanese art market.
I guess I could give some idea of how the exercise works:
Take a piece of drawing paper and create a penciled in grid of 1/2" squares about 8 x 8". Then using different greys, create a composition (you might say Modrian-like) without using straight black or straight white. Of course, you've only got yourself or those immediately around you to figure out what you're looking at and whether it is balanced or not.
We've written about this before because one of my art instructors at UCLA told me I was designing my abstracts. There was too much use of design principals and their constrictions and I had to "free it up." This is the same as Tom Kitten said about know the basics to the letter and then taking chances. They have to be calculated chances to a degree like the planned accident of the abstract expressionists. If one looks at a De Kooning or even a Pollock, there's an order in what seems to first be disorder.
art
O.k., I see what you mean. It's all about balance. Yes, to me the trick is to find an "interesting" adjustment between symmetry and asymmetry. Too much symmetry and it's boring/static; too much asymmetry and it lacks unity and harmony. The BALANCE, as I see it, is a dynamic thing. Right now I have a painting in process that is TOO symmetrical. I'm trying to solve the problem of injecting asymmetry--in this case, as dissonance with its overall resolution (i.e., "balance"). Obviously my ultimate frame of reference is the creation (ironically, "composition") of music.
Thanks.
It's verticle, horizontal and diagonal balance -- artists often work in only one or two of those dimensions. Just working horizontally as most artist think to place their forms or objects into the picture plane, injecting enough perspective to satisfy a perception of foreground and background often ends up as an unbalanced or static painting. Ancient Chinese painting and carved panels perspective was oriented (sic) vertically. I like your using harmony associated with the visual arts but as with music, some artists strive for a disharmony, maybe just enough to viscerally excite the viewer. It is how far an artist can push out the envelope. The exercises teaches one to deal with the picture plane in a circular fashion -- Rubens consciously painted in connected circles. So instead of dealing with the picture plane just simply up and down, you're looking at what the balance is from the center to each edge and the corners. I always liked the idea of two or three vanishing points over one in any composition. Abstract forms can also have a perspective and many vanishing points if the artist is trying to achieve a depth to the image. De Kooning was always the most successful in this respect followed by Gerhard Richter, albeit with a lot of combinations of brighter colors.
I am again tiring of writing about the inept Mr. Kincaid but he plays it safe on his perspective and it shows. I mentioned this before but I saw a painting, still not that good, that was actually inventive with perspective at the Westminster Mall gallery (now defunct) and when I got closer recognized that the technique was not Kincaid's, it was a poorly disguised aping of Kincaid. Wonder how that happened?
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I do like a bit of "visceral dissonance" in painting. But it's most desirable when "on the whole" the result is harmonious. It's just that while the dissonance in musical passages usually moves to some kind of satisfying "resolution" in painting this occurs not so much temporarlly but spatially. Of course, as the eye moves around a painting, it also moves through time. But I like to see paintings "all at once," even to see the whole while look at some spot in the center. That gives me a good look at its overall unity or balance. Let me qualify my second sentence. Sometimes I like a bit of unresolved asymmetry or dissonance, like a little bit too much mustard on a hot dog.
I would add radial and meandering to horizontal, vertical and diagonal...all methods of creating compositions that achieve a certain movement....
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Great additions, SP. The more "patterns" to choose from the greater the freedom. I am concerned that we must be careful not to follow rules too transparently in order to avoid the look of "fabricating" pictures which look cliche, like art school exercises. As you and LW would agree, I'm sure, good art follows the rules, GREAT art often manages to get away with breaking them. But "freedom" only comes with knowledge of the rules/restrictions.
Apparently I'm making cliches about cliches.
The pattern painting that emerged after modern art was declared dead was basically a variation on the grid excercise. Some of them looked much like Oriental rugs. Thank gawd that died away (mostly painted by academic painters recently graduated from universities). Jasper John's "cross-hatch" paintings, on the contrary, were pattern paintings but he explored all sorts of effect of depth and a kind of intellectual mood (I know that could be interpreted as an oxymoron but it's the only way I could think to describe it.)
Kinkade is still selling posters for $99 and $250 for framed. I'm trying to post a picture of the newspaper ad, but having some problems. Will try again later. He's going to be here "in person."
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