Elements & Principles of Design

I recently ran a workshop for the Foxboro Art Association in Massachusetts on using the elements and principles of design in landscape painting. I explained and illustrated the use of the elements and principles with a digital slide presentation followed by a painting demonstration. 

Making use of the elements and principles of design allows the painting to become more than just the sum of its parts.

This is the stuff that makes up a painting. Every painting needs to be composed. Are you a painter who spends time thinking about the principles of design to best compose your paintings or do you more or less wing it and go with what looks good? I firmly believe that a lot of good paintings can be made stronger with a little more thought given to the arrangement of the composition. By the way, I am completely guilty of just winging it sometimes!

Edgar Payne wrote in his book, Composition For The Outdoor Painter; that an artist should 'mix brains with paint.' His examples of different compositional armatures in the book are outstanding and clearly demonstrate a thinker behind the brush. His use of these armatures within his paintings make his work stand out above a lot of landscape work. When a painter thinks about these compositional ideas along with the principles of design, they have a really good shot of simplifying their subject matter to the essentials and can begin painting the relationships of objects, along with relationships of value and color that add strength and unity to the painting. In other words, they PAINT a painting rather than copy or render things. 

Making good use of the elements and principles of design allows the painting to become more than just the sum of its parts. 

By utilizing the principles of design when organizing a painting, it allows the artist to still explain the big truths about nature but it also allows the artist to use his or her inventiveness in the final product.

In the coming year, I plan on making the use of these elements and principles of design a focus in my weekly painting classes and also in my plein air workshops. I'm in the process of also making it available as an online class.

Interested?

Below is a very quick sketch done in class showing an example of working from a photo reference and strengthening the design using the elements and principles. I rearranged shapes, changed sizes and pushed the compositional movement towards a radial design with a strong diagonal movement.

Day 11-19 Fleeting Glimpses & Memories

This project still fascinates me. I realized about half way through the 30 day project that trying to crank out a painting each day just to meet my own self imposed deadline was rather senseless. My normal busy schedule of classes and deadlines for other paintings etc; was already a rather full plate. I started to find myself feeling anxious to get a painting completed just for the sake of getting it posted. After a couple days of real bombs (which were scraped completely) and other obligations that got in my way, I decided that It was alright to change my strategy and I made it a new personal goal to complete the 30 paintings as time allowed for it. I wanted to learn and gain new ideas from doing the project. Spending time thinking about what I was trying to capture in each painting from my color notes and photo references made the most logical sense. I tend to be very direct with my painting procedure, but I am a thinker. I think about a painting a lot before I ever touch brush to canvas. 

I personally wish that there were more painters in this world who spent  more time thinking about what they are trying to say in a painting along with giving more thought to composition, color, type of light etc instead of just copying everything before them. Or worse, and we see it a lot; painters who essentially just copy themselves over and over and over again. I've found myself doing it at times. It's actually rather easy to fool ourselves into believing that we are seeing things with fresh new eyes and approaching each painting with an emotional investment, when actually we are just on auto pilot. We reach for the same green, we make the same marks, the trees have to look a certain way, water is done like this etc etc. We start to paint from habit instead of painting from instinct and emotion. What results are formulaic paintings or paintings that look like everybody else. There are a lot of those paintings floating around. This is not a rant but an observation. 

For me personally, when I find that I am not emotionally invested in a painting, I take a step back to ask myself why. The painting experience is about having a conversation with my subject matter and therefore, expressing something that might not be readily seen in the painting but felt. Paintings that evoke an emotion from the viewer are the paintings that matter. Without that connection, a painter is just recording things on a canvas. Robert Henri said that the world doesn't need another 'pretty' picture and is he ever right. 

The Fleeting Glimpses & Memory project has made me have to think harder back in the studio about that emotional connection that I felt looking at the subject. Even color notations that I made on location took on a whole different meaning back in the studio. The notes gave me a starting point, but the actual color mixes that eventually were applied to the canvas were more about trying to recall the feeling of the color and were never exactly as they had been written down. I think all good paintings tend to evoke an impression or sense of place beyond just stating the obvious. Wouldn't it be an amazing feat if a painter could thoroughly intoxicate the viewers senses with this intangible quality.

Here are photos of paintings 11 through 19. The images are also posted on my Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/pages/David-Lussier-Plein-Air-Painting-Workshops/397547803746

and also on my Dailypaintworks gallery page http://www.dailypaintworks.com/allartists/#/artist=lussier,david&mode=search

'Fleeting Glimpses & Memories' Painting Project. Days 7-10!

'Fleeting Glimpses & Memories' Painting Project

Days 7, 8, 9 and 10

If there is one thing I've learned doing this painting project, is that my schedule is extremely full and fitting an extra painting into my day for thirty days in a row is just not going to happen easily. I'm enjoying the project immensely and have decided to get my thirty paintings completed as my days allow. (This will keep me from becoming a nut case!) :) 

It's been interesting looking at night scenes at all different hours. The night sky is so vastly different from one night to the next. Everything becomes a factor; the time, the immediate weather and the phase of the moon. It makes perfect logical sense, but it has never been so obvious until I really started looking and thinking about it. Every time I write down some notes about color and value, I am surprised by the various combinations I am seeing. It seems endless. At times it is strikingly different and yet so very subtle.

As I continue with the project, the weather is also changing. We are losing all the snow and that is going to have me looking at different subject matter etc. I'm excited about some ideas that I have and as the weather warms up and the days get longer, I am going to try to do some of these on location. The knowledge that I am gleaning from looking and trying to memorize the evening light is opening up my mind to thinking about color in new ways.

I'm still posting the painting images here and on FaceBook. You can click on the Daily Paintworks widget located in the right column of this blog to be taken to my gallery of all the paintings being done for this project on the daily paintworks website.

Day 7 - 'Ice Melt'   9x12

Day 8 - 'Ten P.M.'   9x12

Day 9 - 'Burning The Midnight Oil'   9x12

Day 10 - 'Night Lights'   9x12