Sunday, March 25, 2018

Frank Bramley's "Domino!"

Great compositions rarely arrive fully formed in your head. They require rough drafts. A color study is where that happens. Here's an example.

Frank Bramley, Study for Domino!, 8 3/4 x 10 1/4"
For example, Frank Bramley (1857-1915) came up with an interesting idea for a painting: A girl and a woman sit at a table. The white dress fuses with the tablecloth to make a larger shape. And the dark shape of the chair blends with other dark shapes.

Nice idea, but still a little "blah." The wall and the ground plane are flat and undefined, and the white shape is stuck in the middle.

Frank Bramley, Domino!,  24 x 36"
Look how he develops it. The figures are playing dominoes, adding a feeling of dolce far niente. A couple of prints hang on the wall, a carpet covers the floor, and a few stairs lead off to another part of the house, with just a dash of light in the hallway. By developing the Z dimension with foreground and background, he improves the houding.

Everything is a foil for the big effect. Those linked white shapes cascade into the foreground, all painted with that angular, square-brush technique. Great shapes, no lazy edges.
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Books: Stanhope Forbes and the Newlyn School

4 comments:

  1. It's so cool to see how much he makes up in his head to improve the painting. This is where I'm struggling myself at the moment, I find it difficult to paint from imagination (which is why your book is on my to buy-list).

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  2. He also set the action further back into the picture plane, giving the viewer some space to enter the composition.

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  3. Great analysis. I learned a lot. I like paintings from life, but I can perhaps appreciate even more the intentional self contained artistic statement which comes about from gleaning material from studies for use in carefully planned studio compositions.

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  4. Great example of designing a image with value and shape. Didn't know Frank's work before going to look it up now.
    THanks

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