Do you see a cellphone in this 1860 painting?

The woman in this 1860 painting seems to be looking at a cellphone, but really she's holding a little prayer book.

The book is an important detail, since it may keep her on the narrow path of virtue.

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, The Expected Ones, 1860

Once we get beyond that fun detail, look at how the painting is arranged tonally. The light is coming from behind, spilling out into the foreground path in a large, unified, triangular shape. To the left and right are well organized dark shadow masses.

The foliage masses create a circular window around the deep space view, and the foliage is lightened up as it goes back into greater distances.
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More at Motherboard "Do We All See the Woman Holding an iPhone in This 1860 Painting?"

Flatness and Depth in Painting

This scene was on the back cover of David Drake's paperback collection of military science fiction short stories called "The Fleet Book One." 

To make the typical '80s air battle look more incongruous, I imagined it taking place at a low altitude over farmland. I set up the scale by introducing the fighter craft in the foreground, and then repeating them way back in the scene. I also softened the colors and compressed the lines of the croplands as they went back to the horizon.

When I was in art school, many of the teachers spoke dogmatically about the importance of making the painting reinforce the flatness of the picture plane. But that idea never really interested me very much. The flatness of the picture plane is a given. It's easy to make a painting look 2D—colored stuff on a rectangle of canvas.

The real fun for me starts when the surface starts to fall away and pulls me back into infinite depths.
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Read more:
Modern art theory: "The Importance of Flatness"
Previous post on "Houding" (a theory of pictorial depth from classical Dutch theory)
Amazon: The Fleet Book One

Integrating a Figure into the Background

BadCoyote asks: "Do you have any advice for artists struggling to match foreground characters and background elements into a seamless pic?"

Vibert

1. Overlap an element in front of the main figure. 

Sorolla

2. Be sure lighting is consistent on the figure and the background. 

Sorolla

3. Cast a shadow on the figure from some other element in the scene. 

Siemiradzki

4. Match color balance between figure and ground and vary the lighting in your scene. 

Signorini

5. Selectively soften some edges, and link some tones with the background.
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Read more on GurneyJourney:
Five Ways to Extend a Story
Repoussoir figures
Topic: Composition

Arkhipov's Washer-Women

Abram Arkhipov (Russian, 1862-1930) did two versions of his famous paintings of washer-women. 

His first version of 1899 came after a tireless search through different wash houses, where he observed the characteristic movements and the quality of light streaming through the window.

Then, at a wash-house in the Smolensk market in Moscow, he noticed an old woman sitting off to the side, her head resting in her hand, and her right arm resting on her knee. 

The second picture brings the figures closer and lights them more prominently. He was moved by the spirit of hopelessness and exhaustion, which gave the painting a social message as well as an aesthetic one. 

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David Farquharson

David Farquharson (1839-1907), The End of the Day's Fishing, 56 x 91.5 cm

This oil landscape by David Farquharson (Scottish/English, 1839-1907) has a marvelous sense of scale and depth. 

A few observations:

1. Note the tiny fishermen figures on the right side of the picture.

2. Also, the tiny slivers of light reflecting off the water in the middle ground.

3. The foreground is illuminated and the middle ground is shadowed, the reverse of many grand landscape painters.

4. The corners of the composition are "dodged" or "blocked"—that is, darkened to keep the attention in the middle of the picture.

5. Well orchestrated atmospheric perspective. The dark colors in the extreme distance are lightened and cooled.

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More about atmospheric perspective in Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter

David Farquharson on Wikipedia

Graveyard Scene by Tom Lovell

This 1947 illustration by Tom Lovell for True Magazine was for an article called "Extra Corpse in the Graveyard." It's a good image to study for color and composition.

Color and Value

• You could probably paint this with Venetian red, viridian, and white, maybe with a touch of raw umber and yellow ochre.

• Note the grouping of tones in the white gravestones and the simplicity of the grassy ground texture.

• Tones are also grouped in the dark background trees and in the shadowed foreground grasses.

Composition

• Except for the walking figure, all the other key elements are cropped intriguingly: the arm, the gravestone with its fragmentary name, and the white gravestone on the right.

• This design is not an obvious one, and I would guess that Lovell arrived at this composition after doing a lot of tonal thumbnails in pencil.  

• Positioning the hand in the extreme foreground also places viewer in the grave and in the path of discovery. 

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Books: Tom Lovell-Illustrator

The Art of Tom Lovell: An Invitation to History

Tom Lovell : Storyteller with a Brush

The Power of Cropping

In his concept sketch, Oscar Björck (Swedish, 1860-1929) shows a fisherman hastily putting on his gear, responding to a distress call. 

Sketch for A Signal of Distress "Et nødskud" by Oscar Björck

His wife and kids anxiously peer out through the window. We can see the shining horizon and the dark sky. Evidently a ship is in desperate need of rescue, because the title tells us that a shot has been fired to call the alarm.

Et nødskud by Oscar Björck

In the final painting, the artist decided to crop the scene tighter. The fisherman is gone, his meal is uneaten, his chair is pushed back, and the door is thrown open. The focus is on the family's reaction. Only the baby is unconcerned and unknowing.

Less action sometimes yields more drama. Tighter cropping sometimes opens up a story. 

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Wikipedia: Oscar Björck
Previously: Krøyer's Hip Hip Hoorah!

Book: The Skagen Painters (In a New Light)

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Five ways to extend a story

Here's a character study of some political junkies in a public café by José Jiménez Aranda (Spanish 1837-1903). 

José Jiménez Aranda, Los políticos
14½ x 18 1/8 in. (37 x 46 cm.)

The older guy is arguing a point with the younger guy, who is reading from a newspaper. If that's all there was to the picture it would be OK, but look how he carries the story further.

1. Reaction figure. 

The third guy at the table is bored out of his mind because he's heard these guys arguing the same point endlessly. However you read his expression, it suggests layers of backstory.

2. Internal crop. 

The guy wearing the ornate blue jacket at the far right is cropped by the column, so we only see a little of him. No need to show more than that.

3. Shadowed elements.

The guy he's talking to is keyed way down in shadow so as not to compete with the main action. But we can see he's gesturing and probably talking politics, too.

4. Repoussoir figure.

The figure on the far left is facing back and to the left. He's cropped by the picture's edge, suggesting another conversation offscreen. Even though he's a throwaway element, he's painted carefully.

5. Reflection.

At the top of the picture is a mirror, and the reflection (see below) shows a scene at another table.

If you're working on a storytelling picture, look for ways to include reactions, internal crops, shadowed elements, repoussoir figures, and reflections.

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José Jiménez Aranda on Wikipedia

More about Jiménez on the Prado Museum site.

Previously: Repoussoir

Dagnan-Bouveret's "An Accident"

Many of you expressed an interest in looking at compositions by doing pencil copies of them. Here is a painting that has always captivated me.

"An Accident" 1879 by Pascal Adolphe Jean Dagnan-Bouveret (French, 1852-1929)
at the Walters Art Gallery

The caption from the Museum's website says:

"After training with Alexandre Cabanel (1823-89) and Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), Dagnan-Bouveret turned from Classical themes to subjects drawn from everyday life. In this scene, a country doctor bandages a boy's injured hand, while his family looks on with varying expressions of concern. The artist witnessed an incident like this while traveling with a doctor friend in the Franche-Comté region of eastern France. When this painting was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1880, it established the artist's reputation as both a perceptive reporter of rural customs and a Realist who explored the psychological states of his subjects."

Compositional study of Dagnan-Bouveret's "An Accident" by James Gurney

What struck me as I did my little pencil and gray-wash sketch was how the story is structured in terms of action and reaction. The center of the design and the area of highest contrast is the white shape of the bandage, the doctor's hands, and the boy's white shirt and face. 

Lesser lights in the design bring our attention to the faces of the people and the clock, which tells us that this event brought the work day on the farm to a halt.

Behind the white bandage is the profound black of the fireplace, and there's a remarkable use of sfumato or enveloping tone linking the surrounding dark values together. There are no edges demanding your attention unless they're important to the story.

Beyond pure design issues, I love the way the story is brought to life by character and psychology. Reaction is more powerful than action in video, and that's true here, too. Whatever injured the boy's hand — by 1872, that might have been a piece of farm machinery — we can see how bravely and stoically he is dealing with it, and we can study the variety of reactions of his parents and fellow farmhands. All the eye lines keep bringing us back to the center of interest. We can only imagine what this injury might mean to the fortunes of the farm.

This all goes back to the thoughts on the analysis of the Forsberg recently: Tonal organization isn't just a design issue, it's also a story issue.

Forsberg's "Death of a Hero"

A secret to good composition is to group and simplify the tones. But the tonal organization must serve the story. 

Let's look at an example, along with my pencil sketch.

Nils Forsberg (1842-1934) La Fin d’un héros (Death of a Hero) 1888
Oil, 300 x 450 cm, Stockholm, Nationalmuseum

Story

At the moment of his death, a war hero is slumped on his improvised bedding. The setting is a church. A priest gives him last rites. His wife or mother grieves at the foot of the bed. His fellow soldiers pay last respects. On the left are other wounded patients laid out on other beds.

Tonal structure

The dying hero is the crux of the design. He is a light shape surrounded by the light-toned bedding. Those light patches are shape-welded to the illuminated vertical column behind his bed. 

I don't know if it was intentional, but that column ascends like an elevator to heaven. The only other light-toned figures are the altar boy with the candle and the attending priest. 

The rest of the mortals are mostly dark. The ailing figures on beds on the left are enveloped in darkness. Wherever possible, dark tones are grouped into large shapes to simplify the design. 

Perhaps I'm reading into it a bit, but the light seems to be associated with spiritual life or afterlife or redemption, and the darkness seems to be associated with mortality and suffering. The point is that tonal organization isn't just a design issue, it's also a story issue. 

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Previously: Shape Welding

On Leaving Stuff Out

Charles Lasar, Hillside in Summer

Charles (Shorty) Lasar (1856-1936) was an American painter who studied in Paris. He urged his students to leave out unnecessary detail in a painting. He said:

"Don’t try to put in a tenth of what you see, it is the continually leaving out that makes things charming."

"Mystery is caused by leaving out, but don’t leave out the big interest."

"If you put in too many accessories the interest will have no chance."

"When things are not interesting lose them."

"In a scene you will always have one part to your liking; neglect the rest for that favorite spot."

"When you are before nature give way forcibly to your big convictions. Put in what you feel the most, and not all the ab solute details that you see. You can’t put all the hairs on a cat, or the whiskers on the wheat."
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From Practical Hints for Art Students by Charles Lasar, 1910. (Free edition on Google Books)
Previously: Charles Lasar on Posing a Model

GJ Book Club— Speed Chapter 12— Rhythm: Unity of Line

On the GJ Book Club, we're looking at Chapter 12: "Rhythm, Variety of Line" Harold Speed's 1917 classic The Practice and Science of Drawing. The following numbered paragraphs cite key points in boldface, followed by a brief remark of my own. If you would like to respond to a specific point, please precede your comment by the corresponding number.

At Roberto's suggestion, we're dividing this gigantic chapter into two.

1. When groups of lines in a picture occur parallel to each other they produce an accentuation of the particular quality the line may contain.

Speed uses the parallel outstretched arms in the William Blake as an example (lower right). Building the metaphor on Walter Pater's suggestion that "painting aspires to the condition of music," Speed talks about such parallelism being like a chord in music.

Personally, I believe the metaphor of design = music begins to break down when you start talking about chords vs. staccato (I think he actually means arpeggio, actually. Musically speaking, staccato is the opposite of legato.)

2. All objects with which one associates the look of strength will be found to have straight lines in their composition....These lines possess other qualities, due to their maximum amount of unity, that give them great power in a composition; and where the expression of sublimity or any of the deeper and more profound sentiments are in evidence, they are often to be found.

For these points he brings in architectural examples, discussing the severe and dignified vertical columns of the Greek cathedrals.

3. The horizontal and the vertical are two very important lines, the horizontal being associated with calm and contemplation and the vertical with a feeling of elevation. 

He continues, "their relation to the sides of the composition to which they are parallel in rectangular pictures is of great importance in uniting the subject to its bounding lines and giving it a well-knit look, conveying a feeling of great stability to a picture." 

I think these points are pretty familiar to most readers here, so I'm not going to make too much of them. 

Speed presents the above diagrams to show how to introduce variety and curvature, breaking up the absolute severity of horizontals and verticals. As we get to the bottom examples in each series of three, there's a suggestion of unsettling wind and a loss of repose.

4. Giorgioni's Fête Champêtre.

Speed uses a couple of old master paintings to illustrate his points, so I'll just add them here in color.

5. Titian Bacchus and Ariadne

6. G. F. Watts, Love and Death
It's worth noting that Watts did several versions of this composition. There's another one here that doesn't have the flowers strewn across the steps.

7. Diego Velazquez, Surrender at Breda

8. The combination of the vertical with the horizontal produces one of the strongest and most arresting 156chords that you can make.
Speed continues: "and it will be found to exist in most pictures and drawings where there is the expression of dramatic power. The [Christian] cross is the typical example of this. It is a combination of lines that instantly rivets the attention, and has probably a more powerful effect upon the mind—quite apart from anything symbolised by it—than any other simple combinations that could have been devised."

9. Other lines that possess a direct relation to a rectangular shape are the diagonals. 
Speed identifies parallel diagonals and alignments in the Velazquez.

10. Superimposed structures
Here's my thought about all these Old Master examples. We may never know whether Titian or Velazquez or Giorgioni consciously used such devices in their compositions. At least I'm not aware of any of their writings that address the effects that they may have intended by their use of horizontals, verticals, rhythm or unity. So I'm just a little bit skeptical about the kind of post-facto analysis that Speed is doing here. We've all sat through art history lectures that show fanciful invisible hidden structures in old master paintings. I even endured one lecture where the presenter turned paintings upside down and discovered sinister faces hidden in the branches of the trees!

Without knowing what the artist thought, you never really know whether the structure exists solely in the mind of the analyst or truly in the artist who created the picture.

So I thought I'd finish up this post showing some examples of artists after Speed's time who were conscious of these devices, because they wrote about them.


Norman Rockwell using diagonals to convey action. In Rockwell on Rockwell: How I Make a Picture he talks about diagonals.

Andrew Loomis uses verticals to suggest dignity and reverence. He also talks about verticals and diagonals in Creative Illustration—but that's another book for another book club.

We'll continue with part 2 of the chapter, about curved lines, in next Friday's post. 

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Harold Speed (Dover ed.)

The Practice and Science of Drawing is available in various formats:

1. Inexpensive softcover edition from Dover, (by far the majority of you are reading it in this format)

2. Fully illustrated and formatted for Kindle.

3. Free online Archive.org edition.

4. Project Gutenberg version

Articles on Harold Speed in the Studio Magazine The Studio, Volume 15, "The Work of Harold Speed" by A. L. Baldry. (XV. No. 69. — December, 1898.) page 151.

and The Windsor Magazine, Volume 25, "The Art of Mr. Harold Speed" by Austin Chester, page 335. (thanks, अर्जुन)

GJ Book Club on Pinterest (Thanks, Carolyn Kasper)

New GJ Facebook page, credit Jenna Berry

Original blog post Announcing the GJ Book Club

GJ Book Club: Chapter 4: "Line Drawing"

On the GJ Book Club, we're studying Chapter 4, "Line Drawing," of Harold Speed's 1917 classic The Practice and Science of Drawing.

The following numbered paragraphs cite key points in italics, followed by a brief remark of my own. If you would like to respond to a specific point, please precede your comment by the corresponding number.

John White Alexander (American, 1856–1915) Oil on canvas; 52 1/4 x 63 5/8 in.

1. Attention to line can give a work an "innocence and imaginative appeal" that is often lost in work that is concentrating on "the more complete realization of later schools."

Harold Speed will give us a later chapter on the practicalities of line drawing, but for this short chapter he concentrates on the aesthetics of line. He associates line with the sense of touch, but also with more primitive and stylized perception, and that's the core of what he's exploring here. 

He makes reference to Botticelli and other early artists who used line predominantly. In the centuries that followed, chiaroscuro and form modeling came to dominate the thinking and made people forget about the power of line.

Artists in Asia were not as obsessed with chiaroscuro in the photographic / impressionist side of things. I was reading a book about the history of photography (Photography: The Definitive Visual History), and it said that when photographs were first introduced in Japan, people didn't like them because they thought they missed the essential truth of what they saw. Now, with the ubiquity of photos, we tend to regard a photograph as a true and complete representation of our vision, but people in Japan and China didn't think so.

2. The eye only sees what it is on the look-out for.

Speed makes this point only in passing, but it's something that I think about a lot. We see what we want to see. This was the theme of an episode in Dinotopia: The World Beneath (see previous post on Pareidolia and Apophenia).

Detail from Titian's "Three Ages of Man"

3. All through the work of the men who used this light and shade...the outline basis remained. Leonardo, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Titian, and the Venetians were all faithful to it as the means of holding their pictures together; although the Venetians, by fusing the edges of their outline masses, got very near the visual method to be introduced later by Velasquez.

Line and tonal modeling aren't mutually exclusive, nor must one use a hard edge throughout a picture to have a good sense of line. The Titian above combines a fine sense of line with a sophisticated feeling for edges.

4. The accumulation of the details of visual observation in art is liable eventually to obscure the main idea and disturb the larger sense of design. 

The problem, according to Speed, comes not only from losing a sense of the contour, but also adding so many small details and textures that the larger shapes are lost.

Speed's cautions about the late 19th century obsession with naturalism, and he points to a time in the academies when line drawing fell out of fashion. He says the use of the stump for blending charcoal added to the problem. Does someone out there know why Speed was so negative about the stump? He doesn't really explain his reasons for disliking it.

5. Art, like life, is apt to languish if it gets too far away from primitive conditions.

It's notable that the Fauvists and other neo-primitive movements were becoming active in Western art as he was writing this a hundred years ago. European and American artists were also appreciating the currents of art coming from China, Japan, and India.

Speed says that if you're going to study past movements, "to study the early rather than the late work of the different schools, so as to get in touch with the simple conditions of design on which good work is built."

6. No wonder a period of artistic dyspepsia is upon us.

Perhaps even truer now than it was in Speed's day!

Animation model sheet of Disney's Bambi by Milt Kahl

7. Line as contour vs. line of action

One last thought that I had in reading the chapter is that Speed seems to be talking about line mainly as the outer contour, but I think it's equally important to think of the line of action, the central gesture traveling through the center of all the forms. The great animators carried Speed's ideas forward into a whole new art form, and it is probably in the realm of animation that the art of line was most perfectly developed in the 20th century.

I look forward to your thoughts, and I enjoyed the discussion last week.

Harold Speed (Dover ed

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The Practice and Science of Drawing is available in various formats:
1. Inexpensive softcover edition from Dover, (by far the majority of you are reading it in this format)
2. Fully illustrated and formatted for Kindle.
3. Free online Archive.org edition.
4. Project Gutenberg version
Articles on Harold Speed in the Studio Magazine The Studio, Volume 15, "The Work of Harold Speed" by A. L. Baldry. (XV. No. 69. — December, 1898.) page 151.
and The Windsor Magazine, Volume 25, "The Art of Mr. Harold Speed" by Austin Chester, page 335. (thanks, अर्जुन)
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GJ Book Club Facebook page  (Thanks, Keita Hopkinson)
Pinterest (Thanks, Carolyn Kasper)

Overview of the blog series

Announcing the GJ Book Club

Chapter 1: Preface and Introduction

Chapter 2: Drawing

Chapter 3: Vision

Chapter 4: Line Drawing

Chapter 5: Mass Drawing

Chapter 6: Academic and Conventional

Chapter 7: The Study of Drawing

Chapter 8: Line Drawing, Practical

Chapter 9: Mass Drawing

Chapter 10: Rhythm

Chapter 11: Variety of Lines

Chapter 12: Curved Lines

Chapter 13: Variety of Mass

Chapter 14: Unity of Mass

Chapter 15: Balance

Chapter 16: Proportion

Chapter 17: Portrait Drawing

Chapter 18: Visual Memory

Chapter 19: Procedure

Chapter 20: Materials

A Composition by Robert Fawcett

Have a look at this picture, and try to self-monitor how you experience it.

The editors of the Famous Artists Course included this illustration by Robert Fawcett (1903-1967) along with an explanatory diagram to demonstrate some design principles. They say: "The scroll is the important point of interest in this picture. Robert Fawcett has skillfully used lines to direct our eye to it. The line formed by the arm of the foreground figure draws our attention almost irresistibly across the upper right of the picture, down to the scroll, and finally to the head of the king. Notice how we are forced to look back and forth from the king's head to the scroll."

I think it's a successful composition, but I don't agree with their analysis of why it works. To me the driving force of the picture's abstract design is the contrast between clutter and emptiness. At first I saw the busy detail surrounding the blank space, and I thought the empty space was a 2D shape left for design reasons.

A split second later, I realized that it was a piece of paper being held up by a soldier in chain mail, and that I was looking at the back of the paper. Once I saw the angry face of the seated figure, and I understood that he was a king, it dawned on me that he was being faced with a challenge by the knight, perhaps showing the Magna Carta to King John.

With the story in mind, my eyes scanned the picture driven by its human premise. I looked at the ecclesiastical figure, whose characterization isn't very well developed. I checked out the face of the soldier, and couldn't get much from him either. My eye then went to the various weapons on display to see if there was a foreshadowing of violent action.

Although I'd need to see an eye-tracking scanpath study to be certain, I'm quite sure my eyes never followed the pathways diagrammed by the FAC's editors, and I never spent much time in parts of the picture that had no story purpose.

My point is that I don't believe it when composition teachers suggest that my eyes are passively moving through a picture, led purely by design considerations. Design does play a role, but if there are faces and a human story, the viewer is operating on a much higher and more active level.

Your experience of the picture may have been totally different from mine, and I'd be interested to hear from you in the comments.
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Books: 
Robert Fawcett: The Illustrator's Illustrator
Famous Artists Course

Previously on GJ: Eyetracking and Composition
Eyetracking and Composition, part 1
Eyetracking and Composition, part 2
Eyetracking and Composition part 3

Book Review: "Graphic LA" by Robh Ruppel

At CTN Animation Expo I bought a copy of Robh Ruppel's new art book Graphic L.A., and want to share it with you.

Robh is one of those rare artists whose work spans imaginative and observational painting. He has worked as a designer for video games and films, and has taught at Art Center. He has also been a leader in digital plein-air painting.

While the book contains some landscapes, the bulk of the images are urban scenes. What I like most about his work is his ability to find beauty in commonplace scenes.

The book includes a mix of finished paintings, thumbnail sketches and step-by-step sequences. The sketches are in tone, most often in marker, while the colored finished paintings appear to be all digital.  

Many of the paintings have evocative lighting ideas that go beyond what photos can capture.

Accompanying the images are helpful chunks of advice, such as "Reduce, refine, interpret." Before he commences a painting, he always explores the possibilities of the subject in two or three tones. "Good value design," he says, "is the clear simple arrangement of a few tones."

He says, "Searching out the composition should take as long as rendering the image. Ultimately, the staging is what tells the story."

The book is 144 pages, about 8x8 inches.

Book: Graphic L.A. by Robh Ruppel