I hope you'll join me tomorrow, September 19, at 2 p.m. EASTERN for our Monthly YouTube Live Chat. The topic will be Getting Good Balance in Your
Paintings.
This is the last entry of my Balance series. Last week, I listed for you with examples major characteristics that give visual weight to images. If you
want to review all my posts, you can find them in the Archives linked at the bottom of this email.
IT TAKES ONLY THREE THINGS
In the long run, good visual balance requires only three things: An axis, an edge on either side of the axis, and placement
of images so that the painting has equilibrium. Since balance is a matter of perception, the artist's job is to build an awareness of the characteristics that cause weight. It might help if we pinpoint that visual weight is caused by things that pull the eye to them.
Physically, when do we feel most balanced? Is it not when we're either standing up or lying down? That tells us that the
strongest balancing tools we have to work with are horizontals and verticals. All other characteristics pull weight, but both horizontals and verticals stabilize weight.
The most basic scale itself, whether normal or steelyard, is based on the interaction between horizontal and vertical. The axis is vertical, the
cross-beam is horizontal.
In this painting by John Singer Sargent, we can see how he has used horizontals and verticals as the main stabilizing tools. So much repetition of both the
horizontal and the vertical is managed by the degree of emphasis he used.
I've used thick lines to show the overall emphasis, and thinner lines to show how many he used. Notice how the painting feels balanced even though there is an accumulation of heavily weighted junk at the bottom and multiple textures throughout the piece.
Of all the principles we use as tools to compose our paintings, balance is the most universal and most natural to our human and spiritual
natures. In the long run, each of us has an inborn sense of balance. It's something artists do automatically, often without knowing why.
But like all principles that govern our universe, it doesn't hurt to analyze what makes it work. In fact, it's the result of that kind of analyzing from which many of our greatest
works of art have evolved.
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