Visual paths are at the heart of every good painting. They work very much like a jazz musician playing within and around a melody. The listener's ear is entertained by whatever the
musician is doing, but the tune is guiding what happens. Sometimes, not even a note of the melody will be played in a passage, but within the improvisation we know it's there. The viewer's eye is doing a similar kind of movement within a visual path.
Even though a lot of the paintings throughout history have followed one of the traditional paths, not unlike the jazz musician often the painter uses a spontaneous path that doesn't follow a traditional pattern. The
objectives of all paths are to keep the viewer's eye moving throughout the painting, and to have all the space of the painting contributing to the entire work.
The circle and C path keep the eye moving in a circular or C pattern. The movement might be clockwise or counter clockwise, or in a horseshoe pattern with the curve at either
the bottom or top, but the path takes a variation of curvilinear motion, guided by how one of the visual elements is placed and by what it is doing.
Claude Monet uses the hue yellow-orange (also called gold) to guide the eye in his painting, The Spring in Argentuil.
Notice how your eyes respond when I take away a lot of that gold on the left. In this version (after I hashed it), the gold is playing a large role in the right
half, but not much on the left. Your eye is probably not as interested in the left side anymore. The circular path has shrunk to only a portion of the painting. Although the moderate value contrast and the isolation of those distant trees on the left do get some attention, but they don't belong to the whole painting like they do when they include the gold.
Look what happens when I take even more of the gold color from that half of the painting.
That one change now splits the painting in half. We no longer have that circular movement, nor do the golds play any important role other than describe those
trees.
In this Monet painting, it is the repetition and location of color that is playing the role of guiding the eye. But color is not the only element that can create a
path. Painters also create paths with value contrast, value gradation, repeated textures, repeated kinds of shapes, strong directional lines, gradation of sizes, just for starters.
Take a trip over to the website of contemporary painter, Scott Christensen HERE. Browse through his
work and locate paintings where he has used some sort of circular path. To find the path, just pay attention to how your eyes are moving around the painting, and which behavior of the elements is causing that.
During my Language of Painting series, I explained the role of our visual elements. If you'd like to review those roles to better understand the behavior of elements, here are the links to each of those
discussions: Color --Value -- Shape -- Texture -- Size -- Line and Direction
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