• Special message Join us tomorrow (Sunday, February 19) at 2 pm. (Eastern) for our monthly YouTube chat.
The topic will be Merging Shapes. We will explore how we can place details in our paintings without making them too busy or taking attention away from the center of interest. By the way, all our chats are recorded and available to watch when you click LIVE in the menu on our YouTube Channel Page. We've all experienced a room full of loud chatting people. What's annoying is trying to hear a single speaker among all that cacophony. Our ears are conditioned to struggle to hear clarity. Our eyes want to see clarity, too, and painters can capitalize on that. Too many details with equal emphasis will cause visual cacophony. Looking at this photo longer than a couple of seconds makes us dizzy. Most likely your eyes will keep dropping down to the lower part of the wheel where there's more visual clarity. A scene like the one above could make a wonderful reference for a painting, but if all those details are included at the same degree of contrast we see here, then most likely visual cacophony will result.
There are several ways to include those, however, without the cacophony. One of those is to reduce the degree of value contrast. But, if we reduce all those contrasts, we
could come up with an unintended result--boredom replacing cacophony-- like this: the eye doesn't know where to look, but really doesn't care. If we reduce the contrast without giving consideration to how the eye will respond, then only that area of stronger contrast will get attention. The rest of the composition becomes mostly insignificant. We don't want that
either. But if we control the contrast with consideration to the eye's response, we can create a path for the eye to follow, potentially one that enables all areas to participate in that visual
journey. All painters have the potential for expressing their response to any subject so that the viewer can easily receive its visual message, just by getting the visual elements to work together, regardless of what they are
describing. That's what I wish people would mean when they ask "How did you do that?" Enjoy weekend of new discoveries! 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
You can access the archive of all my newsletters (as well as the Quick Tips and other stuff) at any time by going HERE.
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