Water provides endless possibilities for design in landscape painting. Today I want to show you several paintings by the British landscape painter Edward Seago (1910-1974) as examples of how the reflections themselves can be used to create and establish the composition. The important thing to remember here is that these paintings were designed, not found. […]
Notan–Not Just Black and White
Notan is a Japanese word for light-dark and consists of a two value arrangement of shapes. It can be used as a tool to define and simplify shape and value patterns. So it may seem counterintuitive to say that Notan is not about light and dark. But it’s true. Notan is an exercise in simplification and […]
Speed of the Line and Stoppers
“Speed of the line” is a concept that plays an important part in landscape design. Often we see strong diagonals at work in Nature- a mountain, a line of trees, or even a roofline of a building. The more steep and uninterrupted that line is, the “faster” it moves the eye- and often it will […]
Four Value Studies and Notan
Notan is a Japanese word for light-dark, and consists of a two value arrangement of shapes. It can be used to define and simplify shape and value patterns. Notan (two values) and four value designs are not based on how we actually see the world; they are constructs that we can use to see and […]
Visual Thinking
Recently a friend of mine who is a writer said to me “writing is thinking.” What she meant is that as we write we often discover the internal structure of what was previously a collection of random ideas and as a result locate the real intention of our work through the act of doing it. The […]
Seeing in Shapes
Learning to see the large shapes in Nature as opposed to all the little details is an essential skill in painting and particularly in landscape painting where Nature presents us with, as John Carlson calls it, “an overloaded property room”. Unless we are able to reduce the visual clutter we see to big simple shapes, […]