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 […]
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, […]
Deconstructing Carlson
As we all know, John F. Carlson (1875-1947) is the author of the ‘bible’ of landscape painting, Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Painting. As might be expected, a study of Carlson’s work can be extremely enlightening! This is one of my favorite Carlson paintings and a great example of his mature style and larger finished works. […]
A Composition Lesson from Corot
A View of Volterra Corot (click for larger view) As landscape painters, one of our main tasks in composing is to get our viewers into the painting and gracefully out of it. The creation of entrances and exits requires that the viewer move easily and at the appropriate speed through the painting as well. No […]
Designing a Sky
Skies are just like other elements of the landscape- as artists we need to impose our own idea of design on the raw materials Nature provides. In this post we’ll focus on how weight, balance, asymmetry, movement, and edges can help us design our skies (and anything else for that matter). This painting is by […]