The Simple Secret to Better Painting by Greg Albert inspires and teaches me something every time I pick it up. This book comes home from the public library every now and then so that I can find a new idea in it--or remind myself of helpful ideas that are easy to forget as I paint. Today's post is rewritten from an entry I made in 2013. This super book came to mind today as I drove to the library, so I picked it up while I was there and decided to post about its wisdom again for new readers--and longtime readers as well.
Greg Albert's "simple secret" is the wonderful lesson of variety within balance, which I consider a metaphor for a meaningful life as well as a basic principle for painting and other visual arts. His simple secret, which he calls the one central rule for design is: "Never make any two intervals the same." There is a wealth of valuable information contained in his applications of this rule. If you have any interest in the visual arts or in any facet of design, this book is worth reading and rereading.
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| "Sea Oats" |
Mr. Albert uses painting examples to expand his simple rule to intervals of distance, shape, tonal value, color, and more--no sort of interval should be the same, he maintains. This advice is helpful at all stages of a creative process. Here's an example. One of my recurring mistakes is to paint too much in mid-tone values--without fully realizing it along the way--rather than to include enough areas of more intense dark and very light values to balance the mid-tones.
In my more recent paintings, I started with a tonal value sketch, but sometimes still ended up with insufficient contrast. During my revision process, the value range often has needed to be extended. Mr. Albert's rule is a reminder to include a broader value range as well as to make sure that the areas (or "intervals") of dark, light, and mid-tone should not be the same in overall size. A previous post about a painting called "Sea Oats" shows one example of revision that included adding some very light clouds and brightening light areas on a dune as well as deepening just a few very dark highlights.
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| Hanna Park reference photo |
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| "Hanna Park Heron" |
Another painting that required some added interval variety was "Hanna Park Heron" (the colors in the photo of the painting are less intense than in the actual painting), shown here with the original reference photo (more about this painting was posted earlier also). Notice how the reference photo's background vegetation repeats types of plants, shapes, colors, and sizes equally--not ideal for artistic composition. Then, notice the additions of the two light grey dead trees to change that sameness and to provide strong verticals across from the large palm trunk. You will be able to spot other changes from the reference photo and to consider my possible reasons for them.
Question of the day: What does an idea like "variety in balance" bring to mind for you?
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