Late FallMarsh, 8x10", oil on panel, by Jeffrey Smith
When I was a little kid, and I’d get out my Crayolas to draw some trees, I kept things simple. A straight, brown column for a trunk and a tuft of green for the leaves. Maybe a cloud or a rainbow was added to ensure that I had used every color in the box, but that was it. My drawing was done.
Then I got older and started to climb trees. I realized that they had branches. It was way more than just a trunk and a green scribble. So I started including some branches in my drawings. The problem was that I didn’t understand how to ‘end’ the tree in a picture. Every drawing that I produced in that period had a straight trunk, branches, and some small clumps of green leaves. I just kept the tree going until it hit the edge of the paper. And that was that. Picture’s done.
Painting outside after the leaves had fallen would have helped me as a young artist to figure out what to do with those trees. It would have given me an idea of how the branches attach to the trunk. Or what happens to the branches as they grow out from the trunk? And most importantly, painting outside after the leaves have passed would have given me a view into the anatomy of trees, that is, the skeleton that gives the tree it’s shape–the armature that gives the whole thing a gesture.
gesture line drawn in with thin paint
I decided to start this painting with the gesture of the central clump of trees. Everything in the natural world has a gesture to it. A ‘way’ that the trunk grows. A very specific shape to it all.
When I was in school at The Atelier, a portrait or a figure painting would almost always start with getting a sense of the underlying gesture. I would ask myself questions like, “How is the model standing? How is the weight divided between her feet? Is his head tilted?”
Questions I might ask myself while staring at a plein air painting subject:
- Compared to a vertical line, is this tree leaning?
- Are all the trees in this clump leaning in the same direction?
- Are all of these trees leaning at the same angle?
- Is the tree trunk relatively straight, or does the angle change at a certain point?
- Is the tree going to fit entirely on the canvas? If not, where will it cross over the edge?
- Where does the shape start, and where does it end?
- Does standing next to this tall, thin tree make me look fat in these pants?
Regardless of subject matter, I have been most successful with paintings that began with taking the time to draw out a strong gesture.
All of that is not to say that there was anything wrong with the simple brown trunks and green scribbles that I started with when I was a kid. A painting should begin with a simplified, general shape. At the starting point in the painting process, you should be thinking abstract. As you’re applying paint, think about what your subject and its surroundings would look like if you were cutting the shapes out of colored paper. The detail is not there, but even at these early stages, seeking out the gesture or specifics of a shape is what conveys the character of the subject.
My childhood tress all looked alike. I had created an idea in my head about how to draw a tree. My trees grew branches as I moved on to a new idea about how to draw a tree based on my experience of climbing them. Now as I paint, my experience of climbing gives way to specific shapes and dynamic gestures gleamed from direct observation of trees out in the natural world.
Tagged as:
gesture,
landscape painting,
plein air painting,
seasons,
Trees
First Touches of Fall, 8x10", oil on panel by Jeffrey Smith
One of the great aspects of living in Minnesota is the drama of all four seasons. It seems like seasons happen all at once here. It’s suddenly spring, or it’s suddenly winter. But in reality, when you finally take a moment to stop and look around, change happens very gradually, over a period of time. We ease from one season into the next. I had my moment to stop and look around when painting First Touches of Fall.
On the day that I was out, things in the Minnesota River Valley were still, for the most part, in summer mode. Lots of green, a few wild flowers, plenty of birds. But when you really dug into the scene and looked a bit closer, the touches of autumn had started to appear. The color of the green foliage was drifting to yellow. The grasses were becoming shades of brown. A few of the early adapters amongst the trees had even started to enter the realm of orange.
Minnesota River Valley, Plein air set up
On a personal note, this was the first outdoor painting trip where I actually pulled over on the side of the road to paint. It’s one of those things that I’ve heard of people doing…driving around, scouting for a spot to paint, and then just parking the car on the side of the road to set up their easel. I think when I was much younger, I classified this as one of those things that I would expect a ‘REAL artist’ to do. Having done it once now, I can report back that it really was a great time and I think I did feel like a real artist. I got a kick out of watching people drive by, slow the car down, and strain to try and get a glimpse at what I was doing. I figured the REAL artist part came in when a couple of cars drove by extremely slowly four or five times.
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The great-big super-important if-you-only-remember-one-thing-about-composition rule.
So what’s the rule? Never make any two intervals the same. That’s it. Just do that and your paintings will be improved instantly!
Okay. But what does that mean? It’s all about variety. Variety is what keeps the painting visually interesting. Look at the space between any two shapes. The distance between those visual shapes should be different than the amount of space between any other visual shapes. This is the interval. It helps to think of your painting in very abstract terms. You’re not dealing with trees and grasses and rivers anymore. We’re talking about green shape, brown shape, light blue shape. The size of the interval between all of those shapes should be different.
Lessons Learned and the Spice of Life
So on to my “lesson learned” for this painting. First Touches of Fall gives ample opportunity to play with intervals in composition. Vertically speaking you have the sky, distant hills, river, tree line, and the foreground. All of these shapes could really be placed almost anywhere in the painting, and be almost any size. The trick when plotting out a composition is to decide what is going to be the dominant thing in this particular painting, and then doing everything you can to support that feeling of dominance.
Let’s think about it in terms of the aforementioned great-big-super-composition rule. My challenge as a painter was to show the dynamic nature of the sky while keeping the rest of the painting visually interesting and playing a part in the story of the painting. I took more than half of the canvas to show the sky. But to keep it from being boring, I was very conscious not to divide my canvas in half. Comparing the height of the grass shape from top to bottom, it’s less than the height of the tree line. I’ve kept the size of the distant hills larger than the size of the river, but smaller than the tree line. No two intervals or shapes should be the same size.
Now take a look at the trees. The trees help to give a sense of scale to the composition. As a viewer, you can judge the majesty and movement in the sky by comparing and contrasting it with the trees. But get ready, because here comes that variety thing again. The trees are shapes just like everything else. And just like everything else, it is important to vary the shapes of the trees and the intervals between the them. That’s what allows your eye to go in and wander. If the shapes become too much the same, you lose the rhythm that an interesting shape creates, and your eye gets stuck. Your eye wants to find patterns; it is seeking out and focusing on those things that are the same.
The idea is to keep the eye interested enough to move around the painting. The goal as an artist is to decide where you want the viewer’s eye to go, and do everything you can to guide it there.
Tagged as:
art,
art instruction,
composition,
landscape painting,
Minnesota River,
Painting,
plein air paintng
