March 2022

It is a pivotal time for me in my art pursuits. Developing an identifiable and desirable style and growing my skills in art fundamentals are undoubtedly the KEYS to my future success. My style will develop on its own through listening to my inner voice and creating a larger body of work while the skills take work and lots of it: work on basic drawing skills, mastering values relationships, principles of composition, brushwork and color mastery through color accuracy, principles of temperature and color harmony…

I am taking online classes now from the Master of Composition: Ian Roberts. I thought I’d share and document what I am learning. While the elements that create a successful composition are so varied that they cannot be cleanly laid out in a simple formula, Ian teaches his method as a great first step to learn from and build upon. His method is all about creating shapes that form an underlying structure for the final work. The shapes take the form of value masses which are essentially shapes of a single value or, at least within which there is minimal value variation. He is always looking for a vertical line that intersects with a horizontal line in an area of high contrast that serves as the center of interest for the painting. Since he most often works in landscapes, horizontal bands of natural elements intersect with roads, rivers, paths, fences, trees or poles. The landscape or other subjects may be studied for these elements and tools such as cropping and simplification may be used to reduce the scene to just those elements that support the intended composition. Ian teaches a way to reduce the value masses observed in nature to simplified geometric shapes in order to visualize the compositional structure. This trains one’s eye to see a scene as an arrangement of shapes. It has been a fun and very useful series of exercises that I highly recommend.

Below you will see the way a scene is blocked out with careful attention to the value relationships of the masses. See if you can find the center of interest (focal point) and see if you can appreciate how the arrangement of other elements lead your eye to that focal point. Carrying this concept forward into a final drawing or painting is the challenge and it is learned through repetition of the process in repeated exercises. The course continues with a 30 day challenge to the student to draw a new value study from life or from a photo daily for 30 days. I’m going to give this my very best effort.

Lastly, my attempt at a follow through to an oil painting. The cropping is my own choice from a photograph with the intention to have all the elements simplified to a geometric abstract structure and have those elements direct the viewer deeper into the picture plane.