I have a question for you: why do emerging artists give so little attention to good composing? That’s the question that has been driving my teaching for several decades.
The older I become, the more convinced I am that composing is the heartbeat of painting. It is not something we do at the beginning and then forget about. It begins with the moment we select a subject and continues until the last brushstroke.
Just as composers of music use the elements of sound, painters use the elements of vision. Those seven little words we use to label our visual elements might appear to be nouns, but they become verbs with the first stroke of the brush. That is why I call this post the “behavior” of our visual elements. These behaviors create our composition. They are what make a painting work.
While we are painting, if we repeat a color, it is now repeating. That is a behavior. If we create a value contrast, then it is contrasting. That is a behavior. If we gradate a value, the variations in that gradation are moving from one value to another. That is a behavior.
Several years back, for this newsletter, I did a series on the Language of the Visual Elements. During the month of February, I will refurbish that series into a new series which I will call the Behavior of Visual Elements. It’s going to be fun!
Stay tuned!
Looking forward to the Art Thoughts on the behavior of the elements - This is relatively new thinking to me!
Looking forward to the new series!