Painters Who Compose

Since my last post, I taught a workshop about marine painting, had an opening for a two-man show at Hartford Fine Art and I also made a drive to Maryland to paint a demo for the Mid Atlantic Plein Air Painters Association for their annual meeting. What a great group they are. The demo went well and it was fun to see everybody. I got to see artists that I know and meet new people. It was fun talking with some of the artists who will be participating in my workshop that I am doing for MAPAPA in Snow Hill Maryland in mid April. It was also nice to get a little bit of Spring while I was there. Pam came with me and we had a wonderful weekend. We also visited our daughter Jen at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.


As promised in my last post, here are some examples of work by other painters along with some thoughts on how they composed them. This is a great thing to do with painters who you greatly admire. It is another way to open up your mind to the myriad of possibilities when it comes to composition. I'm still an avid believer that many good paintings can be made better with more thought given to composition. I include myself in this idea. Often times, I am excited by a subject and go with that first idea, but I always end up with a stronger painting if I take the time to make a few thumbnails first. I recommend coming up with a good plan first and then jumping into painting. Gruppe would always say that if students spent more time planning and drawing their subject, they would get better results. Charles Movalli once told me that when drawing in his big shapes,  Gruppe would sometimes wipe out and reinstate an object even if he changed the placement by only a quarter of an inch to get the composition to work correctly. Now that's planning!

First let's look at some paintings by Edgar Payne. As far as I am concerned, he wrote the best book on the subject. If you spend a year reading this book, you will still be learning new things from it. It's the kind of book that is best digested in small amounts.

Here is a link. Composition of Outdoor Painting

If  you click on the pics, you will get a larger image and the text will be more readable. In my workshop, I projected these images (and many more) onto a large screen and discussed them individually with all the students. It got them thinking about how they were going to compose their own paintings.

Now let's look at some paintings by Gruppe. Emile Gruppe was a master painter and a master Exaggerator. If you remember only one thing from this post, let it be this. 'Learn to Exaggerate' There is a Gruppe saying that goes like this. 'Overstate & Understate, don't ever tell the truth!'

Another note on the above painting. Gruppe REALLY wants the viewers eye to be directed to the main ship in this painting and to the smaller dories. He even went so far as to lean the buildings on the right of the canvas towards the boats! Talk about professional exaggeration! This serves the purpose of leading the eye but also helps to explain how STRAIGHT and TALL the masts of the ship are. Gruppe was also a master of explaining one thing for the sake of the other. Here he has the large ship, the medium dory and the small dinghy. The BIG explains the little and vice versa. But also notice how he knew when he had a good thing and didn't kill the effect. Imagine the building on the left leaning in towards the boats. We would feel like the world was coming to an end!

The Process of Doing

My latest weekend workshop here in my studio was titled simply 'Composition'. When we think about 'one word' definitions for the word and what it really means for the painter, we generally come up with things like 'structure', 'design', 'placement', 'organization'.  When I asked my students what words came to their mind, these were their answers.

When I looked up the actual definition of the word, the dictionary tells us that for an artist, the word 'composition' means, the act of combining parts or elements to form a whole. This lead me to looking up the word 'act', which said simply, the process of doing. Then I looked up the word 'process' and found this definition. A systematic series of actions directed to some end. And the word 'system' stated that it was an assemblage or combination of things or parts forming a complex or unitary whole.

It gets pretty interesting playing this word game.

So here's my point. A good composition for an artist requires somewhat of a systematic approach to the planning of it. And here's another point. Generally when you mention the word 'systematic' to a painter, their face scrunches up and they want to run away from the very thought of the idea! They think that using any type of 'system' will surely squelch their creative self. I'm more in line to believe that using this approach actually opens up the mind to being more creative and affords the painter with an opportunity to see things in new ways and to be inventive and clever. The 'process of doing' can be fun!

In my workshop, we looked at dozens of well composed landscape paintings by artists like Emile Gruppe, Aldro Hibbard, Paul Strisik, Carl Peters, Anthony Thieme, John Folinsbee, Harry Leith Ross, Edgar Payne and more. What becomes apparent when you look at the work by these painters, is that while they were alive and working, every one of them put an effort into making compositions that were strong. They didn't just make an okay plan, they used their brain and they made an exceptional one!

Herein lies a question that we as painters have to ask ourselves...   ...Am I really planning my compositions or just kind of winging it???  and...  Did I answer that question honestly or not !!!

These painters made use of the 'Steelyard' idea. They made use of the 'L', the 'S' and the 'C'. They made 'Circular' compositions, they made 'Radial' compositions, they used 'Pattern' and 'Repeating Shapes', the '3 Spot', and 'Alternating Bands'. They composed within a 'Triangle', they thought about the 'Tunnel', the 'Group Mass', the 'Cross' and more. In their paintings, they looked at the subject and arranged elements with one of these compositional ideas as a main plan and also made use of other ideas within that main idea to make a more complex one.

The participants in this workshop have also been attending my wife Pam's Monday morning painting class.  They have been working on painting from the still life. This afforded me the opportunity to gear the workshop towards both still-life and landscape composition. For Saturday morning, along with looking at strong compositions and talking about them, I took 3 found objects and composed and drew the elements into different types of compositional ideas so that they could see the process firsthand. When I say 'found' objects, I really mean just that. I got the idea of having them first see the compositional ideas thought-out with still life objects, at the start of the workshop when I realized they were all in the Monday morning class. I went into the kitchen and grabbed three items of different shapes and sizes. In this case, it was a bunch of bananas, a coffee cup and a bottle of ibuprofen!

Here is what I did.

This next image shows my thought process of trying to make a strong composition from the photo. If I was on site I would put these ideas down in a sketch book and work from the best one. Outside, I will usually make 4 to 6 small rectangles in a sketch book and write down different compositional names under each rectangle and see if I can make the subject fit into each particular format. Doing this opens up the mind to many possibilities and keeps me from getting stale or making the same type of composition over and over again.

I decided on painting the diagonal composition for my 30 minute demo on Sunday morning. When I was first doing the thumbnail sketches above, it was difficult trying to fit this subject into a steelyard composition but it worked out well and would have made a good composition for a painting. The Radial design would have worked too. The diagonal won out in the end. I really liked the simple movement of it.

In my next post, I will show examples of the different painters we looked at for our slideshow.