"Your cyber source for artist news and education!" © 1998, 1999, WetCanvas!

GENESIS OF A COMPLEX PAINTING: 2 Soon I began to think about middle distance. In this painting the middle distance is everything, It contains the landscape transitions and all the sumptuous detail. At this stage I decided to finalise my structure. The two horizontal blue lines will represent the foreground middle distance and the background (Fig 6). The points at which the two short blue lines intersect the diagonals will be where the final painting will be folded and divided into its three parts. The yellow diagonals are to remind me to continually emphasize these as I develop the painting. In design terms they will unify the whole. (see lesson on design and proportion) Fig 6.  I have put certain items in the middle distance even I have forgotten. There are owls and giraffes, sheep and geese a palace and an observatory. I always try to crowd and detail the middle distance in my large paintings. It is mischevious and fun - and in this case provides a counterpoint for those with gloomy dispositions.

I wanted an Icarus like figure to represent ambition (my sense of humour got the better of me and I paired him with a wingless chicken.- a creature that could once fly but had lost the urge) I needed a cliff or ramparts or something from which he could launch himself. A terrace suggested itself. This would give me the platform I needed but it would move the table and people outdoors into a Mediterranean picnic like atmosphere? I liked the idea. I also liked the idea of an abundance of food as a metaphor to the abundance of activity.  The difficulty was with landscape and joining. On one side of the painting I needed a cliff but I also needed to somehow join the foreground to the developing middle distance. The solution was a perspective sleigh of hand - to create an alpine-like road "S" bend.  I decided to use the winged figure to join the two light areas of the terrace wall and the middle distance hill thus creating maximum contrast in the abyss. The distant figures waiting for the ship and the white ibis would give scale and the transitional link with the past I wanted.  Things were assuming a natural order but now I needed to 'capture the eye'.  To accomplish this I tried to use the maximum contrast areas (chiaroscuro) and areas of major interest in two ways. One to create a zig-zag and the other an ellipse (Fig 8). The point to remember is that the directions for the eye must either be continuous (as with the ellipse) or they must start and end on an edge of the painting (as with the zigzag).  Fig 8.  The ellipse also gave me the perfect vehicle to evolve my themes on architecture, transportation and circular time. I also wanted a continuous physical path from the past to the people around the table then a break, the path leading off to the left representing the dislocation caused by the industrial revolution, then to emerge into the mechanical functionality of the late twentieth century. I decide to pack the picture with metaphor description and meaning, to describe the evolution of the human organism on earth, achievement and failure, art and science, and singular restless ambition combined with humour and the need to socialise.  [ Lesson Index ] [ Previous Lesson ] [ Next Lesson ]