Eliminating the Unnecessary

Andy Walker
Jul 2, 2023
3 min read

The abstract- expressionist painter Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) once wrote: “The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.“

Now, I guess that many of us would agree that simplification is something we want to achieve in our painting. Perhaps you paint in a very detailed way, but even then you need a simplified tonal structure and a simple composition undergirding your painting to give it strength.

But perhaps you want to paint more loosely, in a painterly style that allows for more expression. I think this quote gives us the key to do so. We need to “eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak“.

What is unnecessary?

Or, to put it the other way – What is necessary? What needs to speak?

Simply put, this is the reason you want to paint a certain motif in the first place. It means identifying what it is that caught your eye. Was it the decoration on a piece of pottery, the colours of roses, the shape of a building, or the light and shadows on the road? In every scene there is a reason why you want to record it in paint. It might be something fleeting – like clouds scudding across the sky. Or it may be eternal – like the shape of a mountain ridge.

This is the Necessary which needs to be painted. Everything else becomes Less Necessary or even Completely Unnecessary. It’s your decision what to put in and what to leave out, what to enhance and what to subdue. We are not slaves to a photo or to the scene in front of us. Simplification helps the viewer to know a little more about us as artists as we are reducing the world to the one thing that we think is important. We are putting something of ourselves into the picture every time we paint.

Here’s an example

A few weeks ago I was walking along the beach and saw this scene that I wanted to paint. Why did I want to paint it? It doesn’t look that exciting in the photo! Well, the photo doesn’t do it justice, because what caught my eye was the light on the road leading to the distant island in the sea. It was too hot to stand and paint right there, and there was no shade around, so I snapped the photo to remind me of what I had seen.

Now, the photo contains too much information, so I need to cut out the unnecessary. I don’t need the buildings, lamp-posts, all the road and beach that take up the foreground and so on. Let’s crop it in a bit…

That’s better! Now it’s time for a bit more editing to get to the necessary so it can speak. I used a 3B pencil to do a very simplified notan study.

And here is the finished painting in water mixable oils.

I tried to eliminate all the unnecessary details to draw the viewer to the island that became my focal point. Even though the trees are reasonably fussy they do not detract from the view of the island, rather they frame it and help us to focus on it. As promised in the video below, here’s my list of materials (also cutting out all the unnecessary!)

8¨x 10¨ 3mm thick MDF board coated in gesso and toned salmon pink.
Cobra water-mixable oil paints – ultramarine blue, cerulean blue, lemon yellow, yellow ochre, pyrrole red, titanium white.
Rosemary & Co. brushes – #4 ivory long flat and #4 ivory rigger