Eliminating the Unnecessary

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!)

1. 8¨x 10¨ 3mm thick MDF board coated in gesso and toned salmon pink.

2. Cobra water-mixable oil paints – ultramarine blue, cerulean blue, lemon yellow, yellow ochre, pyrrole red, titanium white.

3. Rosemary & Co. brushes – #4 ivory long flat and #4 ivory rigger

Watch me paint this picture

(in just over 8 minutes)

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Creating colour by deconstructing grey

I had a wonderful opportunity to get outdoors and paint today as I’ve been based for a few days down at the coast. The weather is great – warm and just a bit breezy, but not so much that your easel is blown away, and the sea is tussled by small waves and white breakers.

So I packed my oil painting gear and headed off to the clifftops to try and capture the sea, surf, rocks and cliffs that always make for a great subject. But when I got there I discovered that even though the sun was out, the colour of the cliffs was just a muted grey-brown.

Now, the more I paint the more I discover that I am a colour man. I like colour. I struggle to paint muted pictures. Perhaps this is because I live in Spain on the Mediterranean coast where the light is bright and the colours (generally) glow. Perhaps it is just my style. Whatever it is I love colour and want my paintings to be colourful.

So, what to do about those dull cliffs?

All greys are composed of primary colours mixed together to one degree or another, so why not deconstruct the grey into its primary parts and paint with those? That’s what I chose to do, using ultramarine blue, pyrrole red and yellow ochre as my three main primaries.

Here I’m about half way through with much of the painting blocked in. The foreground is still to go. I’m painting on a warm red underpainting which shows through in patches and especially at the moment in the foreground.

The finished painting.

Can you see how I have upped the colour? You may say that it is “unrealistic”, but it makes for a much more interesting painting, and these colours really are there although hidden in the grey. I’ve just set them free!

The finished painting

It’s a beautiful day – water mixable oil on panel 27 X 22cm

I hope you have found this of interest. Please comment and/or like this post. I’d really appreciate that!

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Get into the O-zone – How to make compelling pictures

I’ve recently written a series of articles for the Leisure Painter magazine in the UK on the subject of composition, and these have really got me thinking much more about the way we design our pictures.

I’ve come to realise that composition is king when it comes to holding a viewers attention. Yes, value and colour are all important, but the structure of a painting – what holds it together and keeps the viewer engaged – is the compositional element. Often it is not seen, just like the skeleton that gives us form and structure, but without this we would just be a blob. Likewise, without the backbone of a good composition, our paintings can become mere blobs.

The power of the O-zone

Take a look at these masterful and beautiful paintings by Frank Gascoigne Heath (1873-1936) . What makes them so good? You will have guessed by now. The composition.

Both paintings use the idea of a circle – the O. And the artist leads you around the picture and around the picture and around the picture. You stay within the painting, hooked and finding more and more to look at. And while you are there you are not looking at someone else’s painting. That’s very cunning. Let me show you how he does it.

Here’s a delightful painting called “A Summer Afternoon” painted around 1925. Can you see the O-zone here that gives it it’s structure? One of the first things you see is the face of the standing girl on the left, whose hat just touches the skyline. (This change in colour which forms the skyline stops the viewer crossing the sea and just keeping on going, so exiting the paint at the top. Imagine the painting without it and you will see what I mean. It’s a simple device, but it works so well as a “stop”). Our eye then travels down the girls body from her head to her feet and then we naturally cross over to look at the seated girl. From there we are lead by the pathway and the dark edge of the cliff to the upstanding rocks at the end of the headland. Heath has then added in some tiny boats in the sea. Can you see why he has done this? They lead us in a curve back towards the head of the first girl, and so we close the circle. Even the dark shape in the bottom right corner forms a part of the circle, and the rather strange foliage around the standing girl’s legs is there for a reason as this also softens the O shape. Finally the rock in the sea to her left is also there for a reason – put your thumb over it and see what a difference it makes to the whole composition. Everything in this painting is there for a specific reason. None of this painting has been left to chance, everything has been carefully planned.

Another example

To see that this wasn’t just a one-off by this artist, let’s look at another of his works that has a similar structure. This one is called “Farmyard Talk”. Can you see the O that keeps us in the picture?

So why not use this powerful compositional device in your next painting? Feel free to make changes to the shapes, colours, tonal values, the foliage, people etc.., even adding boats or chickens or anything else you might want to form your O-zone. The aim is to keep the viewer in the picture, fascinated and delighted and finding new things all the time.

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