This is part of a regular series called Inspirations. In this series, I explore the art, historical periods, and artists who captivate, teach, and inspire me. This is the art that makes me want to create pieces of awe and wonder.
When it comes to compositional focus, finding examples is no difficult task. Far more difficult to narrow down such a list. To my mind, three contemporary artists really demonstrate how to harness composition to focus the viewer’s attention: T. Allen Lawson, Ian Roberts, and Frank Frazetta1.
T. Allen Lawson and Ian Roberts are both contemporary landscape artists working in oils. Lawson is based out of Maine and Wyoming, and Roberts out of California, Ontario, and France. Each has a distinct style of painting, but they both employ what amounts to implied perspective lines to aid the viewer’s eye in navigating their paintings. Consider T. Allen Lawson’s deceptively empty January’s Deposit.
As the audience, you cannot help but follow the snow drift as it ungulates back and forth across the prairie. If you try to escape, there is something to catch you and gently put you back on the artist’s intended path: the fence posts in the foreground; the shadow in the midground; and the rolling berm in the background. Even when the prairie grass cuts into the snow your eyes do not deviate to the left or right, because your eye joyfully jumps over it and is back on the trail. It is the compositional strength of this piece that makes the viewer smile, even though its subject matter is the definition of mundane. It’s fun to follow the snow2. :)
Ian Roberts employs similar compositional techniques, as his painting Light on the Loing demonstrates.
This is obviously a “prettier” painting than Lawson’s above, but they are both doing the same thing: directing your eyes where and how the artist wants. In the case of Lights on the Loing, your eye leisurely moves down the river. You may be tempted to get out at the midground, on the far left where the bank disappears briefly, but why? There is still water and sunshine to be explored further into the painting. So you keep going until you realize that you are now beyond the huge sentinel trees on either side, and are moving beyond the painting and deep into the Burgundian country side until you are peacefully lost. Like Lawson, this painting’s strength is not in color or even subject, but in leveraging the elements of design (especially composition and value).
Although his subject matter is radically different from Lawson and Roberts, Frank Frazetta still demonstrates not only the payoff of great composition, but also the cost of great composition. To demonstrate this, consider Silver Warrior, which Frazetta painted for the cover of the second Silver Warriors (1972) novel by Michael Moorcock. I’ve already talked about this very piece in a previous post; since I gush about Frazetta regularly, I’ll spare the reader my effusion this one time :)
How do these artists influence me? These three artists have taught me the power of composition. Great composition is not about taking the viewer’s hand and directing them to where you want them to be, even if it does that. Great composition is about focusing the viewer so that they become captivated by your artwork. Having been captivated, they are then free to explore and experience something new, strong, emotional, and aesthetic.
In painting landscape - France (watercolor), I was very aware of the work of Lawson and Roberts. I carefully plotted the lines of the hill; the dry-brushed farmland on the right; the city; the mountains; and, of course, the river to provide the viewer with a pleasurable “walk”. When painting this, I wanted my viewer to feel like they were there, at sloping vineyards, looking down at a not-too-distant French city, and ready to start the not-too-long walk to whatever bridge must be there to cross the river. I did not paint a bridge; but I want the viewer to know - to just know - that one is there because of course it must be there.
Sleep dreams (pigmented inks and collage) employs compositional techniques differently. I am shamelessly applying the golden ratio in tandem with a picture cut from the comic book The Sandman by Neil Gaiman. It is hard not to see the comic book image of Morpheus first because it is the only thing representational in an otherwise non-objective work.
So the dream begins: the viewer leaves Morpheus’s clipped collage element, and follows his sand out into the abstract world of dreams. The Fibonacci spiral, with increasing speed, takes the viewer back to Morpheus, and the journey starts again. The viewer may want to linger around the bubbles, or the strange striations that fight against the current, but the current is simply too fast, too strong, and before they realize it, they are back at Morpheus. It is a pleasing image, and one that the viewer gets to take part in thanks to the interaction of the comic book cut out and the flowing movement of the golden ratio. Like dreams, the composition does not “allow” the viewer to “call the shots”. And if they force the matter, they will only exit the experience completely: they will wake from the dream.
Since initially writing this, I have to add any and all of the Wyeths to this list.
In a very strange way, I find an affinity between Lawson’s painting and Franz Marc’s Gelbe Kuh.
I'm beginning to look at art in a different way...a but more than oh I like this. Good work.