weisserwatercolours

AS CONFESSED BEFORE in entries, composition is an area which has always been challenging.  It took a long long time to finally understand that there was/is nothing accomplished in drawing exactly what is right there before the eyes.  For years this slavish devotion to depicting only what was there, out of respect for Mother Nature, I suppose–that to vary from it, is to somehow be disingenuous or false–was an inhibiting notion.

THE FACT IS, our eyes are the way they are and trying to let Mother Nature be the determiner of what ends up being painted only serves to confuse the way we are hard-wired to confront two dimensional art.

THE PRINCIPLE OF THIRDS — divvying-up the paper into thirds and using intersections as places to provide visual interest — works.  It works and will always work because the human eye gravitates to proscribed areas of interest, simply because we are human.  Our eyes will instantly grab onto places in a painting which compositionally are compelling–and the principle of thirds, as elementary as it may seem, works for that reason.

TO THAT END, this drawing was done to put the idea into action and cement the basic principles which for years weren’t followed….

YOU WILL NOTE how an effort was made to use the four intersections for highlighting something to grab the eye.

THE PAINTING ITSELF is underway and its progress will be followed until there’s either a finish, or a disaster (smile) …..