More Quotes on Rhythm from "Composition of Outdoor Painting" by Edgar Payne

"Pack Train in the High Sierras" by Edgar Payne

"Rhythm being an attribute of music, is felt in the recurrence of similar sounds, contrasts and subtle nuances of near tones. Poetry, too, must have rhythm. In languages, also, this quality may be felt. For instance, Spanish has beautiful undulation and repetition - a continuity of certain near evenness, broken or interspersed with the contrasts of climaxes and anti-climaxes."

"Painting is like handwriting - the grace and swing in curves, ovals, and the general rhythm in the line of written words is possible only when the hand easily and confidently makes the strokes."

"The significance of line has much to do with rhythm in painting. Lengthy vertical and horizontal straight lines not opposed or interrupted are always more or less static. Curved lines contribute more to rhythmic feeling than any other type of line. Yet a curved line generally needs opposition by at least a few straight lines." 

"The recurrence of contrasts, accents, extreme values or color; the repetitions of closely-related values and color are also some of the visual factors in the picture which cause rhythmic feeling."

To be continued

 

Quotes on Rythym from "Composition of Outdoor Painting" by Edgar Payne

"Eucalyptus Grove" by Edgar Payne

"Rhythm comes mainly from a receptive state of mind, which is usually brought about by what is seen and felt. To feel the spirit of animate and inanimate nature - the rhythm of life and the universe... Sometimes a view will reveal a lazy stream winding through gently moving foliage, with distant meadows, shadowless hills, all perhaps enveloped in hazy atmosphere. Here is peace and quietude. The mood of nature becomes our mood."

"Nature has visual rhythm in form, line, color and movement."

"Rhythmic feeling when observing nature is caused by seeing both the moving and stationary parts. In creating the proper state of mind to feel rhythm, vision and appreciation must be employed... The semi-stationary quality of substance in foliage is balanced by the more rigid limbs and the strong foundation in the attachment of the trunk in the ground. This accents the grace and movement felt in the texture of loose foliage and small twigs as they respond to the varying strength of the breezes... The symmetry in the banks of streams and slow or swift-moving water gives an example of nature's rhythm."

"Whether the movement of clouds is seen or felt, there is always a certain rhythmic quality in them... Here is a fine example of the need for balancing of moving impermanent masses by the more stationary elements. Some of the more stationary ground parts are essential."

"Rhythm may be said to be the lubricating element in pictorial composition. A sort of easy co-ordination of time and circumstances is needed to relax the mind in order to sense nobility and visual quality in nature and relate this in the visual parts on the canvas... As the dancer uses rhythm to integrate time, space and movement, so too, does the painter utilize this element to integrate the factors in art."

To be continued

 

Quotes on Mountains and Clouds from "Composition of Outdoor Painting" by Edgar Payne

 

"Canyon de Chelly" by Edgar Payne

 

"High Sierra" by Edgar Payne

"If we decide to make a specialty of painting hill or mountain subjects, we should study their characteristic forms as the figure painter studies the human figure. Height is one of the strongest points in hills or mountains. They are also massive and suggest solidity and permanence. These characteristics should be brought out when composing such subjects."

"One other important thing to remember when composing hills and mountains is that form extends from their top crests towards the painter as well as to the right and left of their peaks. Picturing this foreshortening is not an easy matter. The ridges and canyons are generally irregular and their form deceptive. Their general appearance is often like an upright flat place. The artist must use considerable ingenuity to foreshorten form, arrange values and color to create recession in hill and mountain pictures."

"There used to be a rule that wherever clouds are used in the composition in considerable quantities, their shadows should be placed on some part of the picture, and there is no laudable reason why this rule cannot be applied today."

"By shadowing the ground, placing the horizon or land contours low and keeping the proportions unequal are the main postulates in cloud compositions." 

To be continued

Quotes from "Composition of Outdoor Painting" by Edgar Payne, Pt. 2

 "The point to be emphasized is, if big simple masses are naturally presented, the composing is simplified and made easier."

"The idea in any composing is to get the work to a sense of completion as soon as possible and then proceed with a feeling that the work may be left off at any time. As a matter of fact, many good pictures are ruined by constant striving to make them better. Over-modeling and accenting detail or highlights is an over-influence of realism."

"There is always a place to stop painting. This is the point where the maximum quality has been achieved. This statement is easily enough made, but judging when this point is reached is quite a different matter. Many artists have the good sense to quit at the right time; others need to be told. THis gives rise to the old saying that it takes two to make a picture; one to do the work, the other to stop him before he spoils it."

"The practice of painting in a broad impressionistic manner is best brought out with considerable preliminary planning, then painting the picture rapidly."

To be continued

Quotes on Choosing a Subject from "Composition of Outdoor Painting" by Edgar Payne

"The High Sierras" by Edgar Payne

Recently I've been digesting "Composition of Outdoor Painting" by artist Edgar Payne (while sitting indoors, waiting for my husband as he does his physical therapy). More than once in a while, I stop and highlight one of Payne's thought-provoking insights, and these are what I'd like to share with you in the next few days:

• William M. Chase admonished his students to develop appreciation, have high ideals, select inspiring motives, paint in a grand style, and never be satisfied with reaching for a mere star but for the greatest one.
  
  
• While it is necessary that the painter look for visual qualities in nature, he needs also to sense attributes which are beyond vision. The power is given to him to feel the mystery and charm of fleeting clouds; the immensity and depth of blue skies and atmospheric distances; the grace and rhythm of living and expanding trees and other growths; the nobility, grandeur and strength of mighty peaks; the endless movement and vitality of the sea and its forms. All these and many more offer unlimited material for worthy ideas. The motive selected should not include anything that disturbs the complete ideology of beauty or pure aesthetic pleasure.
  
  
• When approaching nature for depiction, the primary consideration is the station point which will give the best translation of the motive. To get a proper view and idea of any subject, one should study it from several angles. The idea is to locate the easel at a point which will reveal desirable variations, not only of the size of masses but quality in line, values and color.
  
  
• The location of the easel should be in a position where the shadowed parts and lighted areas will suggest the proper measures, that is, the unequal distribution of light and dark.
   

Honore Daumier: Lithographs and Paintings

"The Third-class Railway Carriage"
by Honore Daumier

"All told, some 4,500 lithographs carry the initials H.D.; prints that have set the high-water mark for all subsequent workers on stone - and you can still buy them for a few dollars. Honore Daumier's oils are few and far between, but intrinsically and in terms of the market, almost beyond price. 

One of the best, 'The Third-class Railway Carriage' at the Metropolitan Museum, and one of several versions of the subject, is about as profound a painting as the world has seen in the last hundred years. It represents his models going about their daily business; three seats in a compartment, with two women in the first, one suckling a baby, the other, very old with a sleeping boy at her side; and in the background rows of passengers, some full-face, some in profile, several in back view. Here are models habitually considered and pondered over, filled with pity and magnanimity, with the human substance poured into them by a great soul; here in plain faces and bodies as solid as clay, we have the story of the dreariness of one aspect of French life, and the portraits of God's creatures fashioned of the stuff that endures forever."

(Excerpts from "Artists and Their Models" by Thomas Craven.)

Honore Daumier: Subject Matter

"Grand Staircase of the Palace of Justice"
by Honore Daumier

"Honore Daumier brought his great work to the completion before the hocus-pocus of modernism and the exploitation of claptrap had alienated art from humanity. In some respects he was unique among Frenchmen. He hired no models to pose for him. 'The people of Paris going about their business are my models,' he said, and he studied their occupational attitudes; dug into their battered souls; observed the lines and planes that hardships had written in their faces and the sculptural twist of their bodies as they washed clothes or swept the streets. His subject matter was gathered from the universal aspects of French life, and he painted with a depth of feeling conspicuously missing in French art.

For example, let us look at one of his most cherished models, the lawyer. As an usher in the courts, he had watched the lawyers perform, and had said, 'There is nothing in the world more fascinating than the mouth of a lawyer in operation.' He had seen shysters puffing out hypocritical arguments in the defense of crooks and felons, making justice a snide thing; and after recording his observations in caricatures of wax, had hurried to his garret to amplify them in lithography. 

As his art matured, he put the lawyers in his magazine cartoons, and in his independents studies. The lawyer did something to Daumier's soul and he, reciprocating, did something to them, and the interaction, combined with years of technical knowledge, produced the work of art, the created lawyer who is indisputably a Daumier job."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Artists and Their Models" by Thomas Craven.)