The importance of composition and values in a painting.

and A painting is much more than a picture depicting a particular subject matter. For that matter there is nothing special about painting a particular scenery that was painted by so many people over and over again. Each painting should be telling a story, a story that the artist would like to present in a pleasing and artistic way. It does not mean that the subject matter needs to be always nice or pleasing. Caravaggio and many others painted quite gory and macabre subjects, but still they are beautiful works of art admired in museums hundreds of years after being painted. 

So what does composition means? Composition has to do with the placement of shapes in a way that are pleasing to the eye and brain. The concept of composition knows its origins from the time of the Greeks and has a mathematical foundation related to the musical scale and tones. These concepts were further developed during the Renaissance, where it was discovered that the same harmonic ratios that creates sounds and vibrations that are pleasing to the ears have a similar effect on our eyes. Hence the same concepts were applied as the underlying framework of a painting composition. 

This concept can be applied to any kind of painting, whether its a landscape, still life or even figurative. For my latest painting "First light on Cradle Mountain, Tasmania" I used the armature of the rectangle to position some important features within the painting including the direction of light (shown in first picture above). The third picture shows the basic sketch of a still life I was working on recently. On it I drew the same basic lines and its interesting to see that objects were instinctively placed in the right places without any prior construction of lines. It will become second nature and automatically one starts creating appealing compositions instinctively following these guidlines of composition without even trying to do so.  It is a good exercise to find some pictures of masterpieces done by historic or even contemporary artists, print them out and draw on them the lines that make up this armature. Its is amazing what you can learn from such an exercise.

The painting process is executed in steps, during each step one will be isolating and focusing on only one aspect of it. The first step is drawing, focusing on the arrangement of shapes making up a picture. One will need to start from the bigger shapes moving on to smaller shapes including the shapes that make up light and shadow. The next step after drawing is to focus on value, or light and dark. Value is the most important aspect of the three dimensions of colour, if your intention is to create the illusion of form on a flat surface. It is more important than colour itself. However it is the most difficult simply because our brains are not that developed to see it and hence we need to focus on an extensive amount of deliberate practice to train your eyes and brain to see value transitions that sometimes are too subtle for the untrained eye to see. Value is also what gives depth in a painting especially when it comes to landscape painting. This can be complicated by highlights on different objects located at different positions in space within a painting, so initially one needs to focus more on shadow rather than on highlights. These effects are more controlled within a still life, for the simple reason that there is a stationary light source and only a small space to focus on. Once a person understands the concept of how light bends and turns on a few basic shapes then it will be easier for that person to paint complex objects made up of different combinations of these shapes. Understanding these basic concepts is important and useful to paint anything that you want including things from your own imagination, or simply wanting to change lighting conditions in a scenery. In order to check your values in a painting there are different things that you can do. One is to look at the painting from a distance. The wrong value at the wrongs spot can be easily spotted by moving back. Alternatively you can look at the painting through a mirror. Something which really works well for me is to take a photo of the painting and convert it to black and white (as shown in second image above). The painting has to look OK in black and white, if not then one will need to evaluate what's wrong and which values are not in the right place.