Rick's Rules #2 - Elegance

Elegant – Design with elegance through simplicity

Mayo Marsh - Broadview

“Being elegant is being pleasingly ingenious and simple.”

Now that you have a motive for the painting and you have decided what you want to say, what in the view before you is essential to that message?  Is there anything that will obviously detract or distract from that message?  What can be eliminated from the painting without changing or lessening your message?

Simplicity begins with the earliest stages of design as you choose a subject and select an idea.  Develop a composition with objects, abstract shapes, values, and colors that clarify your motive – your main idea and emotion.  Eliminate everything that is distracting to your motive and vision.  Among the remaining elements, select only those that will support your motive or whose exclusion from the painting would distract from your vision.  Don’t forget that sometimes an element in the scene needs to be changed, moved, or replaced; or an element needs to be added to the design to help explain or emphasize your motive.  At this point, you should be nearing the irreducible minimum for your message.

Now that you have an idea of what your painting should contain, you can develop your composition around those elements.  Be careful as you build your composition that you do not introduce without good reason any elements that may distract from your motive.  It is no crime to change or modify your motive if you discover that another idea or emotion inspires you more, but do so deliberately.

The most difficult part of achieving elegance in simplicity is rejecting good and often beautiful elements from the composition because their very “beauty” distracts the eye from your objective.  Elegant simplicity can help you achieve the greatest beauty in your painting.

Example:

I took the photo above of a view of the salt marsh near my home.  I have often been inspired by this view with the tall pines on the back edge of the marsh and the reflections in the water.  As the photo shows, this view contains a multitude of ideas that would make a good painting.  My first step was to make a sketch with notes to record my inspiration, and this is the sketch I made on-site.

Mayo Marsh - field sketch

I was standing on a sidewalk beside a 6-lane parkway when I did this drawing, so it is somewhat abbreviated.  I made some notes and did a few adjustments for composition.  My goal here was to capture the essence of the day and my response to the scene.  I drive by this place almost every day, and each time I'm reminded that beauty surrounds me everywhere if I only take the time to look.

Mayo Marsh - Detail sketches

From my notes and guided by the photo, I made detail sketches of areas of the view that inspired me.  For each sketch, I made notes to guide me as I decide what to select for the "final" drawing.  Putting this together in a trial composition and drawing is the next step in the process, so the accuracy of sketching and quality of observation in the sketch is critical.

Rick’s Rules for Painting

These "rules" are my own principles of painting developed over time for my personal use.  My goal is to use and apply these steps in all my painting efforts.