The #1 Composition Rule You Cannot Break

[Music] hi Ian Roberts mastering composition and the laboratory of our painting process so I'm saying this week the number one rule you cannot break in composition and you could say in the year 2020 with the contemporary art scene the way it is the idea there still might be some rules left seems almost laughable and usually when someone expresses to me a rule about art I'm skeptical because probably I've seen somebody that's broken that rule and made something admirable so we're gonna get to that I mean you could talk about a rule being you know expressing yourself authentically having the courage to be vulnerable to give that expression but that's more like advice right even though it might apply to all artists it's more like good advice so for representational painters which I'm assuming most of us are and let's just make a clarification there we have representational art and we have non representational art now normally we think of representational art and abstract but all painting is abstract no matter how detailed the painting is it's just a bunch of marks on a two-dimensional surface dramatically abstracted from the world so just for the sake of clarity representational art is what we're going to be talking about today and there is a Western tradition of hard-won conventions that goes back to the late 1300s right up to about 1890 hard-won conventions of crafting that illusion of depth on a two-dimensional picture plane and so representational art has a series of conventions they're not so much rules they're conventions it's how it works and so let's say the convention of perspective well Giotto didn't know perspective in the late 1300s because it hadn't been invented yet but now we all know it and if you're painting if you know about perspective and you paint something in perspective we can see you know that convention if you don't know perspective and you and it and it's not in perspective than we realized oh you don't know that convention so there's a series of conventions not rules about heaven but the rule that I'm going to say is what you want to do is keep the viewer inside your picture plane so here's what I mean by that supposing you're in a juried show paintings all around the wall its opening night and there's a couple going along looking at paintings and you can see they've come to your painting and they're sitting there looking at it looking at it and you realize they're finding something engaging in my image they're still there they are being held by my painting and that obviously is what you want so I'm going to show you a few images right now the first to break this rule dramatically but you'll see for a very specific reason and then the others are normal representational paintings where I'm going to make adjustments to show how show how easy it is to start pulling it out of the picture plane so here in the first painting I'm showing you an example of someone breaking this rule and doing it very intentionally and very well you can see that the push in the entire double-page spread is over to this line here which obviously is where the page is turned and so the child's attention is like oh well what's next and you might say well that was just an accident but every single double page spread in the entire book is like that and again you just see it's test-taking as straight over here out of the picture plane but that's what he wants us to do this is Nicolai timki from 1955 and you can just see he's got this nice structure taking us back into here so that we have this nice array of things that were sort of looking at there but look what happens when I create some increased intensities way over there our eye is now going right out of the picture plane this is another painting by Nicola Tim Kaufman we're obviously being pulled and everything is orchestrated to take us to the red building but look if I take this fence and just make it darker how it starts to do this and we start to leave the painting so obviously a fence could be this dark he hasn't just found a place where everything's perfectly aligned so that he can paint it he's orchestrating it so that it all sits comfortably together pulling us into where he wants us to look this is a painting by Chardon and you can see that he just has sort of information that's consecutively taking us into sort of this nice rich warm centre information and then there's like this secondary one out here that pulls our attention doesn't take very much of an edge here to find that it's starting to disrupt that sense of unity instapoll is out of the painting and lastly we have this one where we come in and these birds are so beautifully painted and we come up to the child here and this all sort of supports it but you can see now how that pathway rather than ending here is now sort of doing this just quietly taking us on to the next image there are so many images out there vying for our attention every day that you want to make sure the viewer is staying inside your picture plane because if you give them a way out they're not coming back you want the viewer doing this you don't want the viewer doing this and that's my rule now all these different you know when you're painting everything that you're doing is a set of contrasts and you're building up these contrasts and they all have edges that are got that have lines of direction and lines of force some of them are intentional or unintentional and so one thing you can do is when you finish a painting you can turn it upside down you can look at it in a mirror and that it abstracts it for you again so the image is fresh and you can perhaps see oh my goodness look at that there's a line of darks taking me straight out of the painting and then you can soften the contrast out by the edge of the painting leaving it so it kind of pushes this in rather than takes us out so I hope you found that helpful I hope you found it in gauging and be sure to subscribe just down here or if you would like to 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Channel: Ian Roberts

Views: 695,335

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Id: 3-Cc2SxDofk

Length: 8min 22sec (502 seconds)

Published: Tue May 05 2020