Essays on Painting

40
hand..
If every element in a painting is a part of the composition, then any
line or color, any object or any space between objects, has been
positioned, and then adjusted and adjusted again, to work in a
precise way with everything else. This holds true for the division
between floor and wall, the shape of a cast shadow, the presence of
a book or a teacup. If I paint a piece of drapery or a piece of paper
on a chair, that element is there because it has a compositional
purpose. It might serve to continue a visual line across the painting's
surface, establishing a relationship to those several parts that
now line up in a particular way; at the same time, it might help
define the way space reads in the painting.
http://www.powersofobservation.com/2014/07/the-compositionof-paintings-artists.html
There is a good argument in favour of the more desirable qualities in
traditional painting given by a good commercial artist of the nineteen thirties.
It is in massing and grouping (in creating design which did not exist
before) that the artist can outdo the best results of colour photography.
If realistic or objective after is to continue, it will be largely
because of this sort of creativeness. The camera has already supplanted
the kind of painting which is a slavish copy of nature, and
it is left to the artist to paint the essence of what he sees, rather than
the frozen exterior image. He must take his subject apart. He must
find out what gives it life, why it is of interest to him, why he wants
to paint it. If the design or natural pattern of the subject interests
him most, let him stress that, or if it is chiefly the colour that thrills
him, let that continue to be his main inspiration: Loomis 1948 p. 62.
ILLUSTRATION OR PAINTING
Illustrations are principally designed to be reproduced whereas paintings
represent the completed objects themselves.
If you see an illustration of an object in a book it usually has a blank space
around it, nobody in the whole of human experience has probably seen