Looking at Oil Paintings

By Sean Durham

When viewing a painting the objective is always to enjoy the experience. This experience can be enhanced if we approach a piece of art work armed with a little knowledge about the principle ideas behind painting.

The contents of a painting can be broken down into its components and each component studied for its own sake. The objective being to understand what the artist intended.

The basic elements of an oil painting can be divided into numerous components. For the moment we will consider the elements of linear composition and colour.

The first point to consider when looking at a painting is the way the artist has used the whole canvas to express his intended idea. There would be little point in having a large canvas and only using the corner of it to paint on. The choice of canvas comes after the idea for a painting has been conceived and is ready for execution.

Canvas is basically the support for a painting or work of art - today some artists try and include the canvas in the actual concept of the work. This idea is interesting but often fails , the viewer couldn't possibly know this was the artists intention because the artist is often a stranger to the viewer and the onlooker will mostly presume the actual work is on the canvas rather than the canvas itself.

After looking at the basic composition in a general way, feeling your way around the canvas, following the lines and colours that your eye finds most attractive and compelling, stand back and begin to consider the juxtaposition of neutral space and the possibilities of negative space. Neutral space is a necessary area in a painting where not much or nothing is happening. The eye is drawn to different areas on the canvas, this can be quite stressful on the brain and eye after a while. It is necessary to be able to stay within the experience of looking, but yet find a place for the eye and brain to rest momentarily. To gather thought before moving on into another roller-coaster of colour and line.

Too much neutral space will become negative space - something of no use in the composition - normally seen as a much too large area of space that does no justice to the intentions of the painting.

The viewer can enjoy a painting to a large extent by just going with their "gut-feelings" . If they like what they see, then that's fine and they have experienced something of value to them.
The viewer may want to extend that experience into something richer and more enjoyable by arming themselves with a little pre-knowledge about composition and colour.

Artists paint because they must. Through hard work and experience the artist learns how to express the idea more effectively, therefore making the experience more enjoyable for themselves and the viewer.

Considering both aspects of composition, colour and linear, we can view a painting with an eye that is searching in a constructive way.

Colour is considered more attractive than linear composition and therefore that is what we first see when confronted with a painting.

Look for the dominant tone in a painting. It doesn't have to be a large area, it could be a very small area where a primary colour has been placed or a stronger tone than the rest of the work.
Observe how the artist has dealt with space around the dominant colour, how he has broken the original tone down by mixing it with other colours. This ensures that stronger tone will stay dominant throughout the work, always bringing the eye back to it like a magnet. The surrounding tones may be based on harmonious colour scales or they may be contrasting colours that create "flashing" effects for the eye to deal with.

The composition of colour is dictated to by the linear composition. It is the choice of the artist to decide which areas of his composition should contain the stronger, warmer colours and which areas are cooler, normally the large areas should be where we see cool tones; blue and green are cooler colours. Red is warm but imagine red and blue mixed together 50/50, this will cool the red down but retain enough of its character to call it a red tone.

The linear composition will always contain elements of "The Golden Mean", a shape within the composition that is difficult to avoid in western thinking. It is basically like a 90 degree angle where the two angles, although appearing to be of different proportions are equal in volume. Study any of the masters and you will nearly always find this form used in the painting. It will repeat itself again and again in the same painting and can be seen as small or large interlocking angles creating rhythms and balances of "weight" in the painting that contribute a lot towards the interest factor in any work of art.

A figure standing at the end of a long bed. The figure and possibly objects bound into the figures expression, could be the same volume as the volume of the bed.

A group of trees may equal the volume of a strip of grass below them etc.

Consider the other forms too, triangular, square and oblong are all forms that an artist uses to enhance the structure of his work. Try and find an area of the work that offers the form of a triangle, it may not be immediately obvious to the eye at first, but when you find it search for an answer to it, something that the artist has used to balance it off against another form, a smaller triangle or an oblong shape that may lead off it. This is how the artist should be thinking when creating a work. He may be painting a group of figures taking a walk in the city, but he will certainly use Forms to construct the painting so that it is attractive or interesting to the eye and brain.

An artist who wants to create an interesting piece of work that will cause the viewer to stop and think, will carefully consider the combinations of shapes and forms available to him that he wishes to emphasize.

Each shape will play-off another shape or form. One shape could be accented for effect and another for volume and dominance to ensure that the viewers eyes will always return to the same position to reconsider the work.

Remember, when looking at art, your opinion based on gut-feeling is just as important as a knowledgeable opinion. But, both together make the viewer a discerning onlooker who experiences much more, and can develop an educated opinion about a complex subject that often baffles or intimidates people.
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