design for artists and photographers
TRANSCRIPT
DESIGN FOR ARTISTS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS
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Design is thought to be the single criteria that makes a work of art great. Or to put it another way, a great artist is a great designer. But what does that mean? The dictionary tells us that the word design means “to plan and make decisions about something that is being built or created.” Another word, composition, is also used to mean much the same thing; “the way in which something is put together or arranged”. In creating a work of art, or a photograph the artist plans the arrangement of the objects in his image. There are elements of design; shapes and curves such as triangles, squares, circles, L, S, and Y curves . Over the centuries that mankind has been creating art, certain principles of design have become “rules” that artists and photographers should know, and apply to their work. These Rules of Design or Composition, generate the most pleasing arrangements, where even without knowledge of these principles, a person can respond positively to a work of art based on one of these design principles. Of course we all can point to certain artists who defy the rules and purposely bend those rules, or abandon them completely. As we all know, you can’t ignore the rules until you know them. There are very few great paintings or photographs that get arranged by accident. When making a work of art, especially two dimensional on paper or canvas, it is the artists’ first order of business to think of certain elements of design such as, where will the horizon lie, where will the head of the man in the portrait actually be, and how big is my paper or canvas and what size will the objects be that fall within those boundaries, an exercise that is known as “scale”. Objects that are out of scale appear abnormal, strange, or other worldly. Some artists can play with scale and create beautiful paintings by enlarging an object so we see only the center of the flower, as in Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings. In many children’s paintings or works of “naïve” painters, objects are out of scale in a charming way, so that a huge sun dominates the scene with medium sized people, and a tiny house with perhaps human sized dogs and cats in the background. Wise artists use the “rules of composition” to enhance their work. The Golden Ratio, The Rule of Thirds and Ra-batment are time-honored methods of arranging objects in the most aes-thetically pleasing way. Studies have shown that people who are shown a regular sized canvas, say 16 x 20, or a Golden Rectangle which would be approximately 16 x 26, always pick the Golden Rectangle as the more pleasing of the two. If you want to see a Golden Rectangle get out a credit card or your driver’s license. Both are Golden Rectangles. The Golden Mean The Golden Mean is really quite a simple ratio, or proportion. It is variously called The Golden Mean, Golden Rectangle, The Golden Section, The Golden Ratio, De Divina Proportione. If you look it up online, the first thing you will encounter is MATH! Press on….the mathematics of the Golden Ratio seem daunting to those of us who need 10 fingers in order to count to 10, but in reality all those algebraic equations boil down to a very simple arithmetic calculation (at least for our purposes). Even a superficial investigation of the Golden Mean will reveal that in painting, architecture, botany, biology, cos-mology, industrial design, human anatomy, as well as geometry and mathematics, the Golden Mean abounds. So much so, it would be impossible to describe all that in this small handout, as there are wonderful books on the subject, as well as many articles online. Philosophically this principle proves that nature is not chaos; there is an order and pattern to it. The ancients thought this mystery should remain secret, and only the most educated and wise would have knowledge of it and those special few who possessed that knowledge became powerful and elevated in society. Popularized by books and films like the Da Vinci Code the secrets of geometry were known only to insiders who knew the “code”. Geometry was ultimate knowledge. They were builders of cathe-drals, the stone masons who could create soaring arches which gave rise to secret societies like the Freema-sons. Leonardo da Vinci used the Golden Mean as a way of laying out the design of some of his canvases. It is said that even the ancient Egyptians knew of the Golden Ratio when building the pyramids. The mathematical
© 2011 Gainor E. Roberts
Morning Glory with Black, 1926, oil on canvas, 35" X 40". From www.michaelangelo.com/okeefe
But there is an easier way! Take your shorter distance (let’s use the 16 x 20 canvas example) Multiply by 1.618 (yeah, I have to use a calculator to do this!) The longer distance of the rectangle will measure 25.8 or roughly 26 inches. Now you have your Golden Ratio 16 to 26 Try it yourself. Measure the short distance of the rectangle lower left. I used picas, which was a convenient measurement on my ruler, and multiplied by 1.618 and the long side is slightly more than 8 picas. Right on! But why that strange number of 1.618? What’s that all about? Read on.
Draw a Square
Divide it in half
Drop the dashed line to the bottom line
Fill in the Rectangle and you have a Golden Rectangle
The Fibonacci Sequence Fibonacci was born in 1170 in Pisa, and was known as Leonardo Bonacci or Leonard of Pisa, which was short-ed to Fibonacci, or son of Bonacci. He was a mathematical genius who wrote, in the early 13th century the Liber Abaci, or Book of Calculation. Having traveled extensively he concluded that trying to do arithmetic with Roman Numerals was much more difficult than using the Hindu-Arabic number system. He spread the word through his teachings and book. Centuries later this numerical sequence was named after him.
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377....etc.
The sequence is derived by adding 0 +1 which equals 1. Then add 1 +1 which equals 2. Then add 2 +1 which equals 3. Then add 2 +3 which equals 5 and so on. Each number is the sum of the previous two and each num-ber approximates the previous number multiplied by the Golden Section 1.618! The numbers become more ac-curate as they grow larger. A golden rectangle would be 5 inches by 8 inches, for example, and if you take the number 5 and multiply it by 1.618 you get 8.09...close enough. All sorts of interesting things follow this sequence; in nature certain sea shells follow the sequence, as do breed-ing pairs of rabbits, certain plants grow leaves in a perfect Fibonacci sequence and the sunflower seeds follow the Fibonacci spiral sequence and astronomers see the Fibonacci spiral in black holes! This is amazing, but how is this applied to art and photography?
relationship of the Golden Mean abounds all over the place, even in Wall Street Stock analyses, diagrams of DNA and the patterns of crystals. So what does all this have to do with your artwork? Plenty as you shall see, but for now consider the Golden Rectangle as an element of your work, perhaps having a custom canvas or pa-per for your work or working a Golden Rectangle into your composition even if the canvas isn’t a Golden Rec-tangle. Here is how to figure out the dimensions of a Golden Rectangle.
Draw a line from corner to corner
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The Golden Mean in Art All kinds of examples flourish in art and architecture. The Greeks were said to use the Golden Ratio in planning their temples. Measure the short side of the temple diagram to the right (2½) and multiply that by 1.618 to find the long side. The answer is slightly longer than 4 inches. Over and over, you will find this ratio in Greek architecture as well as archi-tecture through the centuries. The famous 20th cen-tury architect, Le Corbusier used the Golden Ratio in his designs and you will find it in cathedrals, tem-ples, mosques, even in the ruins of the Druids. Be-cause the Golden Mean is so visually pleasing scholars have determined that humans make the Golden Rectangle without even knowing about it. Leonardo da Vinci Undoubtedly Leonardo da Vinci was one of the top geniuses the world has ever pro-duced. The famous drawing of the Vitruvian Man was one of his drawings to picture the golden ratio to parts of the human body. We know from many of Leonardo’s drawings and notebooks that he saw this relationship in nature and mathematics and he showed examples of the Golden Ratio throughout the human body. The distance from the head to navel is approximately a Golden Ratio to the distance from the navel to the floor. When we learn to draw the human figure the first thing we are taught is that the navel is not midway in the human body. The face divides into a series of perfect Golden Rectan-gles and the bones of the hand, arm and leg form Golden Ratios. Drawing accurately uses proportion and ratio to figure out what you are looking at, and many artists use a sighting stick to measure the proportions of objects they are drawing. Once familiar with this technique anyone can make a fairly accurate drawing. Use the Golden Ratio to design your painting or photograph When I went to art school we were taught to divide our canvases into Thirds. It became known as “The Rule of Thirds”. The centers of interest in a canvas or photograph were located where the lines intersected. This “rule” also advised the wise artist or photographer to place the horizon line at the one third line, rather than in the middle of the painting or photo. And you can do that with any size canvas or paper. But if we take a Golden Rectangle (below) we can discover points within that rectangle that have been called “the eyes” or centers of interest areas. Draw lines from corner to corner. Calculate the midpoint from the corner to the center where they intersect. When planning your painting or photograph be conscious of where your centers of interest fall. Can you move the ob-jects around so they line up with these centers of interest? When taking a photograph can you move yourself so that tree, or your friend, or that building lines up with the “eyes of the rectangle?
The Eyes
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Rabatment is another device used by artists through the centuries to compose and design their paintings. The concept is relatively simple and it can produce visually stunning paintings and photographs. It works with any size paper or canvas except squares. For this illustration I am using a Golden Rectangle. The idea is to find the square within the rectangle. There will be two of them horizontally and two if the canvas or paper is vertical.
The Rule of Thirds The illustration below is not a Golden Rectangle but a size that is common to our modern papers and canvases. Let’s say it is an 8 x 10. The photograph on the right shows how a lucky shot can be translated into the Rule of Thirds. Many digital cameras will have a similar grid on the LCD screen to help you compose your shots. (The photograph was taken by me in 1982 as we sailed into the Hudson River from the East River on a trip from New England to Florida in our sailboat. The World Trade Center balances the sloop Clearwater, owned by folk singer Pete Seeger.)
Measure the short distance
whatever that measurement is makes the square within the rectangle
The dashed line is the rabatment of this Golden Rectangle.
Here are two examples of the use of Rabatment in the design of a painting. On the left is Monet’s Landscape at Vétheuil. Measure the short side of the canvas and flop it down to the long side and you will have a square. That imaginary line is the Rabatment and it is used over and over by artists through the centuries to design their can-vases. Obviously when a canvas is all ready square finding the Rabatment is not possible. So using the Rule of Thirds on Monet’s Houses of Parliament we find that he actually knew what he was doing! Monet was well trained in classical techniques and these compositions are no accident.
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Sometimes artists will purposely violate these rules. Visually arresting images do not always have to follow one of these rules. Knowing the Rules allows the creator to violate those rules, as in this painting by me, that is actually on a square 36 x 36 inch canvas. I believe that this image would not work as well if the vase of flowers was placed on the one third line, but the gold dragonfly falls exactly on the one third intersection. We all know art is subjective and open to all forms of interpre-tation. Look at this masterpiece of photography by Ansel Adams. Do you think it was an accident that the tip of that dune lines up with the perfect Rule of Thirds. Probably not!
Photography It is interesting to note that 35mm film and slides are a Golden Rectangles. This was not an accident either, and was de-signed in the early 20th century by an employee of Leitz Cam-era Company who knew the Golden Rectangle was a 3:2 ratio. Thus began a format that allowed photographers to produce images in a perfect Golden Rectangle. Unfortunately my digital cameras do not quite fit into a neat package since the system is now designed around printed images on papers that are de-signed to fit inkjet printers and 8½ x 11 formats, but this does not mean that I can’t crop my images into Golden Rectangles,
and use my photo editing programs to provide compositions that follow these rules of composition. Other Elements of Design Artists and photographers look for shapes, sometimes negative shapes, that are repeated in patterns. Paintings are sometimes designed around a shape, a circle, a square, triangle, or letter shape like an S, L or Y, for example. One “rule” is that you should have odd numbers of shapes, ob-jects, patterns, in your painting, as that is supposed to be more pleasing than even numbers of things. Design also incorporates repetition, pat-terns and pathways that create “eye-travel” through a painting. Humans don’t like chaos, and paintings that are arranged according to a definite plan seem to be more satisfying. Basing a composition, as in Michelangelo's painting of the Holy Family, on a pentagram or Golden Star makes a design that grabs you and makes you look twice! Many painters use the device of a path or road to bring your eye into the painting. Patterns of light and shadow also make shapes that a canvas or photograph can be designed around. Clothing and drapery in a still life
Grannies by Gainor Roberts, oil on canvas
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makes designs and patterns to build upon. Look at these paintings by Alfred Sisley, an Impressionist painter who clearly knew a great deal about design and composition. He uses repeating shapes and patterns of light and visual devices making arresting images because they are designed using the simple tools of composition. You do not need to know math to figure out a pleasing design, and it is likely that many artists arrive at a composition that follows the rules, even though they may not have set out to make a Golden Rectangle, or place a tree on the Rabatment, because they know what will be visually pleasing by instinct.
Sacred Geometry If you do any research on this vast subject you will find a diagram that looks like this (on the left below). It is of-ten superimposed on images to illustrate the Golden Ratio in art and architecture. What the diagram shows is the Fibonacci sequence of repeats. If the large square on right is removed you have yet again another Golden Rectangle on the left, and so on infinitely. The numbered diagram on the right shows how the numerical ratio works to create the perfect Fibonacci series.
What is really interesting about this visual diagram is shown in this next diagram where the pattern forms a spi-ral, sometimes referred to as “spira mirabilis”. We see this pattern in nature especially in the Chambered Nauti-lus shell and other spiral mollusks, leaf patterns, seed distribution in sunflowers and black holes in the cosmos. No wonder this is called “divine” by the early artists, philosophers and mathematicians.
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Now look at what the celebrated photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, can do with the “spira mirabilis”. Cartier-Bresson said he never cropped his photographs. He was trained as a painter, and knew the rules of composition and every photograph he took conformed in some way to the rules of good design. No wonder he is considered one of the true “greats” of the 20th century. He said “ ‘Manufactured’ or staged photog-raphy does not concern me. And if I make a judgment, it can only be on a psychologi-cal or sociological level. for me, the camera is a sketchbook, and instrument of intuition and spontaneity and the master of the instant, which questions and decides simultane-ously. In order to “give a meaning” to the world, one has to feel oneself involved in what he frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, a disci-pline of mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry.” And Salvador Dali is also one of the great geniuses of the 20th century who knew de-sign, proportion, geometry and mathematics. His painting called “The Sacrament of the Last Supper” measures 66 x 105 and if you do the arithmetic you will find it is a Golden Rectangle. Geometric shapes are thought to be mystical and special. Pyramids and
stars, polyhedrons, and triangles, seem to resonate with all people in all cultures in all times; perhaps it is part of the Jungian collective unconscious, and if you can do algebra and geometry you will find the Golden Mean in most shapes.
The diagram on the right (above) shows that most of the key elements of the painting fall into various Golden Rectangles; for example, the exact placement of the disciples to Christ’s left and right, and the placement of the table. Because of Dali’s interest in geome-try he features a dodecahedron above the figures which are formed by 12 pentagrams. The mathematics will confirm that the dodecahedron can be reduced to Phi or the Golden number which translates into 1.61803398874989…… The point of all this discussion is this; plan your paintings and photographs. Design is not accidental. Great designs are based on solid principles that will work in your paintings and photographs. I do not believe that the idea of a “rule” will inhibit your work. Uninhibited work, to me, looks chaotic, messy and well, unplanned. It was the rage in the mid 20th century to design work based on accidents; artists did zany things like cover themselves
with paint and roll about on the canvas, and artists like Jackson Pollock seem to make attractive paintings out of drips and runs that can only be accidental even if he was flinging the paint from his
brush in some kind of controlled way. But many 20th century artists knew of the Golden Ratio and we can find examples throughout the “modern” era that use Golden Rectangles and the magical number Phi. One artist who unabashedly used the Golden Rectangle was Piet Mondrian. Here is an example of one of his paintings to the left. Some of the other 20th century abstract expressionist painters also used the Golden Ratio to design their canvasses. Here (to the right) is one of Mark Rothko’s paintings which closely falls into a Golden Rectangle and there were many other abstract painters who explored this design concept in their art.
To the right is a painting by Hans Hoffman, called Golden
Dodecahedron Drawing by Leonardo daVinci
Mondrian Composition in Red, Yellow and Blue Rothko, Violet, Green, Red 1951
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Rectangles. Obviously he is exploring the mystery of Phi in this painting. The photograph below depicts the Canadian National Tower in Toronto, Canada. This tower is the tallest freestanding tower in the Western Hemisphere, and is designed as a Golden Mean. The diagram on the right below shows the Golden Mean, a line divided into Phi. The arithmetic is not terribly complicated: the ratio of the observation deck at 342 meters to the total height of 553.33 is 0.618 phi, which is the reciprocal of Phi. (Notice that Phi is 1.618 and is shown with a capi-
tal P while the reciprocal is 0.618 and it is a lower case P in phi.) If do more research and you are mathematical-ly inclined you will learn that Plato, in The Republic, asks the reader to “take a line and divide it unevenly.” The mathematics of this have to do with proportion and ratio so that the whole to the longer equals the longer to the shorter. Hurricane Sandy ripped into the New Jersey and New York coasts in September of 2012, causing massive dam-age and many lost lives. For our purposes, interest in this storm can be seen in the diagram below, which shows a perfect Fibonacci spiral as the storm nears the coast of Virginia, and spreading out to the Great Lakes and into Maine; a huge area. These diagrams were found in an article by Shea Gunter on MNN (Mother Nature Network), http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/climate-weather/blogs/finding-the-fibonacci-sequence-in-hurricane-sandy
I will close with a personal story. In 1994 I started my “Feeling Series” of paintings, and the first painting was a 48 x 48 canvas called Anger. Before I finished that painting I had the second one in mind and it was going to be called Joy. At the time I didn’t know about the Golden Mean, although I had learned about the Rule of Thirds which was also called “The Golden Rule of Composition”. I decided that the Feeling Series paintings would all be at least 48 inches in one direction. The other dimension was arbitrary depending on the subject matter. I se-
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lected 30 inches as the other dimension for Joy. Then, years later, I knew Inspiration would also be a 48 x 30 inch canvas, which is not a standard size so it had to be hand stretched on stretcher bars. I began work on In-spiration around the same time I started to research the Golden Ratio, and I began to wonder just why I chose that dimension for these canvases. Well, you guessed it, when I did the math I found that I instinctively chose Golden Rectangles for the feelings of joy, inspiration and Awe. Here are Joy and Inspiration, and Awe (still a work in progress as of January 2013). Three Golden Rectangles for you! There seems to be an insatiable curiosity about these numbers and patterns in art and nature. Books abound, and articles in scholarly publications and on the internet are readily accessible to us. Most of my research on this subject was done online, and there are dozens of websites and blogs that show example after example of the miracle of the Golden Ratio. A fascinating website is called The Museum of the Golden Ratio—A Geometry of Life and Art. For art lovers this is wonderful eye-candy! One excellent book I like on this subject is called “The Golden Section; Nature’s Greatest Secret” by Scott Ol-sen who is professor of philosophy at Central Florida Community College in Ocala, available from Amazon, as well as other booksellers. This is a very small book but contains a wealth of information about the Golden Ra-tio, with really interesting graphics, and detailed explanations of the algebraic equations of the Golden Section, most of which I can’t understand, but would be very interesting to people who understand algebra.
Joy Oil 48 x 30 Inspiration Oil 48 x 30 Awe Oil 48 x 30
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