Fishing for Ideas
Where do ideas come from? How does a realist artist translate the world around her into works of art?
I thought you might find it interesting to see a tool I used for coming up with an idea for a painting, so here I will describe how I did that for a recent landscape.
The Nudge You Need
Ideas don’t always come easily. Sometimes just raising your awareness to your surroundings will open your mind to possibilities and ideas will flow. Other times you must give your brain a gentle nudge in order to see things that have potential for a pleasing piece, or something that fits the idea or a mood you have in mind.
Recently I was on a walk around my new community in Florida, Wild Blue, in Fort Myers. I looked across the lake, Indigo Lake, and saw the beautiful skyline with the dazzling reflection of the sun on the water and the line of clouds above the line of dense trees on the opposite shore. There were a lot of parallel lines in the scene, which can be difficult to work with as the viewer’s eye isn’t drawn into the scene. It had potential, and with the T-shape created by the strong vertical line of the sun’s reflection on the water, I thought it was worth pursuing. It just needed a little boost to make it more interesting.
Pop Art?
Paintings are like pop-songs. The need a hook to draw you in. I believe a strong, vibrant color composition can pick up the slack a bit when the structure of the scene is weak in a landscape and provide the necessary draw, or hook, if you will.
That day, at about 9:00 in the morning, the sky was a vibrant blue and, while beautiful, not as warm as a yellow or orangey sunrise or sunset. I am in love with sunsets and sunrises. Who isn’t? So, I wondered, how I could bring that punch into this scene?
Tonalism
Tonalism is “an artistic style that emerged in the 1880s when American artists began to paint landscape forms with an overall tone of colored atmosphere or mist.” (You can read more about it from The American Tonalist Society’s website with artwork samples.)
The Finished Painting
I thought about how my sunglass lenses change the color of things. I stood at the side of the road and raised my brown-lensed sunglasses up and down and observed how the lenses changed the colors. They made everything orangey and darker. I took my iPhone out of my pocket and decided to take a photo to capture the scene to further visualize it in 2D to see how it would translate to a painting.
The result was spot-on. It had the look of a hazy sunrise with a veil of dusky blue over a luminous orange.
Now when I look at the completed painting, I feel a sense of peace and calm. It’s the sort of scene that I could sit and gaze at for a long time, lulled into a meditative state. A perpetual sunrise; what more could you ask for?