Your brain loves a straight line. It’s quick, leads you from one end to the other in an instant. It divides one side from another and no ifs or buts about it. Then the brain dusts off its hands, congratulates itself on a job well done and moves on to something else.
When you put a clean crisp line into your painting you tickle that part of the brain that wants to know what’s what and therefore your attention will go to that line and you will be pleased.
Let’s look at a recent painting by Ellen G. Here on the right you see it in the almost-finished stage. We get the sense that this is a construction (it was derived from a collage, measuring less than 2 inches) and that directs us to see is as an abstraction, an invitation to engage in interpretation, that necessary pastime of us moderns. What am I looking at here, the eye says. Well, I see a reddish trapezoid, a bit of green on the right, an L shaped yellow thing, a fuzzy dip (#3) into a lead gray rectangle and then, oh look, there this thing on the lower right that looks like a landscape(#1). Thank you, artist! You gave me something to identify and latch on to because it relates to the real world. Once you see this picture within a picture, it will dominate your attention. This hilly vista with a suggestion of something like telephone wires just came out like that. In the original collage it was a bit of torn paper. No matter, here it’s incarnated as a landscape and it takes over and you keep going back to it. The rest of the painting then will look irrelevant, if you can even get yourself to pay attention to the yellow and the red.
Now, look what happens when the edge at #2 is made absolutely clean and straight. Your eye zooms to it. The “landscape” at #1 still demands your attention, but now it has competition. The clean line at #2 compels your eye up. Then what? There’s a synaptic jump and you land at #4. What’s #4? Nothing. It’s pure shape and color. It’s an angle, the intersection of two lines, not as compelling as a clean line would be, but, hey, it’s red. So there you are at this angle, which forms an arrow. And where does the arrow lead? Down to #1. So, the artist has us coming and going, moving through this painting and wanting to stay with it. When this happens, your brain becomes mind and you love puzzlement. There you are, looking at this thing, feeling entranced.
What about the yellow-orange L shape? That’s texture. Texture engages you with its emotional power. See next post.
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
artamaze by Katherine Hilden 
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