Leonardo da Vinci, sfumato and Dan Brown

Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code reminded us of all the classes we slept through:  Latin, French, the Merovingians,  St. Paul’s Letters to the Ephesians, the Crusades, comparative religion, infinite series, et al.  Oh, and art history.  At one point Prof. Langdon explains that sfumato is the technique invented by Leonardo by which he softens the contour of a form to make the form look more three-dimensinional, rather than like a cut out delineated by a consistent line. (Fumo in Italian means smoke.) Sfumato eliminates the line as a way of distinguishing one thing from another. It means that everything is related to everything around it and the eye flows through the image and sees interrelatedness on the canvas as it does in real life. This is huge. It makes the image life-like and I would go so far as to call it a consciousness-raising technique.

Leonardo da Vinci (1453-1519) in his treatise on painting techniques repeatedly warns artists not to trace out the form with outlines.  This is an admonition that he himself only sometimes managed to heed.  Sfumato was more a goal than an achievement for him. He almost certainly directed the criticism at his younger contemporary, Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510), who was fond of outlining his delicate figures with a continuous black line. High school students love Botticelli but when we mature a bit, we embrace Leonardo’s idea more and more.  Sfumato.  It’s not that smoke gets in your eyes, it’s that the adult perception of reality grapples with interrelatedness—conceptually much richer and technically much more difficult.

Sfumato is applicable to both painting and drawing.  It’s easier to see how it would work with paint since you can blend and push the paint around to create soft effects.  But in drawing, also, the form can be liberated from the enclosing (strangling!?) line through the use of shadows and negative space.  More on that next time, with examples from students’ work.

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Why Is It so Hard to Noodle?

The still life with the doll was set up again the next class.  This time I suggested an entirely different use of the visual complexity they were presented.  Instead of really drawing what was there, just pick up a line here and there and quickly put that down on paper.  Use a marker, specifically the marker made by Utrecht, which has a wonderful brush nib.

To work in this manner (let’s call it noodling)  you’ll want to work fast and fill one sheet after another.  “Fill” turns out not to be the right word at all, because this kind of mark making, I think, is most effective if there are few lines.  As the students were doing their own drawings,  I sat down and did fourteen drawings, one after the other, 8½ x 11 each, in just a few minutes.   The first few pages were not good because they had too many lines.  Restraint turns out to be difficult:  you get into the play of the lines and you’re tempted to just pile them on.  The trick is to draw impulsively and immediately respond to the kind of negative space the line creates.  After eight drawings, I finally produced four that were “right.”   When they were all spread out in sequence everybody could see why the last four worked and the earlier eight didn’t.  No explanation was necessary.  This is strong stuff.

The next step was to tear a snippet of color paper from a pile of collage material (magazine pages) I had spread out.  A scrap of red, say, the size of your thumbnail, can then be moved around on the page. Some placements are obviously “bad” and some are immediately and intuitively perceived as “right.”  What makes a spot right, has to do with the expectations that the line drawing has set up, the tensions and the shape of the negative space.  But what’s amazing is the unanimous agreement of where that bit of red should go.  Really, strong stuff.

Only one student took my suggestion and worked in this manner. This noodling with lines is considered to be hard.  How can this be hard, you may ask, if you can do any old squiggle that doesn’t have to represent anything.  I don’t have a post-length answer.  But I’d like you to try this:  just pick up a marker and squiggle a line on a piece of paper.  Maybe a dozen more pieces of paper.  See what happens.  Then see if you can relate a tiny bit of color to that line. See what happens.  This is not hard like lifting cinder blocks is hard.  It’s hard in the way dancing is hard if you’re nervous about looking foolish.  We’ll get back to this topic again in a future post.

(Now, here are the rejects.  Click for larger image.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

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The Love of a Straight Line

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.

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