What makes a painting beautiful?

46 west, 14by18

Santa Rosa Creek, 14by18

I am thinking if people comment about a particular painting and call it beautiful, I have accomplished my mission. But what exactly is it that makes art beautiful? In the ’70s the word ‘kitsch’ was used for art that was considered…well, not beautiful, or substandard!

Wikipedia says:
‘Kitsch (/ˈkɪtʃ/; loanword from German) is a low-brow style of mass-produced art or design using
popular or cultural icons. Kitsch generally includes unsubstantial or gaudy works or decoration, or works that are calculated to have popular appeal.’

I guess that includes Thomas Kinkade! A winter scene with smoking chimney tops and lights on in *every window* of the house, yet somehow green and red trees? Yeah….kitsch! Not beautiful. In his excellent 1950s book Eye of the Painter & Elements of Beauty, Andrew Loomis listed 12 Elements of beauty. After all, it can’t just be one thing!

Here’s what Loomis wrote: Unity, Simplicity, Design, Proportion, Color, Rhythm, Form, Texture, Values, Quality of light, Choice of subject, Technique.

Definitely the bible for me when I first started long ago. Even now every teacher talks about these! They repeat themselves in traditional painting like the backdrop in a Flintstone’s cartoon. And forgood reason! The ones I struggle the most with is ‘Rhythm’ and since I am mostly watercolor painting nowadays, ‘Texture’. Texture in watercolor painting is very limited.
‘Rhythm’ is almost esoteric. You can’t put your finger on it. There’s rhythm in a landscape, the hills. There’s rhythm in a tree or a flower. Everything has rhythm, from the smallest forms to the cycles of the universe (to quote Loomis).

Choice of subject is relative, in my opinion. You can make a pretty drab subject look beautiful. That is when the artist comes in! Just look at Dean Mitchell’s work. Often far from pretty subjects, but beautiful art nonetheless. I’ll talk about some of the other elements in the next blogpost.

Abstraction in realist painting

What is abstraction? Webster says: ‘..expressing ideas and emotions by using elements such as colors and lines without attempting to create a realistic picture.’

There is a lot of abstract painting in my work. During this exhibit some people commented about how realistic my work looks until you take a closer look. I pointed out to them that most scenes have very little to do with reality. It just feels that way.

There are a few different methods that can be done to achieve this.

One is the exaggeration or manipulation of values contrast. Here’s an example in my work. The buildings appear very soft and ‘tonally wrong’ compared to the rest of the picture, i.e. the contrasty figures up close. In real life, the figures would not be as strong and the buildings would not be as weak as I painted them.

Andrew Wyeth was a master of this. Here’s an example. Notice the dark background hill? It feels like a ‘realistic painting’ but has very little to do with it.

Colors can be altered within an object or shape. A shadowy white building might have blues and pinks in it. Here’s an example of an oil painter who achieves this within the girl’s hair (Daniel Gerhartz)

Others introduce a different color scheme to an already existing light situation, blue juxtapositioned with orange/red, the way Van Gogh did.

‘Loosely painted nothingness’ in backgrounds or unimportant areas, is another. If you look at the background in this painting (Paso Robles Acorn) the lines and shapes make no sense. They don’t have to because I established what it is by painting the middle ground more defined, so the background ‘reads right’.

My friend Josh Clare, another oil painter,  did this so well with the close up of his cow painting: Can you see the second cow on the left? It works because the first one is all there.

All this illustrates how much abstract painting so called realist painters actually do. More than we might think!