Speed your painting journey by knowing the best techniques. Brad Teare expands and adds to the best of his Thick Paint Blog-a site dedicated to painting with thick texture.
We all have our compositional preferences. It will come as no surprise to those familiar with my work that I like compositions with a road, pathway, or river leading the eye into the scene. I like this idea so much it often becomes a cliché, or worse, a focal point in the painting that completely subverts the original reason I was attracted to the motif. It should also come as no surprise that our preferences can be a weakness as well as a strength.
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We need to carefully cross examine our visual instincts. It took me a lot of soul-searching to finally decide that a painting comprised mostly of a path or road leading the eye into a scene was not necessarily something worthy of exploration. There came a time when I needed to set that obsession aside and move on to what I regard as more mature and subtle compositions. I'm sure there is a psychological reason why I like such paintings. A road can be a metaphor for life's journey, for example but it is best to acknowledge these impulses and not allow them to become obsessions, at least if the obsession begins to exert an ungainly influence in composition.
Many painters are seduced by the intense greenness of Spring. Such green can be a beautiful metaphor for new beginnings. But the impulse to use intense greens must be countered with an understanding of both how the eye works (too much green can be exhausting) and the complexities of nature (red is the underlying color of most greens in foliage).
Yet, we want a unique compositional signature to emerge in our work so we want to give to our compositional instinct freedom, no matter how idiosyncratic. The composition of a painting should be just as individual as our brush strokes and our signature. It's impossible to imagine the work of Maxfield Parish in the absence of blue skies and statuesque trees. Walk into any major gallery and even from a distance you can identify paintings by Maynard Dixon, Georgia O'Keefe, and William Wendt. Their compositions are as unique as every other aspect of their painting.
The compositional style of great painters evolves from their preferences, their obsessions, and their affections carefully blended with the subtlety of a fine chef. No one spice dominates the entire dish.
