Speaking of Art Blog

There are valuable lessons we learn from our parents.  Some we are taught intentionally, but others we catch in the air by watching them model certain skills for us.  One such caught lesson I learned from my mother is what I call random yet balanced. 

My mother created bed quilts for many years, hundreds of them.  One of her favorite patterns to use is what’s called a scrap quilt.  It’s literally made out of scraps of fabric, little pieces leftover from previous handmade quilts where there’s not enough of any one fabric to include in another quilt in a major way, but it’s still valuable fabric in its own right.  While there’s a general pattern to follow that dictates the size and shape of each piece of fabric, the placement of each little shape is totally up to the quilter.  That’s where the random yet balanced lesson comes in.

I used to watch my mom lay out the fabric puzzle pieces on the floor and then she’d play and play with where each piece went.  She’d exchange pieces again and again.  What was she looking for?  Her goal was a seeming randomness to their placement, not contrived looking, but also balanced.  If she thought she’d hit on a good balance, then she’d stop to study only the reds to see that they weren’t bunched up in a corner by accident.  Then she’d study the blues, then the greens, etc.  She’d also look at patterned fabrics to see if they were balanced with the more solid looking fabrics.  She’d look at the lights vs darks.  Every single visual aspect of how the shapes worked as a whole was carefully studied.  She would also let the pieces lay there for a few days, glancing at them as she walked through that room in the house.  That was important too.  Sometimes an anomaly, an unbalanced feature, would jump out at her when she looked at the shapes with a fresh eye.  All of this was a valuable lesson for me.

Making a Splash, pastel, 12x23"

So how does this caught lesson come into play when I do my own artwork?  I go through exactly the same process when I have a passage in a painting or drawing that is large with random shapes, where I need to strike a balance between the shapes, their color, and their placement.  This pastel painting of mine that I recently completed, Making a Splash, is a case in point.  With all of the background leaves and then all of the colored reflections in the water, I employed this method.  While I created little groupings of the same colored leaves, the placement of those clusters still needed to be random.  Once I finished all the leafy background, then I stopped to evaluate the whole area:  Are the placements of the yellow leaf clusters balanced?  How about the bright green leaf clusters?  What about the dark red and navy blue shadows?  Is there any section that doesn’t contain enough shadow shapes, or too many?  Then after I finished rendering all the reflections in the water, I asked those same questions:  Do I have a balanced number of orange and yellow-green and medium green streaks?  What about the lengths of the streaks?  Do they vary enough as I glance across the water from left to right?  How about the bubbles on the water’s surface?  Does the placement of their groupings look natural?

Once I think I have finished such a painting, I walk away from it for a day.  When I come back to it the next day an unbalanced area leaps out at me.  If I missed it, I fix it.  This goes on for several days until I can find absolutely nothing left that looks unbalanced to me.

Random yet balanced.  Sounds easy, doesn’t it?  Not so much.  You really have to make a conscious effort to attain it.  But when you do, your artwork sings.  Oh, and thank you, Mom, for the valuable lesson I caught in the air from your creative modeling.