What is Composition?
Nicole Palmer
I have been asked numerous times if I teach, and my answer has always been ‘not yet’, but if I ever did teach a class, it would be on Composition. In my opinion, composition is the first thing which an artist needs to address before the brush hits the canvas.
The sketches below are from a 3 day workshop about 6 years ago in Nashville, given by Roger Dale Brown. He is not just a Signature member of the Oil Painters of America (OPA) but he is a Master member, or OPAM. Probably less than 1% of the OPA membership falls into this distinguished classification.
Each of those little sketches below took about 90 seconds. The exercise was to stretch our thinking of how to compose a scene which we intended to paint. My scene was of the South Manitou Lighthouse as seen from the north looking south. Ultimately, I chose to paint the lighthouse from the south looking north, because it greatly simplified the scene by dropping out those small structures in the foreground.
This piece is 30”x30” and it sold very quickly, so I must have hit a chord with that buyer. Maybe it was the composition.
Cheers!
Rick
