Alchemy (25½x39¾) by Peter Seltzer

I use a responsive method of painting, feeling out the areas where I need to strengthen light, subdue it, or emphasize elements of the composition. It’s not uncommon for me to spread the focus across the picture plane. Instead of having one isolated area that’s the main focus, I tend to allow for the eye to move across the composition with relatively equal attention to the elements in the eye’s path.

Alchemy is a good example of a painting that works in this way. There’s a lot going on in this piece, to say the least, but if you really look at it, you’ll see there’s a certain repetition of forms, horizontals and elements that move the eye across. Working this way demands that you have a good degree of control over your movement, so that the viewer’s eye moves.

Creating rhythm brings a subtle organization to a potentially chaotic composition containing many elements.  Just as there is rhythm in music that underlies the melody and helps move us through the song, we can also create visual rhythm, which guides the viewer’s eye through the painting. 

Try using some similar shapes and sizes, repetition of color and even similar negative spaces to establish unobtrusive flow.  There is always a delicate balance in achieving movement. Can you move the viewer’s eye without being too obvious? You don’t want the rhythm to overtake the melody.

Try This at Home
Show us one of your pastel paintings (or several) and tell us what you did to direct the viewer’s eye through the composition. E-mail images to pjedit@fwpubs.com (as a 4x6-inch JPG image with a resolution of 72 dpi) by April 20, 2009. Type “Creative Spark” in the subject line and include your name, e-mail and mailing address. The “editors choice” will receive a half-stick set of new Colourfix Pastels, a Rainbow Pack of Colourfix Paper and a Colour Shaper blending set (total value $160).

And the 10th anniversary issue hits just keep coming! You can now get a sneak preview of the top winners in the 10th annual Pastel 100 competition on our website. Click here to learn more about a pastel newcomer, a master of still life, a passionate professor, an animal lover and a demo that evolved into a prizewinning landscape.

Pictured: Fallera in Turquoise (pastel, 20x13) by Carolyn Robles, winner of the Jack Richeson/Unison Pastels Best of Show Award ($5,000).

In Get Started in Pastels: Deborah Secor Paints The Landscape, the artist shows you how to get started with pastel the easy way. She covers basic strokes, tools, techniques, elements and principles of design, and finishes by completing a landscape painting.

Secor shows you how to use light, photo references, nearby vs. distant shadows, color recipes and more in Painting Outdoor Shadows in Pastel with Deborah Secor. You'll finish by completing a painting using a reference photograph, defining color layers and shadow edges.

Both are available for $29.99. Click here for ordering information.

If you happen to be in NYC between now and February 16th, I wish you'd visit MoMA and report back on the Marlene Dumas retrospective, Measuring Your Own Grave, as it's sure to be a once-in-a-lifetime treat. From Peter Schjeldahl's review of the retrospective in The New Yorker:

"Dumas matters as one of a number of now middle-age painters who dealt with the apparent dead end of painting after modernism. ... Like Richter, Dumas confronts the problems head on by hewing, in paint, to the arbitrary givens of a photograph; in her case, photographs that she has found or has taken herself (usually Polaroids of people close to her)."