Painting Seascapes: The Lace and Composition
In today’s post landscape painter Yitzy Rosengarten would address a subject that raises many doubts to the amateur and that is, almost always, the object of desire of anyone who is starting in the art of painting: Painting a seascape or marina.
The subject is so broad and diverse, so here, Yitzy Rosengarten will try to generalize this matter. He focuses on giving some tips on the lace and composition.
Surely you have heard of the golden section, golden order, divine proportion, golden point etc. Yitzy Rosengarten indicates in painting, this is about the constant "proportions" that nature offers us and that when transferred to a pictorial work they convey the sensation of natural beauty.
Rosengarten indicates that, the first thing you must decide is the format of your support to represent these suggestive themes. In any fine art shop we can find different types of canvas formats, including a ‘marina’.
“Well, you see, it is easy to choose the format of your canvas for your marina. Obviously you can choose any other format, but the ‘marina’ is specially designed for these themes. It has a horizontal format much wider in proportion than in height,” says Yitzy Rosengarten.
An element that we are almost always going to find is ‘the horizon line’. According to Rosengarten, this is a line that we should correctly place in our work to respect the ‘divine proportion’ and convey to the viewer that feeling of ‘natural beauty’ suggested by academics.
Without going into depths, almost all authors, including landscape painter Yitzy Rosengarten, agree on the rule of ‘thirds’ to locate the horizon line in every landscape, and of course, also in seascapes.
The question is to divide the height of our canvas into three parts and place our horizon line either on the upper or lower line but never between the two, that is, more towards the center of the painting.
Rosengarten shares that painting a seascape by placing the horizon line in the central part of our canvas is not considered proportional and academically correct. You should place it in the upper or lower third.
“For me, this is more a matter of fixing the viewer's attention on the sky or the sea, than a pure matter of aesthetics as the academics maintain with their theories about the divine proportion or golden section,” says Rosengarten.
If we wanted to give prominence to the sea, we would use the first option and if, on the contrary, we want the protagonist of our work to be the sky, we should choose the second.
In his articles on Reedsy, Rosengarten indicates that you only have to observe the work of great masters throughout the history of painting to see that the three options have been used without affecting the ‘plastic beauty’ of their great seascapes.
In Yitzy Rosengarten’s opinion, choosing where to place our horizon line should be totally a very personal option that should affect the beauty of our work in an academic way and look very good to the ‘connoisseurs of painting’.
The subject is so broad and diverse, so here, Yitzy Rosengarten will try to generalize this matter. He focuses on giving some tips on the lace and composition.
Painting a seascape
Surely you have heard of the golden section, golden order, divine proportion, golden point etc. Yitzy Rosengarten indicates in painting, this is about the constant "proportions" that nature offers us and that when transferred to a pictorial work they convey the sensation of natural beauty.
Rosengarten indicates that, the first thing you must decide is the format of your support to represent these suggestive themes. In any fine art shop we can find different types of canvas formats, including a ‘marina’.
“Well, you see, it is easy to choose the format of your canvas for your marina. Obviously you can choose any other format, but the ‘marina’ is specially designed for these themes. It has a horizontal format much wider in proportion than in height,” says Yitzy Rosengarten.
An element that we are almost always going to find is ‘the horizon line’. According to Rosengarten, this is a line that we should correctly place in our work to respect the ‘divine proportion’ and convey to the viewer that feeling of ‘natural beauty’ suggested by academics.
Without going into depths, almost all authors, including landscape painter Yitzy Rosengarten, agree on the rule of ‘thirds’ to locate the horizon line in every landscape, and of course, also in seascapes.
The question is to divide the height of our canvas into three parts and place our horizon line either on the upper or lower line but never between the two, that is, more towards the center of the painting.
Rosengarten shares that painting a seascape by placing the horizon line in the central part of our canvas is not considered proportional and academically correct. You should place it in the upper or lower third.
“For me, this is more a matter of fixing the viewer's attention on the sky or the sea, than a pure matter of aesthetics as the academics maintain with their theories about the divine proportion or golden section,” says Rosengarten.
If we wanted to give prominence to the sea, we would use the first option and if, on the contrary, we want the protagonist of our work to be the sky, we should choose the second.
In his articles on Reedsy, Rosengarten indicates that you only have to observe the work of great masters throughout the history of painting to see that the three options have been used without affecting the ‘plastic beauty’ of their great seascapes.
In Yitzy Rosengarten’s opinion, choosing where to place our horizon line should be totally a very personal option that should affect the beauty of our work in an academic way and look very good to the ‘connoisseurs of painting’.
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