The Artist's Magazine, December 2011 - Artist's Network

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Simple Secret of Composition: the Vertical Line
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Portrait/Figure category 1st place winner Amelie (detail; oil, 19x12) by Thomas Reis

from Mastering Composition (North Light Books, 2008) by Ian Roberts
find the vertical
For a fully enlivened
picture plane, engage
both horizontal and
vertical lines of force.
BY IAN ROBERTS
60 www.artistsmagazine.com

EVERY ACTIVITY HAS ITS ARENA. In painting,
the arena isn’t the studio but the canvas—the
very specific horizontal and vertical surface of
your picture plane.
With your first mark on the canvas,
you create a dynamic tension. Each additional
mark you make adds more complexity.
Obviously, the goal isn’t to create complexity—
that’s a by-product you have to deal with. Your
goal is to orchestrate engagement. The reason
we still look at great paintings, ones that
people have admired for 200 years or more, is
precisely this. The arena of their picture plane
holds, engages and fascinates us.
LEFT: The various elements of
Laura’s Carpet (oil, 30x30) were
consciously arranged to draw the
eye to the center of interest, which
appears at the intersection of horizontal
and vertical lines of force.
Armed With an Armature
How do the creators of great paintings accomplish
this feat They use, of course, all the tools
of good painting—strong value masses, subtle
color intensities and harmonies, edge quality,
great drawing. But one principle underlies all
these tools: The artists make full use of their
arenas. The image on the canvas fully exploits
the dynamic of the picture plane.
A study of older paintings
reveals a geometry underlying
the composition. Sometimes
this is mathematically derived,
but often it’s schematic. This
geometry can be called the
armature of the composition—the lines of force
in the structure of the painting that engage all
the parts of the canvas.
The armature is the foundation upon
which everything is built. The
term comes from the wire support
to which sculptors apply their clay.
It serves two functions: supporting
the clay and establishing the
line of the figure. In painting, the
armature plays the fundamental
role of describing the horizontal
and vertical lines of force that
enliven your whole canvas, left
to right and top to bottom (see
Foundational Armature, at right).
Foundational Armature
Dramatic value masses make a strong statement
in Morning Market (below; oil, 8x10), but it’s the
underlying armature (above) upon which those
masses hang that enlivens the picture plane with
horizontal and vertical lines of force.
Half-Armed Landscape
Let’s look at the genre of landscape
by way of example. Any
landscape has a horizontal engaging
the left and right sides of the
picture plane. It’s the horizon. It’s
always there. Even if the horizon
is only implied, we feel it.
December 2011
61

Vertical By Design
The vertical usually isn’t one long line from top
to bottom but the linking of several elements,
like the clouds, trees and road in Road to Sablet
(left; oil, 36x36). Sometimes you need to impose
the vertical in this way. The point to consider is
whether you’re orchestrating the design of your
painting or just cataloguing what’s in front of you.
But what’s engaging the top and the bottom
of the picture plane That’s the really
important question. You want the whole arena
alive—alive by design. From there you can
create emphasis as well as repose to lead the
eye purposefully around the picture. First,
however, you must establish a fully engaged
picture plane.
A landscape with a horizontal line of
clouds and then another horizontal line of hills
and another line of trees and a couple more
lines of fields creates a dynamic interplay with
only the two sides. That landscape doesn’t have
a vertical line of force, and that’s what you
need to find.
Fully Armed Landscape
What do I mean when I say that you need to
find the vertical Because we’re so accustomed
to the horizon, we don’t feel how powerful its
left-right energy is in our paintings, but that
energy is there, and we need the vertical to
counterbalance it.
Finding the vertical means thinking about
design before subject. You want to feel the
energy of both axes before you start to paint.
Usually my students, when first confronted
with this idea, look at slight diagonals—
horizontals on a bit of an angle—and, linking
a couple of those, feel they’ve found a vertical.
I then take them over to one of those diagonals,
say the edge of a field or a road, so that,
as we’re standing on it, that line moves directly
away from us. In other words, that line would
be perpendicular to the horizon on the picture
plane. When I do this, a light goes on for
them: “Oh, I see. You mean a vertical vertical.”
(See Vertical by Design, above.)
Going out with a sketchbook and pencil,
looking for an interplay of the horizontal
and vertical and making small value sketches,
makes the idea more concrete so that it begins
to inform your paintings (see Draw Out the
Composition, opposite page, top). Setting up a
still life with this in mind does the same thing
(see Armatures in Other Genres, opposite
page, bottom).
This doesn’t mean the armature is obvious.
Usually the lines of force are buried behind
the subject matter, but they can be felt, and
they do anchor the composition to the picture
plane.
You can, of course, find terrific paintings
in which the vertical isn’t apparent. This is rare,
62 www.artistsmagazine.com

Draw Out the
Composition
A
You can learn a lot by going out and not painting.
Instead, just draw value studies of compositions.
This frees you to find good design possibilities
around you. You’ll find the exercise informs your
work when you come back to paint.
Notice how the tension and pull of the composition
of sketch A is off to the left. Everything
else supports and leads to that area of interest.
The vertical in my sketch, though hidden among
the landscape elements, is clearly visible in the
diagram (B).
B
Armatures in Other Genres
C
D
In still life you’re in control of many
factors—objects, light, background
and so on. You need to make sure you
impose both the horizontal and vertical
to fully animate your picture plane. In the
still life sketch (C), the table provides a
strong horizontal, while the draped cloth
linked to the bowl, jar and jar’s contents
provide the vertical.
Most portraits and standing figures
engage the vertical; the horizontal may
be secondary. In my compositional
sketch of a figure (D), the couch supplies
the horizontal. On the other hand,
a reclining figure would have a strong
horizontal and would need a vertical to
counterbalance it.
December 2011
63

though, and I suspect that in most cases some
other design element is playing so strongly that
the vertical becomes unnecessary.
Forearmed With Awareness
The inert materials of canvas, paint and
brushes are only brought to life by the quality
of your awareness. Consciously employing a
horizontal and a vertical increases your awareness
of the structure inherent on your canvas,
and by becoming more conscious of the specific
dynamics of your chosen picture plane,
you have more scope for play. That gives you a
new tool with which to engage the viewer with
your work. ■
E
F
IAN ROBERTS is the author of Mastering Composition:
Techniques and Principles to Dramatically Improve
Your Painting (North Light Books, 2007) and Creative
Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your
Artistic Vision (Atelier Saint-Luc Press, 2004). See www.
artistsnetwork.com/tamonlinetoc for information about
both books. Learn about Roberts’s paintings, videos and
workshops in Provence, France, at www.ianroberts.com.
The Only Rule
from Mastering Composition (North Light Books, 2008) by Ian Roberts
ABOVE: The simple
yet dramatic design
of Green With Red
(oil, 16x20) packs a
lot of power, much
of which comes
from its armature of
strong horizontals
and verticals (right).
Representational art has developed a number of
conventions over the centuries. The moment you
call them rules, you can find someone who has
made a successful painting that has ignored that
rule; however, I would say one rule does exist
for representational paintings that hang on the
wall: Keep viewers within the boundaries of your
picture plane.
Too often, lines of contrast—edges between
two shapes—pull the viewer’s attention out of
the arena of a picture plane. Once out, the viewer
is gone and probably not coming back.
The density of the line in E (at top) represents
the strength of its visual pull. Lines of pull are
created by value contrasts and color shifts
between color shapes on the canvas. Here the
viewer is out and gone to the right.
In F (above) the density of the horizontal and
vertical lines of the composition pull the eye into
the picture plane. To achieve this in a painting,
you would diminish contrasts that could pull the
viewer out of the edges of the picture plane and
enhance those that would pull the viewer in.
64 www.artistsmagazine.com

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