Five Skills Worth Learning
In his February 14, 2012 newsletter, Robert Genn, Canadian landscape painter, lists five skills worth learning by a landscape painter: 1) Drawing mastery is understanding relationships – it means seeing and reporting the relative distances between things. 2) Color mastery involves knowing the properties of pigments and the effects on one another when juxtaposed or mixed. Color mixes that call for opposites on the color wheel (complementary), as well as nearby on the color wheel (analogous), or even so closely related as to appear to be one color (monochromatic) make for lively and sophisticated effects.
3) Abstract understanding generally involves implication, suggestion and mystery and attacks your feelings before your understanding. 4) Compositional mastery, the queen of the skills, involves learning to play with the eye and move it around in the picture plane. Composition includes the golden mean, role of thirds, big and small, dark and light, activation, circulation, focus, pattern, stoppage and many other ploys developed by you and unique to yourself. 5) Emotional evolution means combining basic skills, such as those above, so that your unique voice and engagement occur.