One time I found myself searching for sketches and photos for new subjects. Then an idea hit me. Instead of looking for something new to paint, why not paint something familiar and do it in a new way? Yeah, that could work. I studied the work of great painters from the past and present and I discovered that their individuality often lies in the way each approaches form. In simple terms, what painters do “inside their shapes” greatly determines the style and expressive content of their work.
You probably start each painting the way I do, by dividing the pictorial space into varied areas, then reducing your subject into a few simple, interestingly designed silhouettes. That’s a sold first step, but it was what I did next that I found very important: it was finding the way to make the inside of these simple shapes interesting. Fortunately, I found a variety of equally effective and expressive ways to animate my designs. One possibility I considered was varying my values.
I remembered my teacher in art class discuss this during the final days in school. Value changes – in which shifts between light and dark values are used to create an illusion of three dimensions - are the most conventional treatment for inside shapes. This produces what most of us would consider the most “realistic” results. For example, Rembrandt’s moving self-portraits and some of Edward Hopper’s works employ value changes to convey their expressive messages. And of course, in the hands of such masters, value change can be an expressive tool. However, this approach often puts a greater emphasis on the description of a subject than on the artist’s emotional response to it. If the form or character of your subject is so appealing, then describing it with value changes is, for me, the best choice.
So I plan the boundaries and proportions of my light and shadow areas so that they create an interesting, varied division of primary shapes.
There are lots of ways in painting common subjects and present them in such a way that they would stand out and have a sense of uniqueness.