Notes on Painting ~ Shape

Belonging There, acrylic on paper, 12 x 18 inches

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.
~Henry David Thoreau~

The July Notes on Painting was all about line. So when does a line become a shape? One way is when those lines are connected in a closed form to become a shape, which makes shape the next logical topic in the vocabulary of art.  
*Please note that I have decided to dispense with the Notes on Painting pdf files and instead publish these as blog posts.

Summer Serenade No. 1, acrylic on wood panel, 8 x 8 inches

​We have geometric shapes and biomorphic shapes in our world. Geometric shapes tend to remind us of human created forms such as buildings and other structures while biomorphic shapes suggest organic forms.  I find myself most often drawn to expressing organic or biomorphic shapes as landscape and natural forms have always interested me more than the man-made. However I do like to introduce some goemetric shapes into my compositions to add variety and break up all that curvilinear space. What a painting communicates to the viewer is in large part dependent upon the kinds of shapes used in the composition.

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