These are some old gouache studies I made years back to study composition. My task was to replicate a painting I admired into five values; white, black, and three middle grays, one being the gray of the paper itself.
Not an easy task for several reasons…it starts with translating color into a value, but the most difficult part was having to designate every tone into only five categories.
Some of these studies also received an overlay where I tried to find some rationale to how the space was divided.
Trying to distinguish a dominant line was another interest, as well as recurring shapes.
Fantin Latour is a favorite of mine. His arrangements always struck me as having a simple elegance that I hoped might be “learnable”. Not so in my case, but I’m left to appreciate more deeply his wonderful taste and individual gift for arrangement and pattern.
Yoshida Hiroshi was great woodcut artist of the 20th century who is too little known. He would be of Edgar Payne’s generation, and his color and compositions are beautiful and effective.
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