Why do I like that picture?

Botticelli: Madonna and Child

As a practicing painter whenever I go through a gallery I can't help but analyse my reaction to pictures. Particularly if I like a picture I stop and ask myself, why?, what is it about this work that appeals to me? It is not always an easy question to answer, in fact it is very rarely an easy question, and having produced a fair number of paintings which, frankly, haven't pleased me, it gains a certain urgency. If I can pin down exactly why pictures appeal it should be fairly easy to incorporate those elements into my own work, right?

Well, no, of course it isn't as easy as that, if it were then painting like Titian would only be a slightly more complicated exercise at the back of a painting by numbers book. Nevertheless, despite what your school art teacher told you, you can't produce a pleasing work of art by chance, it is therefore entirely necessary to study the great works of the past to try and gain an understanding of what they have in common which have earned them that reputation.

Now obviously whole books have been written on this subject and I shall be returning to it several times, I imagine, over the coming posts. For now I want to limit myself to one observation which struck me forcibly during a recent trip around the Louvre. Approaching the great Italian gallery in the preceeding room there are two pictures hanging side by side by Botticelli. (one of which is at the top of this post) Now both were of the same subject, a Madonna and Child, both were a similar size and fomat, and coming from roughly the same period of the artist's career the physical features of the personages in both were very similar. The interesting thing though was that despite these very obvious similarities one picture strongly appealed to me and the other didn't. So what is going on?

Well clearly the first point to make is that the subject of the picture isn't enough in itself to make one like a picture because the subject in these two pictures was exactly the same. Now I do feel that the subject of a picture is of some importance and I will discuss this more later, but my Botticelli experience demonstrates that one can't like a picture just because of the subject matter. This might seem obvious but its common to hear people say 'I like seascapes' or 'flowers' or whatever it may be. In fact it seems clear that people (and I'm talking primarily about non painters here) are seduced by the subject matter and have difficulty to see beyond it.

Beyond to what? is the obvious question and the answer must be to the formal qualities of a painting. A painting, as Maurice Denis once said is firstly, before it is a 'horse' or  a 'nude woman' or anything else, merely areas of colour placed on a flat surface. Therefore one can deduce that the painter's first task is to arrange his coloured areas in pleasing combinations, of value, hue, chroma, size, shape and all the other formal elements of a picture likewise to create a pleasing whole. If he doesn't do this he cannot create a pleasing picture, if he does he will create, at the least, a pleasing picture, and has given himself the chance of creating a thoroughly good one.

The word 'whole' in the previous paragraph is key because the artist's principal difficulty in composing a picture is to maintain a balance between two competing forces; variety and unity. Too much unity and the picture is dull and monotonous, too much variety and it doesn't hang together as a coherent whole; This is what artists mean by 'breadth' the sense that unity of surface has been maintained across the whole canvas, and it is why finishing a picture, adding and refining detail can so often be the time that it begins to evapourate. This in turn perhaps explains why many schools of art from the impressionists onwards have opted for loose handling and have not risked losing their breadth by working towards a tight finish.

In Botticelli's case, my analysis did reveal that the picture that I didn't especially like did have its large tonal masses,  on which a sense of calm grandeur are so dependant, broken up a little by detail  thereby creating a slighly spotty effect. It was subtle and took a lot of looking on my part to pin down exactly why one picture didn't 'sing' quite like the other but given that the subject and treatment were essentially identical we have nothing left to fall back on but the formal qualities and of these, in my opinion value, or tone as it is often called, is the most important. And having made that claim it seems only reasnable that I dedicate my next post to trying to back it up.