Alla Prima – Everything I Know About Painting [PDF]

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Alla Prima – Everything I Know About Painting Book

Pattern as a deliberate compositional motif came into broad use with the rise of Chiaroscuro (high contrast light and shadow) in the 1 7th century. It infected nearly all schools of Western European painting, but its best examples can be seen in Dutch, Flemish, and Spanish art. Rubens used it splendidly in his Descent from the Cross; Velasquez, Rembrandt, Hals, and others embraced it.

The pattern became the abstract structure that unified complicated paintings; it served as the basis for arranging subject matter and disparate pictorial elements into and within a few main value shapes, rather than allowing things to be scattered about haphazardly. The pattern gives a painter a plan, a grand design to follow.

Often, as here, nature provides a ready-made pattern. Other times we must search for vantage points or manipulate our subjects (as in setting up a model or still life) to achieve a pattern. The most salient feature of a pattern is that, in a painting, either all of the major light shapes are connected, or all the dark shapes-in the case of certain vignettes, it can be both.