4: Roberts and the Satisfying Spaces
Ian Roberts
Home from the Abbey (recent but date unknown)Oil on canvas, w30" x h24"
From IanRoberts.com
One of the things landscape is really good for as an artist is practicing a sense of composition: that is, how shapes and values fit together1 to form a sense of balance, and how the eye can be led around the picture in an interesting, deliberate way. Composition is very much its own subject, and it's a mix of rules and intuition that's hard to get at anyway...but basically you know when one is working because you look at it and get hit with satisfaction.
So today it's a work by someone I've looked at specifically for composition in landscape painting, Ian Roberts. Funnily enough, I do think he's better at nailing down compositions on-location/in-person rather than in the studio, so ignore his studio works but here's a link to his plein air gallery. Go through and see if you can feel out which of the paintings 'satisfy' most, simply because they're fit together well.
And if you're interested, Roberts does have instructional books and video demos for sale through his site.
NOTES:
1. One exercise to see this in practice: squint a little, and break the picture down into three values (lights, middles, and darks). Look how 'blocks' or 'shapes' are created out of these values, and how the pieces are then clicked together into an interesting arrangement. For example, looking just at the right-hand side of the the above painting and working down from the top, we have a middle value (the hill/mountain), a strip of dark (the trees), a thin line of light (a streak of sunlight), a dark (the field in shadow), a large patch of light (more sunlight on the field), and an even larger block of middle (the foreground field). Each of these bricks of value has its own sense of visual weight, and its own sense of contrast/continuity with the surrounding spaces.