• OUR HOLIDAY SALE BEGINS DECEMBER 12! Watch for our emails! Beginning on the 12th and running for 12 days, we
will offer all our lessons and courses at a considerable discount. Stay alert for our best deals of the year! The Christmas season always brings us music--lots and lots of music! It's a good time to revisit a fun musical composing tool we looked at this time of the year three years ago: counterpoint in painting! What do the melodies of "Three Blind Mice" and "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" have in common? Answer: they can be sung in a round. Two distinct tunes can work together at the same time without conflicting with each other. (Don't we Americans wish our Congress could learn to do that!) The method of juxtaposing two or more voices in music is called counterpoint. We use counterpoint in painting, too, but it works differently than in music. Instead of each part moving parallel and independent of the other in painting, elements move in opposing directions, each balancing the other. A vertical will counter
a horizontal and vice versa; a diagonal will counter another diagonal moving in an opposite direction. This counterpoint movement helps keep the viewer's eye within the painting. JOHN AND RICHARD KNEW IT WELL John Singer Sargent was a master of counterpoint. In his painting A Hotel Room, the vertical movements in the background are counter balanced by the horizontal movements on the floor. Richard Schmid is another painter who loved using counterpoint. In Wildflowers (below), whereas Sargent has applied a horizontal to counter verticals, Schmid uses opposing diagonals: the tilt of the large flower on
the left is countered by the tilt of the smaller one on the right. Both are reinforced by their repeated movement in the piece. Counterpoint in painting works to give visual stability by keeping our images visually balanced, by creating a dynamic rhythm, and by helping keep the eye within the painting. Below is a photograph in which most of the major images are moving in the same direction. Create a study in which you use counterpoint by changing the direction of some of them (like Schmid has done) for a stable balance and dynamic rhythm. During my Language of Painting series, I explained the role of our visual elements. If you'd like to review those roles to better understand the behavior of elements, here are the links to each of those
discussions: Color --Value -- Shape -- Texture -- Size -- Line and Direction
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