Rhythm and Movement

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"Grand View Butterflies Opus 1"

Today at the Grand View Ranch, we enjoyed the most beautiful display of butterflies I have ever seen. At one time, the hillside felt alive with a multitude of fluttering bits of colored confetti of the most brilliant kind. This butterfly caught my eye as it stopped to sip nectar from our Buddleia tree. The shapes and movement of the leaves of the plant, the purple flowers repeating colors, and the application of textured paint (impasto) gives this painting rhythm and movement, and prevents it from being a static painting. Try to identify the rhythmical invitations that lead your eyes to move from the butterfly to other areas of the painting and back to the butterfly.

Rhythm is a compositional element that an artist employs to help the viewer’s eyes move around the canvas from the focal point to other objects, drawing attention to repeating colors, and moving from foreground to background, and back to the focal point. Rhythm can give your paintings a stimulating visual flow and creates an overall sense of balance. Repetition of brushstrokes, colors, objects, edges, dark and light values, direction, and forms create this movement in a painting. Paintings that display rhythm and movement stand out, vibrant with interesting and sometimes subliminal patterns that are rich and satisfying to the viewer experiencing the work. There is no formula for creating rhythm in a painting, just the artist’s keen awareness that rhythmical arrangement is a powerful element to include in every painting.

We, at the Grand View Ranch, are preparing for the fall workshops, and if you have not had the chance to come to a workshop, I invite you to visit our website at http://www.thegrandview.com/ for information about painting outdoors in Shasta, California. While you are on the website, you can download my free book, “Everything I know About Painting” under “Information” on the home page of the website.

I am offering (for a limited time only) the readers of our blog and Outdoor Painting newsletter, a $75.00 discount off of the price of the workshops that will be held in September and October, 2008. You can call me at 415-606-9074 or register on the website. Space is limited, so call soon.

If you are interested in experiencing a breakthrough weekend that will take your art to the next level, visit our new website at http://www.thegrandview.com/, and you can download my FREE BOOK where I share “Everything I know About Painting.”

I hope that we can build a community of artists that can share information with each other.

If you know of any artists that might appreciate being included, let them know about this blog.

I hope to offer more painting tips as this conversation continues. If you have questions that you would like me to answer, please don’t hesitate to email me anytime.

I welcome your feedback. Stefan_Baumann@yahoo.com