Composition and the Golden Section

You've probably heard of the 'Golden Section' or the 'Golden Ratio' in relation to art and the composition of a painting.

Put simply, the Golden Section - also called 'Phi' and equal to 1.618 -  refers to the aesthetic rule that a composition will look pleasing if there are certain proportions underpinning it.  Which basically boils down to 'things look good when they are roughly in thirds'. Here's what I mean:

You can view a short video about how to draw the Golden Section (or Golden Ratio) HERE.

Imagine that the rectangle above is a landscape painting.  Theoretically, if you put a tree on the black vertical line (for example), it'll look good and the painting will 'balance'.

It seems that ours brains are 'hard-wired' to make sense of the world by looking at the patterns which underpin it, whether we consciously realize that those patterns are there or not.  So even if we look at an abstract painting, we can make sense of it by referring subconsciously back to the patterns which we have seen in nature, and we will find some abstract patterns more pleasing than others because they more closely follow these rules of proportion.  It's called neuoraesthetics.

One experiment in Canada, for example, asked volunteers to look at an abstract painting by (amongst others) Miro, and then a slightly different version of the painting, and asked them which looked more pleasing (read the paper here).  

Here's the paintings - which do you prefer?

Miro's genuine Bleu 1 is on the left, with its red lozenge carefully balanced on the golden section.

The maths of the Golden Section is very very interesting, and has fascinated mathematicians, philosophers, painters, architects, scientists, biologists and thinkers for centuries.  As I've said, it has a basis in nature, whether it be the proportions of a curve of a shell or the petals of a flower, or the spirals of a galaxy... 

It can be applied to music.  It can be found in architecture, such as the Pyramids at Cheops (I've been inside one of the pyramids at Giza - surprisingly hot down there) and the Parthenon in Athens...

..and in the famous double-helix (like DNA strands, life itself) staircase at the Vatican (the one you can ride your horse up) (or down)...

It can even be found in the stock market, where it is found in the complicated patterns of Fibonacci numbers, and used in market strategies such as Fibonacci retracement.

But back to paintings.

I tend to paint on a square canvas, or just off square (24" x 26" for example).  Lots of Scottish artists paint on a square - I'm not sure why.  When painting a landscape, a square format will give a dynamism to the composition, as you have very dramatic diagonals and a strong central focus.  Perhaps that's something that suits the Scottish temperament.

Traditionally, canvasses were rectangular.  If you see an Old Master that's square, it's usually because it's been cut down.  Painting on a square format is a pretty modern idea.  Degas uses it, for example in his Portrait of Edmond Duranty in the Burrell Collection in Glasgow.

Edgar Degas, Portrait of Edmond Duranty (Pastel and tempera on canvas, 1879)

Have a look at where the vertical lines for dividing the painting into thirds come.  On the right at the bottom, it's where Degas' signature is on the book.  On the left, further up, there's a black vertical line just above Duranty's shoulder.  Going back to the right, further up, the golden section is at the edge of a pile of books or papers resting on a shelf. 

Taking the painting horizontally, there is a bookshelf going across the golden section horizontally in the top third, and in the bottom it draws attention to the awkwardly clawed hand, increasing the power of the gesture.

Your eye is thus led into the painting, moving around the composition from side to side and up and down like a tennis match.

The square format, as I said, means that you have dramatic diagonals.  Imagine the diagonals drawn from corner to corner.  

In the top right of the painting, you have nothing but orderly bookshelves.  That's half the painting with nothing going on, nothing of the subject that the painting is about.  But by devoting half the painting to the books, they do actually add to our knowledge of the sitter.  They are almost about to fall down upon and engulf Duranty -  they emphasise his scholarliness, his 'bookishness'.  They speak of his knowledge, but also of a certain fragility, of him about to be overwhelmed almost.

The bottom left diagonal has all the action squashed into it, all the scattered, disorderly papers, the sitter himself.  And guess where the diagonals interesect?  On the gesture of the two fingers pressed against the temple, emphasising the mind, the brain behind the man.

The format therefore adds hugely to our knowledge of the sitter himself.  Degas exploits the qualities of the square to suggest the nature of Duranty's character.  Clever, eh?

Vincent Van Gogh used a double square format excusively in the weeks before his death, in the summer of 1890. 

 

 Vincent Van Gogh, Wheat Fields with Crows (Oil on canvas, July 1890)

It's almost as if he's trying to double the drama. 

Vincent Van Gogh, Undergrowth with Two Figures (Oil on canvas, June 1890)

A double square format used with a landscape could easily end up looking like a big sandwich, but look how Van Gogh keeps the tension there, playing with the proportions and the centres and keeping your eye moving.  It's a very restless type of format, as there are two centres, and two squares to read round, two squares playing off each other.  It's a big statement to make.

Vincent Van Gogh, Wheat Fields Under Clouded Sky (Oil on canvas, July 1890)

When I'm painting, these 'rules' of composition are in my mind, but it's not so calculating that I get out a T-square and start measuring the golden section.  Instead, you go by your instinct, and trust your own eye.  If it pleases you, it stays.  If it doesn't, you change it.  Sometimes you can't quite analyse why it isn't pleasing you, but you just know you've got to change it or else it will always bother you when you look at that particular painting again.  

The golden section may be an almost mystical mathematical formula which underpins aesthetics, but it doesn't mean that there's a formula for painting the perfect painting.

The Sculpture Show, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

During half term, I managed to get through to Edinburgh and take in a few shows, including a trip to the Gallery of Modern Art.  I was especially keen to take in the sculpture show, and to see how it compared with the very disappointing British Sculpture exhibition at the Royal Academy a couple of years ago - having a theme of 'sculpture' for a show is, after all,  ludicrously wide ranging.  How to curate and make sense of such a large subject?

The answer here was to narrow the range between 1900 and 2012, and to arrange the rooms each with a theme.  The first room that I entered was all about the human form, and contained Ron Mueck's super-sized A Girl (2006).

Born in 1958 in Melbourne (Paula Rego is his mother-in-law, which I didn't know), Mueck's hyper-real sculptures are meant to give a disconcerting sense as you are able to look at something normally quite small in super-close-up, including individually applied hairs on the baby's head.  However, I found that the skin was just too shiny and unreal to carry off the illusion and trigger that disconcerting feeling.  Or maybe I've watched too many episodes of One Born Every Minute to feel any sense of shock.  Or maybe it's having had a baby - of course they feel that big!

In the next room were less literal represenations of figures, with works by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Sarah Lucas (with her stuffed tights) and Henry Moore.

Henry Moore, The Helmet 1939

Moore's piece is at once something militaristic, and also a mysterious abstract object relating to the human form, being one thing inside another.  It can also be read as a mother and child, with the 'helmet' as the protective mother.

Further rooms contained works by Nick Evans - 'Oceania' is a giant checker board with huge coral-like figures, and a dull Damien Hirst retake on Degas' 14 year old ballet dancer.   Then I discovered Room 1 where I perhaps should have started...

Now we're talking!  This contains a piece by Medardo Rosso - 'Ecce Puer' (Behold the Boy) of 1906.

 

This plaster sculpture was inspired by seeing a small boy push his face against a net curtain, revealing the form in a ghostly, partially hidden, mysterious shape.  The result is a textural, organic form.  

Then there are Degas' bronzes, where you can feel the fingers of the artist in the work.  Hurrah, there is Rodin, and his study of Balzac, with the figure and the dressing gown all merging into one expressive gesture, like a wave, with an organic synthesis of foam and hair forming the head at the top.

Rodin leaves the marks of the manufacture clear to see.  You get a sense of precisely what it was like over a century ago to take a piece of wax and work it into a shape with your fingers.  Nothing says that more clearly than the back of his Flying Figure 1900, which originally had a second figure as part of the sculpture.  Rodin then decided to remove it by slicing it off with a large knife.  You can see the sawing action through the wax as he carved it off, like a Sunday joint.  Instead of smoothing off the site of the butchery, he decided that this was all part of the genesis of the piece, and so it is preserved as the final bronze.

This Impressionist sculpture, where you can see the process behind the finished object, of course reflects what was happening in painting in the last part of the 19th century.  Painting was changing from highly-finished, studio-created  Salon paintings, where brush marks couldn't be detected, to en plein air Impressionism, where expressive gestural brushwork was the order of the day.

Then it was on to a room of Cubist sculpture, of which there's nothing much good to say except I was heartened by again meeting Henri Gaudier Brzeska's Bird Swallowing a Fish.

It's a beautiful thing, a beautiful shape and a lovely patina.  It was made in 1914 a few months before the start of WW1 (in which Gaudier Brzeska was killed in 1915 at the age of 23).  This was created by someone who was just 21!  How many students coming out of art school could make something like this?  It's a fusion between machine aesthetic and the organic, with a torpedo like fish being rammed into the beak of a tank-like bird.  

It's a resonant precursor of Isaac Rosenberg's WW1 poetry, where he also combines striking imagery of the fusion between the destroying machine and the lyrically organic; as in the poem Dead Man's Dump where 'the swift iron burning bee/ Drained the wild honey of their youth', or in August 1914, 'Iron are our lives / Molten right through our youth. / A burnt space through ripe fields / A fair mouth's broken tooth.' 

More tomorrow!