Simplifying your subject...

If you have ever taken an art course or workshop, you have probably heard from your instructor that you should simplify your subject more and not put in every detail you see. You have probably been told that less is more or that you should reduce the scene to its essentials. Why? Shouldn't putting in everything possible produce the most accurate painting and therefore best capture what inspired you in the scene?

Trying to put everything in the scene into your painting is a little like going to a restaurant with a big menu. Everything looks good. How can you decide what to get? What if you don't decide and just order everything on the menu? First of all, it will be EXTREMELY expensive! (Putting everything in your painting is also extremely expensive, in TIME.) Secondly, you just aren't going to be able to take in all that food! At some point you are going to be stuffed sick and have to stop eating. You definitely won't be enjoying it anymore. (Why set yourself up to work on a painting so long that you get sick of it and have to stop? Chances are you most likely won't ″get around to finishing it″ later.) A better idea would be to focus on enjoying one entrée today. Come back tomorrow and try a different one; makes much more sense. (Pick one focus for your painting today. If the scene is so inspiring that you want to come back and do a second painting with a different focus tomorrow, great! Go for it!)

Painting could also be likened to telling a story. Have you ever seen a movie that drags on or read a novel with so much inconsequential detail that you soon find yourself wanting to scream, ″Get to the point already!″? (That's what we can end up doing to the viewers of our paintings when we put in too much detail.) Putting in detail says to our viewers, ″Look over here, this part is important!″ If you are painting a scene of a kid and a dog in a field, the kid and dog are probably the subject. Why distract the viewer by putting in 10,000 individual blades of grass just because they are there in the scene?

Now that we have determined some good reasons to simplify our paintings, how do we do it? What are the ways we can simplify our paintings and make them more to the point? My next article will explore just that…