Vertical or horizontal? How orientation affects your view of a painting.
One of the “givens” of any painting is its orientation: vertical (“portrait”) or horizontal “landscape.” You see these orientations most clearly with a rectangular canvas, regardless of how big or small the overall dimensions are. But even a square canvas has an orientation. My choice of orientation is part of the experience that I’m creating in a painting and part of what you experience when you view it.
So how does this work? Shown are two of my paintings from my Tree of Life series. “Rite of Spring” is a big painting (my favorite working size, 4’ wide x 6’ tall). It’s standing “on end” with the black/grey/dark brown Tree of Life dead-center: a deliberately strong vertical, the tree seeking, reaching, striving upward toward the warm spring sun and air.
“Shading the Heat” is on a canvas that is only slightly smaller, at 60” wide and 40” high. But its strongly horizontal, and this Tree of Life is off-center, its immense, thick leaf canopy anchored by the thick trunk at left.
In both orientations, there is very little “negative space” – the area around an object (in this case, the trees). In “Rite,” the negative space is evident in the upper left quadrant, the distant azure sky. The positive space is crowded, partly with the tree but even more with the abundance of plants emerging, leafing, blossoming with it. In “Shading,” negative space is at the very top and bottom: the “burning” sky, sultry and ominous and the sheltered, cool, invitingly shaded earth beneath the tree’s canopy.
The orientations guided my application of paint – take a look at the two closeups below. In “Rite,” the varied brushstrokes apply thin layers of paint, even with the tree’s branches and trunk. The effect is lightness, a communion of color: earth, plants, tree and sky seem to permeate each other, striving upward. In “Shading,” I applied paint much more thickly and densely especially for the canopy. The leaves draw life from the sun while creating a green shield to shelter more life.
Do YOU find yourself preferring one or the other? Vertical or horizontal?
When I paint on a square canvas things get more ‘fluid’ and even more exciting. But that’s for another day!