tim white
I really hate this painting.
I was just going to leave it at that, scroll past it on my dashboard, but… you know, it’s easy to write a piece off, just say ‘oh this is gross’ and think no harder than that. The challenge comes when you have to define what about a piece you don’t like and more importantly why you don’t like it.
(aaaaand brace for tl;dr)
That analysis process is one of the most useful ways to stretch your artistic limbs in the absence of another person. Forcing yourself to think actively, to be specific in your critique and thoughtful in your reasoning, not only gives you a sharper eye for others’ art - it makes you a better artist in your own right.
So much of what we do starts out as being done unconsciously, and part of the learning process is figuring how to do it all on purpose. It’s hard! Especially because as long as it works, it doesn’t feel like it’s at all needful. But if you’re working by instinct, you have nothing to fall back on if inspiration decides it’s time for a hissy fit - while if you know the way you tick, you can make those instinctive choices with deliberateness.
This takes training and practice, just like every other part of making yourself into a better artist. For me, the Spectrum Fantasy and Sci-Fi annuals are awesome for this, because there are always pieces that blow me away with their beauty alongside pieces that make me think that if this shmuck could become a professional, maybe I have a chance - so each page has the potential to become an exercise in analysis.
Tumblr images are good for this, too. And with that segue, I’ll stop pontificating and start critiquing :D
Before I go into specifics, I’m going to go out on a limb and declare that this artist’s biggest mistake was trying to be Maxfield Parrish without understanding Maxfield Parrish. Let’s take a look at the man himself, shall we?
There are some pretty direct quotes from Parrish’s style and tone in the piece. Look at that flat staging, the way the mountains were painted - hell, the girl could have come straight from a Parrish piece, the way she’s dressed and posed. But the problem is that the piece feels like a checklist he artist went down when he decided he wanted to Do A Parrish Homage - Intensely blue sky? Check. Flat staging? Check. Amber light? Check. Nature? Check. A chick in vaguely Classical drapery looking sort of thoughtful? Check - without really understanding what he was looking at.
Let’s go point by point.
- Parrish’s skies might be intensely blue, but they are a) in shades of blue that suit the piece, b) precisely the right value, and c) never ever flat. Boys and girls, never ever do this with to your skies unless you are doing so for very specific reasons. Skies will just about always be lighter than the ground, being where the sun and the moon and stars, aka the biggest sources of light, are. And because of atmospheric perspective, even the flattest cloudless blue September sky will have a gradation to it.
- The elements in Parrish’s paintings are arranged in layers, making for an odd not-flatness you’d get on a stage with flat panels of scenery arranged in space before a backdrop - but he did this very carefully, and always managed to give his stagings a sense of space, usually by carefully controlling the tones, values, and contrast of his set pieces. In this piece, that never happened: absolutely every element has almost the exact same level of contrast and chroma, which destroys any depth that might have been left over after the perspective was massacred. (Seriously. Try to prove that the unicorn isn’t the size of a dog using only the cues provided by the painting. I dare you.)
- The light point was already sort of covered in the above point. Beyond it being incredibly chromatic and sort of impossibly consistent over what’s supposed to be vast distances, flat, hard light like that doesn’t look like anything that happens in nature, especially with the sharpness and warmth of shadows. Also, what the absolute balls is a green like that doing in a painting that ostensibly is lit by a… sunset, I guess? For the love of god, may we all make better color choices in our own pieces, amen.
- The chick herself isn’t really doing anything terrible that hasn’t been covered in previous points. Though man, that drapery is so sculpted it hurts.
All of these things are technical failings that could have been solved, and I’m not talking about going to school and learning How to Art: each of these are pitfalls that could have been avoided by carefully observing Parrish’s paintings. Which is not as easy as it seems, but something to keep very carefully in mind if you’re going to do such a clear homage to such a well-known and masterful artist.
Beyond the big umbrella of Failing to Maxfield Parrish, the composition and light structure are runners-up to being what’s wrong with this painting.
Most egregious is the framing, because it manages to be wrong in two different ways. First, the way that the picture sits within the frame is… bad. The bottom half has a bunch of elements perfectly cupped by the edge without overlapping it (look at the rocks in the bottom left corner), while the top half is basically unbroken black. The entire piece becomes static and stilted, contained neatly in one little box. Secondly, the frame-within-the-frame that the trees create makes me flinch, because it frames… nothing. Nothing effectively, anyway. The dead center of that frame is a mountain, which is coincidentally also the subject of that frame. It is so stark against the sky in both color and tone that even with a glowing unicorn half an inch below, your eye is locked onto the mountain. If you do manage to look at the unicorn, the bright slope of the woman’s skirt scoops your eye immediately up to the right by the glowing mirror(?) the woman holds.
Squint your eyes at the image. What is the brightest element? The unicorn’s glow, sort of, and the mirror’s; but the woman’s chest and the aforementioned skirt are also bright, and while they’re a couple of steps darker on the value scale than either glow effect, they’re framed against much more contrasting tones and hard-edged and big areas. All of which means that your eye has no idea where to go, and sort of rests on the mountain peak before falling off the picture entirely.
…yeah, I think I’m done rambling about all of the things wrong with this. If anyone actually read through the whole thing, I am seriously impressed, because this devolved pretty rapidly. Oh well! It was a good exercise, and that makes it worth it.
