Robert Genn's Twice Weekly Letter
Insight and inspiration for your artistic career.

Dear Artist,

While it's possible to create interesting work without attention to order, for most of us it's difficult. Consciously or unconsciously, our personal sense of order is vital to both style and creative satisfaction. For example, painting from foreground to background rather than background to foreground creates differing effects. While practical logic might suggest one, creative logic might suggest the other. Thus, as artists, we are all different.

Human nature also leans toward working from the easy to the difficult. On the other hand, wisdom and experience might suggest getting more difficult areas out of the way first. Any close observer of studio activity will know of the importance of habits--good and bad. Take brush order. While logic might suggest large to small, the reverse can be habitually engaged to jiggle the muse.

One thing suggests another. It's often in a state of "backwardosis" where new connections are made. Last Saturday, we put together a very short (53 second) figurative video that demos the development of a visual idea through the use of reverse order.

Regarding order by size, small field sketches and studio thumbnails have traditionally preceded larger, more ambitious work. A valuable exercise is to make sketches as postscripts to majors. This second look, perhaps an inconsequential toss-off, rethinks previous commitments and becomes its own unique personality. Funnily, afterthoughts are often superior to the main thought.

Another concern of order has to do with colour. Choosing earth pigments and building toward cadmiums and quinacridones is the tried and true order. Working the other way around sets up another kind of energy. Even the early introduction of crudity in colour and flourish of application can be useful--in the full knowledge that things can be modified later.

"Fat over lean" and "tone before colour" may be order concerns that are germane to many creative processes. In today's free-for-all, people often do what they want without benefit of traditional order. But out there, in the great consciousness, order still exists. It's there for the taking.

Best regards,

Robert

PS: "Great art is deeply ordered. Even if within the order there may be enormously instinctive and accidental things, nevertheless they come out of a desire for ordering and for returning fact onto the nervous system in a more violent way." (Francis Bacon)

Esoterica: Artists do well to supplement trial and error by relearning and rethinking the time-honoured order of the masters. The good books are everywhere. The mere expedient of change and variation can transform chronic mediocrity to unique accomplishment. Apart from the artistic values of disobedience and intransigence, art thrives on "backwards thinking." These days, "beauty" is an unappreciated word, but it's in an understanding of order that beauty is often rooted out and exposed. "Order is the shape upon which beauty depends." (Pearl S. Buck)

If you would like to read more information related to the above letter please visit the Aspects of order Clickback


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