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

Dear Artist,

When it comes to painting, kissing can be the kiss of death. Kissing is where elements in a painting come up to one another and just lightly touch or rub against one another. It can be the result of painterly timidity or a lack of informed audacity. More than anything it's an acquired habit that simply needs to be understood. Instructor Marion Boddy-Evans says, "Ideally, elements should be either definitely apart or definitely overlapped."

We all do it from time to time. The best way to find examples is to cruise your own work. Accepting that your paintings are made up of various patches, note where and how these patches approach and touch one another. Here are a few typical kisses:

A background strip of land just comes up to a foreground tree. A cloud wraps itself around a hill. A tree-trunk comes down the sky and sits on the edge of the land.

Minor adjustments to these aberrations will often improve compositional strength, form and depth. They neutralize that awkward two-dimensional look that is rampant these days.

Make the distant land go behind the foreground element. Design the cloud in counterpoint to the hill. Bring the tree-trunk down into the land--situate it "in" rather than "on".

Actually, there are no real rules against kissing--only conventions. Things just look better when kissing is under control.

On the other hand, some artists actually look for opportunities to kiss, searching out pictorial elements that might be made to have mutual or tangential edges. This stylistic ploy is used to create distracting relationships and illusions beyond reality that may be valuable in some cases.

Whatever you do, if you're going to kiss, kiss regularly. One lone kiss generally sticks out as the blunder of an amateur. A work filled with passionate kisses can be intriguing, but a work with no kisses at all fills the viewer's heart with love.

Best regards,

Robert

PS: "No kissing please, as this creates a weak, connected shape which will distract the viewer's eye, causing a momentary pause as they puzzle it out." (Marion Boddy-Evans)

Esoterica: Kissing is prevalent in the work of beginning artists as well as mature ones. It has something to do with our innate desire to organize and make sense of our world. Our eyes automatically reorganize elements to give us a more mechanical understanding and our brush goes along for the ride. When this is understood, you can do something about it. Our world is actually a feast of divine chaos, but pictures are pictures, and there are sound compositional devices to handle the situation.

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