Balance

   I got a haircut the other day. It was the first time since November because the lady who cut my hair last was in a car crash, and I was waiting for her to recuperate. She isn’t returning until at least May and I was getting desperate enough to chop at my hair around my ears, a bad sign. Anyway, I went to a guy who hadn’t cut my hair before. During the cut, Jordan stood back and chuckled to himself.  “About half way through I look and realize I have another side to do.” It’s a matter of balance, of course. 

We all try to find balance in our lives in one way or another. When I was in high school, about a hundred years ago (no, not really - only 59) the smart kids in my physics class talked about going to college and “working hard and playing hard.” That was, I suppose, a sort of balance. I, on the other hand, was delighted to pass physics and graduate. In college I worked hard and got very good grades, and I suppose I played hard, too, but it didn’t involve the binge drinking my high school classmates suggested.

As my life progressed, I looked for other kinds of balance: between family and work; between what I was required to do and what I wanted to do; between buying and saving; between - you get the idea. With luck, each of us creates individual, personal balance in our lives.

I’m retired now and I’m more conscious of finding balance in my life than I used to be. Lately, I work to balance painting with the things I have to do, the external, and also within my art itself, the internal.

There are all kinds of balance within a painting. I look for contrast in value as well as in color to provide balance.  I take a photo on my phone and then using the editing tools, I put the picture into gray tones. That way I can clearly see the light, the dark, and the gray values. If the painting is lopsided, the phone photo smacks me in the face with it. 

A second balance is shape. Identical shapes need not repeat, of course. And the same shapes don’t have to repeat. A rectangle-ish shape can balance a roundish shape or a triangular-ish shape. Negative space can balance positive space. A quick definition: negative space is the area around an object; positive space is the object. Giorgio Morandi is a still life artist who makes great use of positive and negative space in his work. The Tate in London has a good webpage with his works: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/giorgio-morandi-1660. Check it out.

Third, when I’m looking at color/ hue, I mentally divide the painting into a grid of nine squares - thirds both vertically and horizontally. Do colors repeat from one side of the work to the other? From the top to the bottom? They don’t have to repeat equally, and they don’t have to repeat at all. It’s just one more consideration when looking at a painting. I use this mental grid for shape and value as well. 

I work at balance in my painting, but I don’t always achieve it. Balance is just one way I consider my work. When I think I’m finished with a painting, I step back from the it and look out the window for several seconds. Then I look back at the painting and see how it affects me, whether I like it or not. Sometimes, my work is a failure. Sometimes it’s a success. Frequently it’s somewhere in the middle. 

But it all balances out in the end.

 

This has top to bottom balance-ish, and clear positive and negative spaces.