The Space Between

My second painting class was this past Tuesday. Last week there was no class so I took this time to practice my assignment of learning how to draw pears since my mom has a some fake ones that she uses for decoration around the kitchen. I also decided to start using down time at work to practice drawing.

During my second class my teacher explained symmetry and learning to see the interesting shapes that can come from negative space. She said that things do not always have to be symmetrical and that often times the more interesting paintings are asymmetrical. However this also depends on the artist and what their style is. For example most religious paintings can be folded up and look the same on each side since they are perfectly balanced. Art is subjective. Things do not always have to be inside the box. I myself am a little left of center.

After dicussing this with me she had me set up my display. First she brought out five fake pears,a roll of tape, a desk lamp and a open box. Imagine a small cardboard box. Now cut of the top and two sides. This is where the pears are placed. The remaining sides of the box have a black background and the bottom is gray. Next she told me choose an odd number of pears, I picked three, and then set them up any way I wanted. I noticed one of the pears kept falling over on it's side. This seemed natural to the pear so I let it stay that way. My second pear leaned off to the side a bit and the third one was perfectly upright. If you were looking bird's eye view they formed a triangle. She explained to me that when she first started teaching this exercise what the student set up, they painted. A lot of students ended up disliking their work so now she first has us draw compositions using a view finder. This allows the student to look at all the angles and find the space between, which can often yield interesting results. So with my view finder(which is an index card with a small hole cut out in the middle) in hand I set off to search for what would become my first painting. Below are my six compositions.



After careful consideration I decided to go with my sixth composition, which features all three pears. My teacher explained that since they are all on different planes I would need to find where they each sit before proceeding. Once I accomplished that it was time to draw the to scale. She gave me the canvas I would be using and had me trace it, just like I did with the view finder. We tweaked it and came up with the end result. Notice the negative space between the pears. My favorite aspect is the shadowing and also how the one pear appears to be overlapping the other.



I have chosen to paint the pears red instead of green because why must they be green? I am very proud of myself for going from composition to canvas in just two hours time. Now on to the fun part!