UNITY

By Aline Barker

I am a practicing artist.  I taught watercolor for over thirty years. These essays art not how to paint a watercolor, an oil, or a pastel, even though I worked in those media. I am writing to give you my philosophy on painting.  Now these are my thoughts. You should have your own. If you read these essays and react to them, I will have accomplished my purpose. I will have made you THINK.

You are the artist.  If you study your existing paintings one by one, you will learn where you are strong and where you are weak. Do not even think about changing anything on  an  existing painting.  You would probably end up destroying it.

This I suggest your doing.  Line up four or five finished paintings. Read my essays on color and value. They are related. You probably have a number of how-to-books of your own. First read the author’s introduction. Every author has something to say about his work. Look in the index for color or value. See what the writer has to say. You may not agree with other writers and you may not agree with me.  You may not agree with any of us because you have a mind of your own and your painting is about what you think and feel. Your painting must say you. 

As you grow, your work should change.  It will grow from early explorations on your own to work under an instructor. Later you will branch out on your own. And in later stages of your painting you should experiment.  You might say to yourself, “What if? Watercolor is wonderful for experimenting. Watercolor has a mind of its own, especially the phalo colors.

Every medium has some rules of its own. They are flexible but you should know those rules.  A good painter friend of mine says “You have to own it before you can throw it away.”
An ancient Chinese, and I forgot who, said that the more knowledge he acquired, the more he knew how little he knew.

And quote, Andrew Loomis in The Eye Of The Painter, “we should do things as we believe they should be done, and give others the same freedom of expression.  All art, to be worth its salt, must be individual. It must be creative.  The pendulum of creativeness is never still, since no two people can see with the same eyes or reason with the same brain.

 My thoughts today concern unity in painting.  Unity and all the other aspects of art and how you handle them fuse together to make your painting an outstanding work of art.  My Webster’s Dictionary says “the fact or state of being one”  Like every  other element
of painting , unity begins with design.

DESIGN, DESIGN, DESIGN. Now that’s the same principle of every other aspect of

analyzing your work.  You can achieve unity through the use of color or the balance of your subject matter.  One way to test this would be to take a landscape sketch from your sketchbook make  four small paintings of this same scene using the colors of spring, summer, fall and winter. On some scrap paper, paint one of the trees using the fall colors.
Cut it out. Now lay this tree over the trees from the other seasons. Complete loss of unity.

With a still life or human figure you could use what I call the “mother color”.  That is, take what you consider to be your most important color,  put a dab of it on your palette in plain sight. Now add the very smallest amount of that color to every other color you use.  This ties all those colors together.  I am primarily a watercolorist and I like to work on wet paper. When I know the colors I will be using and the paper still has water flowing on it, I like to float a litt;e of those colors across the paper.  Not much pigment.  As the paper dries, the colors will all blens together leaving a very subtle background.  Pastel painters with their colored paper get unity without having to create it.

How you handle  brush, pen or pastel is important.  I recommend  you work all over your support.  That way, if you change your brushwork or technique, the change will not be noticed, it will be throughout the painting. Your technique will be consistent.  Consistency helps hold your painting together.

Any of these aspects of a painting are merely guidelines rather than rules. You are the artist. You paint to please yourself. You paint what you feel. You make your statement.
Sometimes it takes ignoring these guidelines to say what you want to say in your painting.