Advancing with Watercolor: "Creature by the River" Compositional Stems

COMPOSITIONAL STEMS

A compositional stem is another tool at our disposal to help us organize the picture and bring stability and energy to our painting/ sketches. Most serve as a way to connect lights or darks or to frame or highlight and area of interest

Over thousands of years of western painting, certain compositional stems have emerged which can give any painting a measure of stability and readability and rhythm, You can think of these stems as a sort of armature that supports the mountains, fields, trees that are painted over it. The sculpture creates the armature and then adds material to hide it, but it is always there at the foundation of the work. So too are compositional stems. These stems are completely flexible and have been used through the ages in countless ways. The good thing is that they work. I think we can think of them as poetic forms, haiku, sonnet, limerick, or musical forms barcarolle, tango, nocturne...They present a certain guidelines to follow which help in giving the finished poem or music a sense of flow and rhythm, as well as stability. The same principles apply to the visual idiom or our painting

As mentioned earlier most of the compositional stems are visible and usable when we connect the lights or darks in our image - much like when we create our Notan we seek to join similar values/ colors. This simplifies the composition and makes it easier to see or visualize a compositional stem in your subject

Very often there is more that one compositional stem that can be seen or used - as you train your eyes and working habits these stems will appear in nature more readily and become something you can use as you would any other tool. Primarily I see them as a way to simplify what I am seeing and give me a foundation on which I can improvise.

Not an end in themselves