*How Many Features/Figures in your Paintings/Drawings?*

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i just "discovered" a new theme for pictures, which i am very excited about.

My pictures have almost always been of ONE face, or one figure, or one, chief, feature in a landscape/background with sometimes other VERY subsidiary figures. I enjoy/experience an often quite intense sense of relationship with the "person/character/central feature"; that is in the relationship between myself and my creation. style total absorption
I can count on the fingers of ONE hand the number of times that i have drawn or painted a picture with TWO, or more, faces/figures/principal subjects! In fact until today i had not even noticed that i did this, ( almost never draw more than one main feature! ) I just took it for granted.

but that is what i just stumbled on today, as if it were something completely new, although i now realise it has been responsible in the past for three of my most interesting/successful/memorable pictures, TWO faces/figures/principal features in the same picture.
this might sound ludicrously obvious, but it has not been for me. And it is really exciting.

Suddenly pictures take on a whole new dimension, or dynamic; HOW the two figures/"agents" relate to EACH other, rather than just to me, as before.

so, my question is, what do other wp'ers do? has anyone else experienced a similar change/breakthrough? has anyone else also always drawn/painted ONE figure? etcetc

Last edited by ouinon on 12 Feb 2008, 7:07 am, edited 7 times in total.

When I paint I kind of merge with the picture and be it till it is finnished, then I feel seperate from it and discusted with it. Often at this stage I will destroy the painting. Since you said this though I have noticed that in my paintings when there is seveal things they are all seperate and not interacting- It is interesting that alot of aspie artists work is like that such as Lowry (matchstick people). Have a look at a few of my paintings on the myspace link on my WP profile and see if you notice any asperger tendancies in them- its hard to see things in my own stuff as Im too close to it.

thank you for the link, they are quite something. Jewel like colours. I especially like the one of the circle of nature around the stag.

And yes i see something similar in your pictures, in the concentration on one central feature/agent, or on a static collection of them without relationship with each other. That is interesting. I hadn't thought about it being an AS thing. A sort of "icon" quality.

I was struck by the new idea/theme appearing today in my drawing because it's just 3-4 weeks after deciding to believe in god, and am now thinking it may have transformed in some way my relation to creativity, or my relationship with life, or myself, because I've "got company"/an important intimate "relationship" unfurling/evolving.

I didn't know Lowry was AS. It hadn't occurred to me to classify artists by this tendency simply because i hadn't even noticed the tendency! ( to one feature/agency only) But now i will be looking !

Last edited by ouinon on 12 Feb 2008, 3:51 am, edited 3 times in total.

Ive read that creativity is from god and that by producing works you are making offerings to god- like its not your choice to do it but something better working through you. I dont know about god but I think something else takes over and does the creating (right side of the brain posibly), but it would be nice if it was god- I definately feel conected with the earth and like to think of that energy being joined to me. I like to think of myself as part of the world- like how a hair on my arm is part of me and that we are all conected - me you , plants animals and mountains and how we exchange ions and have ions in us from the begining of time, from jesus, from buddha , from everyone- if we renew cells every few days then we trully inter-are! I definately touch god or whatever higher thing there is when I paint and who I am disapeers. (you must excuse my terrible spelling)

i get the merging thing too, and disappearance into a picture. and sometimes i too feel repulsed by the image at the end and bin it.

About how my recent new belief in god might be making a difference, i mean that as a result of believing in god i have a different position relative to the contents of the picture.

Previously i was a completely jealous creator and consumer of visual art, that is i wanted it to be paying attention exclusively to me, for the central feature's most important relationship to be with ME,( the creator or observer), to enter into relationship only with me.
Now i feel able to allow my pictures to contain features engaged in relationship with each other, ( up to a point! i'd still like to get the impression that they're aware of me!! ) without me feeling excluded, rejected/shut out, and therefore bored, turned off.

The art i created in the past, and the art i have preferred to "consume", have tended to be iconic/idol style images, in which the "art" and i are lost in rapturous absorption in each other.

The change to "within-picture relationships"began the other day when realised i was drawing/sketching faces which were "listening" to something "off-screen" so to speak, they were NOT interested in me! Then yesterday i drew an adult and child, which was satisfyingly complex to create, and is interestingly ambiguous/ambivalent to look at. And something i have virtually never done before.

It's almost as if because of this "relationship with god" i don't need to demand the exclusive attention of my creations. I can let "them" get up to other things. It opens up a whole new area of visual exploration for me.

Has anyone else noticed these two sorts of dynamic, in their own painting/drawing , or in others peoples art?

Last edited by ouinon on 12 Feb 2008, 5:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I have the impression that "fine art" has become more "iconic", focussing on/prioritising the relationship between the observer(/creator) and the art.
Whereas art used to have several central features relating to each other, with perhaps one or two clins d'oeil at the "camera"/painter/observer, now it tends to pour itself at the viewer. The central feature, reduced to one, is turned towards the viewer/observer, and not towards anything in the picture.
Pictures telling stories now form basis of comic books, or film.

Wondering whether a kind of selection has been going on, that creators good with people, like many old masters with their studios full of assistants, apprentices, their contacts in the world of the nobility and the church, are now IN the film industry and commercial art. And the people left in "fine art" the last 100-150 years are increasingly AS, hence the increasingly iconic/single feature style of modern art?

Because that's what i found myself thinking today as i attacked a second picture with two people in, relating to each other; that it was like "noting" a film in one picture. I drew two women, who started off as strangers, with one threatening to be a hostile element, and ended up best friends, may even be mother and daughter.

Last edited by ouinon on 13 Feb 2008, 7:48 am, edited 1 time in total.

I would relly like to see you picture to understand more what you mean. Do you think the believeing in god has made a difference as because you have god you dont need the pictures (like your being supported/loved enough) or did you mean something else. I think your so right about the iconic nature of art and how it has changed over time. I think its really interesting to look at the change in society and how it facilates AS ( that we live more alone now and not so much in villages). Have you read the Artists way by Julia Cameron - it really conects the spiritual with art. Just thinking Im glad I havent got lots of apprentaces!

i dont know... i tend to depict the number of people/elements according to how i see fit.

a pinup kind of drawing (not necessarily erotic - just that: one character/thing/whatever on a more or less nondescript background) usually is much more about the design or look of what i want to depict and hence, not much thought, if at all, is spent on background or interaction between other picture elements.

depicting, say, a police swat team, its quite obvious i need to include at least two people and indications of more...

what i thin is more important to me is the amount of focal points.
a massive classic pyramid-style composition works to one singular and very powerful focal point, but at that point, two people could be. there could also be only one, but the rest of the picture could be filled with subsidiary people and still be only about the one at the focal point.
another example is howard pyles painting of the little mermaid - its got one focal area, but two people are there: the unconscious sailor and the mermaid.

i rather tend to like bold compositions - one main focus, maybe one more to play it off, but thats rather seldom.

i just realised, reading your replies, and continuing to think about the question, that this is actually a huge subject.
which was a bit of a shock, because for a long long time now art hasn't seemed terribly significant.

About my picture of two women, lotusblossom; it's a very simple image of two women ( 3/4 views) facing each other, sitting quite close together. By the way i've realised that they are sisters. It's definitive!

Thinking about what i am representing when i draw people in plural. In the singular, as i have almost without exception drawn people in the past, they are like icons, idols?, adored and adoring reflections of ( parts of) me, in some way. Except when are portraits from life, which hasn't been the case for years.
When i paint abstract i have, though very rarely, managed to develop a significant relationship between two "forms" within the composition, whose "dialogue" within the space has been loaded with meaning for me.
Yesterday i was looking at Caravaggio, and Velasquez, Goya, and Raphael. It's interesting to see how they handled relationships between "characters/features/agencies" in their pictures.

gekitsu, i know about rules of composition, focal points and pyramids etc, though not as much as might be helpful (! !), but what i was wondering about was the dynamic between actors/agents within the frame, to each other.

Icons are one thing, which i am familiar with. But the pictures which are essentially a kind of story telling, because they have people in, doing things, and are not looking at the viewer at all, most of them ( i like the odd characters who do, like little reminders in those old pictures, that there is a "camera"/painter in the "room/landscape" )... i haven't drawn since i was about 12.

Wondering why one does draw "stories", as opposed to an element in isolation /a one/a unity? Because i've just started again.

Does anyone draw/paint "stories" ( in one scene)? Is "old art" just fancier comic book? Or storytelling before the invention of film?

Last edited by ouinon on 14 Feb 2008, 2:51 am, edited 4 times in total.

I tend to draw one thing/person at a time; multiple people throw me off and I can't do very many special poses. Mechanical pencil seems to fit just nicely, because if I use a pen I tend to make a lot of mistakes. Thanks to my mom I can do calligraphy and with more than one alphabet ^^;

I can't draw a human for the life of me, it tends to be something totally humanoid |D

I attribute my drawing styles to one thing: hentai.

Thinking some more about the focal point analysis, do they matter as much as, more, or less than the people? Are people just "clothing" for the focal points or surroundings, in which case almost aswell be an abstract picture, which is what i always used to feel when drawing/painting anything with more than one feature? I can see how figures of people might have to coincide with focal points in order to "figure" strongly in the scene, or not coincide if want to create someone as a curious/significant "absence"/oversight. Do you get focal points in "space" between people?

Lotusblossom. It's not so much that i don't "need" their undivided attention as that i suddenly can imagine them paying it to something other than me. As if they have an independent existence, of some kind. And this independence is interesting to me for a change.

Previously when i did not draw "icons" i painted abstracts, and tired of them because it seemed to me that they could be anything, an infinity of possibilities, and there seemed no point in picking one rather than another.
Belief in god has introduced a whole new element, of life within the picture, meaning which exists independently of me, of relationships developing which i can observe, in which i can participate, while creating the picture.
People in the plural are no longer just annoying distractions from the important "conversation", that is the one i'm having with them, ( actually in that case i think i see what you mean, lotusblossom, that "having a relationship with god" makes me less dependent on getting that through a picture. less resentful, less thrown, by the presence of others).

Believing in god gives me a model, (me), of independent life in creations.

what i meant, for my personal drawing process is, that i tend to spend much more time on working out focal areas in a picture, rather than spend time counting how many humans are going to be in this picture.

to me, its the more striking oint of pyles mermaid that its a one-focal-area-painting instead of a two-person-painting. of course, a focal area can also be between two people, think the creation of adam, for example. i wouldnt say that people are just clothing, or even more harsh, just one random way to "paint by numbers", for the real picture, its dynamics and compositional blah blah. its hand in hand... if i want to tell a characters story, i should place some importance on depicting the character somehow. HOW, compositionally, i depict him/her is important, too, because it may further my cause - telling the story.

a friend once said on composition: if your composition is peaceful, you can paint a tank batallion through that dale and it wont be war. if your composition is agressive, even the most harmless subject, like a grandma with a plate of cookies wont be peaceful - pobably, the cookies are poisoned.
so, id say its going hand in hand - the relation between what is painted and how its painted.

thank you for your clarification; that is what i'm thinking too. I love your friends comment. Totally agree.
I think that abstract was not enough for me because although i could, very ocasionally, really get involved in the relationships between the "parts"/focal points/areas, there wasn't enough meaning in them for me. And trying to bring people in before didn't work cos to me people in pictures were matter for an absorbed one-to-one relationship, icon style, without distractions. So it's so weird for me the last few days discovering that belief in god seems to allow me to combine "meaning" ( the people) and form/composition.

Last edited by ouinon on 14 Feb 2008, 2:55 am, edited 2 times in total.

i see your point concerning abstracts. i remember when said friend wrote on and on about compositional rules, he posed the challenge to make two grayscale pictures of only abstract shapes, one peaceful and rather uplifting, the other witha tinge of danger. almost everyone who entered went down the road of going symbolic or non-abstract (using geometrical shapes for displaying something - like tapered triangles for spikes that a misbalanced circle could easily fall into). i found it a very nice exercise, and got much out of it (especially on the harmony one - i didnt want a symmetrical composition), but as an art form itself, it would not present me with enough i want to do.

almost always only ONE important one, esepcially if its a self portitat. if its a landscape scene the whole thing needs to be equally important

For as long as I can remember I've been doing drawings of two characters interacting with each other. It might be something about my love of even numbers, or it could be a psychological thing where I don't want to draw characters by themselves because I don't want them to be "lonely"... Probably a little of both.