The Art of STILL LIFE - Modeling Forms: Sculpting in Two Dimensions

In building a statue, a sculptor doesn’t keep adding clay to his subject. Actually, he keeps chiseling away at the nonessentials until the truth of his creation is revealed without obstruction — Bruce Lee

- TODD M. CASEY

Representational painting is like a magical performance in which the artist fools the viewer’s perception by creating a threedimensional illusion on a two-dimensional surface. It’s a lot like sculpting. In fact, in the academic tradition sculpture was intertwined with painting and the two were often taught together.

If you don’t think like a sculptor, your paintings may appear flat. When painting, you’ve got to feel as if you’re sculpting—pushing things back in space and pulling them forward into the light until they seem to be coming up off the surface.

In this painting I used the same color—of the same value—on a portion of the ticker tape, a part of the book’s spine and the copper penny. But you’d never guess this just by looking at the painting. The square of color in the image at right reveals that the three apparently very different areas have the same value and hue.

MODELING FORM

Rendering the light and dark values of an observed object in an order that gives the appearance of volume is referred to as modeling form. In modeling form, we are combining all the concepts of light, drawing, value and color to achieve form.

Every color relates to a value. It’s often said that color gets all the attention but value does all the work. Indeed, accurate value structure and accurate drawing are the two most important aspects of a successful painting. If you nail these, you are well on your way to making a good painting. If your value structure works, you can get away with not having the color be super accurate.