Today’s watercolor experiment:

I had a couple of ideas in mind for today’s composition. First, I had been thinking about revisiting the idea of how one looks at an old fashioned contact sheet. I brought this up in a previous post (Re-Inspection of Time). For clarity, here’s my example of a contact sheet from that post:

Time Sequence of a Contact Sheet

Note that one reads each line (consisting of small thumbnail photographs) as one would read a book. The white line indicates motion of the eyes as they scan the page.

I also wanted to impose a self-consistent grammar on my visual elements. I began reading Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art. However, sometimes I am impatient with reading and want to get right to painting. I stopped reading, decided on some rules and applied them to a simple geometric shape: the triangle.

Here are my rules: 1) sepia and brownish yellows were assigned to the older pictures (i.e., those that were taken first), newer pictures were assigned more saturated yellows; 2) each rectangle of my grid represented a photograph; 3) a triangle was inscribed in each rectangle; 4) the apex of the triangle for landscape-formatted photos was positioned at the lower left; 5) the apex of the triangle for a portrait-formatted photo was positioned at the upper left; 6) less interesting photos had a lower slope (i.e., the angle at the apex was small); 7) more interesting photos had a larger slope.

I lightly penciled in the lines leading from one row to the next, but did not develop them as part of the final design. However, I painted a faint blue wash outside the top and bottom lines, to bracket the inner design. In my visual time world, blue represents the present.

Reading a Contact Sheet #1
9″x12″ 140# Cold Pressed Watercolor Block

Comment:

I’m pleased with the results of my self-consisted visual grammar. The lone red panel represents the best picture on the contact sheet.  I consider this work a preliminary sketch and would like to refine it in future compositions.

I developed this composition to be displayed horizontally, but it also works in the vertical format:

Reading a Contact Sheet – Horizontal Format