Composing with tone T
Our natural instinct is to compose a picture with shape or colour, yet artist Aldo Balding explains why considering tonal variations can be the key to a successful painting
he composition and design of a painting is a dominant factor in a successful work of art. Even if
one manages to convincingly render the beauty of the human form, if the painting itself is poorly composed, it is like listening to a beautiful passage of music in a mundane sonata. When we look out of the window we
see a multitude of colours and tonal values, yet we only have mere pigments and a perceived tonal value range of maybe 9 or 10 increments to depict the effect of light in nature. So, the real question is how do we
74 Artists & Illustrators
ABOVE Arrangement in Blue, oil on canvas, 41x30cm “I kept this painting simple with two dark values and three light”
translate those values pictorially? When I look at the work of artists that I admire, I can see how they have created a convincing rendering of form with a limited tonal value range. 17th-century painters such as Frans Hals and Diego Velázquez employed their knowledge of tonal values, as did John Singer Sargent after them. In fact, Sargent’s paintings often show no more than five different areas of tonal values: three lighter tones and two areas of shadow. What happens when one uses more than five? The result can be chaos and disorder.
In my painting, Arrangement in
Blue, I have attempted to keep the composition simple as Sargent did. The entire painting falls within five distinctive tonal values: two dark values and three light ones. To make this simple composition
work, I started out with a series of repetitive diagonal lines to create a very rigid layout, but then distracted the eye from them by varying the degree of blending at the edge of each tonal area. The diagonals can be seen in the right arm, chair back (under the arm)
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