[^ Study of Brooklyn Rooftops #04072013. oil on panel. 5 x 7". © Bullock Online 2013]
"When the field of vision is confused or the material too close, the zoom principle will be useful --- either a card with a cut-out viewing space, or simply the concentration of sight on to one small area to the deliberate exclusion of everything else."
- John O'Connor, Landscape Drawing and Painting (1978), ch. 3: Selection of Image
I love walking around the boroughs and looking at the rooftops with their haphazard arrangements of walls, ledges, cooling units, skylights, water towers, and window panes. Any monotony that occurs at street-level seems to resolve itself up there. Almost always something interesting is composed against the sky.
I carry a medium-gray, adjustable view-finder with me to help block in the subject (and block out everything else). I might look a little weird squinting through this with my head tilted back, and sometimes people slow down and look up to see what has my attention. The view finder visually isolates the subject, framing it so that the shapes and proportions of its elements become clear. It is a "5" on the gray scale ranging from "1" to "10", which is very helpful in determining the tones of colors. Whether one is doing a sketch or a painting, mastering tones is important, and something which I still struggle with. You can buy the View Catcher here.
This small oil painting, a study really, is from notes in my sketchbook from November 2011. Working from notes is a very different process than painting outdoors and, as such, I achieved a different sense than I would have with the plein air approach. I think it has a more calibrated, cubist sense to it, a geometry that I wanted to hold onto as it became more clear. I deleted all minor details like satellite dishes and wires so I could focus on the composition and tonal arrangements.
Annoyingly, my camera has created a slight "curve" effect to the left and right margins.
(Somehow, I had overlooked doing a post for March. This may be the first time in the five-or-so years I have been doing this blog that I forgot to do a monthly post.)
