Thomas Hoyne

Square Format

Jaume Laporta was born in Barcelona, in 1940, to a family with a long artistic tradition. He started painting when he was 14 years old.

After moving to the Costa Brava, he found himself attracted to the beauty of the Mediterranean, and decided to devote himself to capturing it's fishing and seafaring life. 

In his oil and pastel paintings, Laporta tries to maintain a realistic feel while playing with his media and brushstrokes  to avoid slavish reproduction of the real world. 

I seem to be posting a lot of square format paintings lately. I often wonder if CD covers, and the square thumbnails on Flickr etc, have increased public acceptance of square images.

An artist once told me many years ago: "Never try to sell square paintings, people don't like them." But public acceptance of square canvases seems to have increased since then, perhaps due to CD covers and the square thumbnails in Flickr etc. 

It's best to chose a format that suits the subject, but chosing a square format can help an artist to break out of cliched compositions.

More from Vose Galleries

Bruce Crane, Boats at Rest, 16 x 24 inches

Movement

Edgard Pieter Jozef Farasyn, 1858-1938, 28 x 43 cm


Painterliness in the waves and sky, contrasted to the crisp fine detail of the fishing boats, gives a sense of movement.

Though the brushstrokes in the waves are painterly, they conform to the planes of the waves.

Repetition and Rhythm

Horold Harvey, 1874-1941, Waiting on the Tide

Hendrik Willem Mesdag, 1831-1915, German, Pinks in the Breakers

Both these works exploit the visually stimulating rhythms produced by the repetition of an element, in this case the masts of fishing boats. The more irregular the arrangement of the repeated elements, the more visually energetic and aesthetically satisfying. The lines vary in length, thickness, angle and spacing. By avoiding outward-leaning masts at the edges of the composition, which would tend to lead the eye out of the image, these painters prevent the visual energy from dissipating. 

These two works use a limited palette of greys enlivened here and there with a hint of red.

English painter Harold Harvey grew up in Cornwall and studied art under Norman Garstin, and then in Paris at the Académie Julian under Constant and Laurens; after his time abroad he moved back to Cornwall where he followed the style of Newlyn Artists; the artist is best known for his seaside paintings.

Space

Fishing Boats at Sea, 50 x 60 cm

German Grobe - German 1857-1938

The shapes of the boats are interesting in themselves, but also the shape of the space between them. It's an interesting exercise to compose a painting with the spaces between objects in mind. Paying attention to the "negative space" around objects is a good way of making sure you are drawing or painting the real shapes of objects, rather than the mind's stored, habitual preconception of what a boat or a wave looks like. In the composition of paintings, spaces between objects are just as important as the shapes of the objects themselves.

In these two works, the German seascape painter German Grobe has filled the narrow space between two boats with bright foam, helping to make the negative space an element in its own right.

A common mistake is to leave to much boring empty space around the objects in a composition so that the negative spaces are lost. The work above shows a good balance between positive shapes and negative spaces. In the work below, Grobe has decided to make the space outweigh the objects, which gives a sense of the sea's power over the fishing boats. The complex textures in the waves and reflective sand make the relatively large space around the objects interesting enough to avoid the problem of lost negative space.

Christopher Blossom

After the Last Drift

Placing a figure at the exact centre of a painting can create an almost religious feeling of stillness. Here it adds to the sunset mood of reverie. The figure also acts as a link between the lower and upper halves of the composition.

Hermanus Koekkoek Snr - Dutch

detail

Details like the wet patch on the sail, dampened by the spray, show the amazing observational powers of these Old Masters of marine art, unaided by cameras. To those unfamiliar with the North Sea and The Channel, it really does have that silty grey appearance.

Joaquin Sorolla - Spanish

Barcas en la Playa,

22 x 37 inches

The lively dance of Sorolla's brush gives  his paintings their spirit and energy. The only way to get this kind of confident fluency is to spend a lot of time painting. Sorolla seems to have been very prolific in his output.

Aelbert Cuyp

detail, National Gallery, London

When people hear the term "marine art" they often think of paintings on the walls of a stuffy men's club, but the best examples of painting in any genre are a treasure trove of learning for the oil painter.

Paul Jean Clays - Belgian

Ships Lying near Dordrecht

Joaquin Sorolla - Spanish

Boats Leaving the Harbour, Asturias, 9 x 16 cm

 
Boats on the Beach, 20 x 30 cm

Irving Ramsey Wiles - American, 1861 - 1948

Scallop Boats, Peconic, 9.5 x 13 inches

White Sloop, Peconic Bay, 21 x 28 inches

The brushwork has a wonderfully relaxed painterliness that suggests an artist who has been weilding a brush for many years and really knows what he is doing.

Henry Scott Tuke

The Run Home, 1902, 162 x 119 cm

Allan J. Hook

Luggers Picking up Moorings, 1886

William Lionel Wyllie 1851 - 1931

A Whole Gale of Wind

The Lifeboat

Dawn after a Storm, 36 x 24 cm

Terrick Williams

Grey Morning, 10 x 14 inches

Scott Waddell

The Hunt

Small Boats - American painters

Dufner, Midsummer Clouds


Irving Ramsey Wiles, USA, 21 x 28 inches


Vern Broe, USA, 18 x 24 inches

German Seestucke

Andreas Achenbach -
Fischkutter auf Sturmische See


Carl Frederick Schulz
Storm Approaching the English Coast


Mauritz deHaas, 13 x 20 inches