Drawing & Painting Concepts

More Notan

More Notan : What makes a strong painting

I have a folder of collected landscape paintings, paintings that I think are particularly strong. I have included some of them below. As I looked through them, I realized how almost every one relied heavily on the value relationships to make a strong composition. I have made notan studies of several of them to help you see how strong the value relationships are.

Each of the above paintings have a strong overall notan design in black and white and each of the above paintings are strong, but this last one below, in my opinion is the weakest of all the paintings on this page. I see the notan of this one as less engaging as well. It seems to be overwhelmingly dark. It lacks a balance of interesting white shapes amongst the black. Not that all paintings have to have 50% white and 50% black. I just think the overall design of black and white shapes is weaker and hence the final painting suffers. What do you think?