Backgrounds and Foregrounds

It has been my experience and continues to be an influential factor that backgrounds and foregrounds are indeed a problem for me when it comes to producing a successful painting. There have been a number of paintings where I have struggled to paint the auxiliary stuff around a subject, whereas the main part of the painting was done with a gratifying, concerted effort. The foregrounds and backgrounds seem to take much more time and exasperation, getting perspective reasonably correct, getting colors agreeably satisfying, getting composition into an aesthetically pleasing and enhanced state. That is probably what makes the difference between being competent and being a stellar, blazing genius.


Here are three examples of how a painting changed in the process of trying to find what works. This was a fun rendition of children perched upon horses with their legs too short for the stirrups. Light and shadow on the horses and tack made it very enjoyable to put those parts on canvas. I struggled a little getting the children’s faces looking like they were supposed to. I loved the fence and the poles leaning against the fence and especially the birds sitting on top of the poles. The dirt in the corral and the vegetation were okay, leaving out some of the earthy texture of ever-present horse biscuits. I had tried to get the horizon backgrounds done before starting on the rest of it, but alas, that was a sticky part that kept looking wrong or out-of-place.
Maybe it’s just that others are better at planning ahead than I am. In the third version of this I used photos of the land around this corral instead of guessing about it. The painting gradually metamorphosed into something that was acceptable to the mother of the children who had commissioned the work. It is much more difficult to work on the background when the main part of the painting is done, but it is sometimes a matter of making the background look right when the rest of the painting is in place.

Aside from art there seem to be some analogies that can be made to life that sometimes our backgrounds and foregrounds have to be adjusted to match what the main parts of our mortality look like in a particular moment. Think about it.