All artists see the world through their own particular view points and it is always exciting to see the variety of creative results. Many use some form of graphic elements such as dots, stripes, dabs and squiggles to form their images.
Painters, many of them from the Impressionist and Post Impressionist movements, have used dots in their “open color” techniques. Everyone is familiar with the beautiful paintings by Monet, Pissarro, Signac, Van Gogh, Seurat and Klimt, who all painted dots in some size or shape.
RECTANGLES AND STRIPES
Other painters, Mondrian, Morris Louis, Ad Rhinehardt, among them, have painted rectangles and stripes in abstracts. Contemporary painter, Chuck Close creates his huge portraits with an intricate pattern of dots within squares.
It would be fascinating to know what experiences inspired these painters to use the particular design element they chose.
MY OWN WORLD VIEW
I know why I started using random dots in my landscapes several years ago. It is a way to create foliage and dappled leaves in my forest scenes. I also use them in graduated sizes to give depth to paths leading into the trees. Every time I travel and look at the scenery, the leaves form a dot pattern in my mind and that is what I paint.
Recently, so gradually that I was unaware of the change, my world view has evolved from dots to stripes. I believe it started when I installed two aspen tree trunks under my studio skylights. The striations of their barks inspired stripes in the tree trunks of my paintings and I repeated a more subtle group of stripes in the background.
The rest of the change must have occurred during a trip to Idaho and Montana this summer. Instead of the foliage I’m used to seeing Oregon, there were vistas of wheat fields and distant hills – all turning into stripes in my mind.
Below is an example of my use of dots in a 36″ x 60″ oil painting entitled “Dappled Autumn”. Also shown is a detail of my new “stripe” technique in another oil painting.
