Site Selection

I’ve been reading Mitchell Albala’s book Landscape Painting. One of the first things that struck me about it is that he divides the usual chapter on “composition” into two chapters: Site Selection and Composition. This is the first time I’ve seen site selection discussed so explicitly, and it seems to me to be an excellent idea because as he explains, a lot of attractive scenes don’t make good paintings.

Albala sums up his thoughts on choosing a good site by saying:

“A landscape painter’s subject can be almost anything, but the choice is never arbirtrary. A potential site must contain the types of visual cues painters rely on to differentiate forms and suggest depth.”

He goes on to explain those cues in more detail: patterns of light/shade that create a sense of volume, overlap and scale, distinct foreground, middle ground and background, and linear perspective. No new concepts, just applied a bit earlier in the painting process (i.e, before it starts!).

He also discusses types of scenes that are problematic, including “walls” of trees. He says, “They appear to be dimensional in real life, but to create an illusion of space in a painting, they must have clear patterns of lights and darks to define structure.” So the photo on the left below wouldn’t be a good choice of scene to paint, although in real life it was quite attractive, while the scene of the boys fishing has much better depth cues. Next time I go plein air painting, I’ll be thinking of this chapter before I set up my easel!