During my last painting class, I have tried to work on composition. The different elements of the picture were: a bird (we were meant to do a crane but I found a nice example of an egret instead...), some rocks, and a branch. The idea was that it is ok to 'copy' each individual element, but I had to work on the composition of the picture. It had to 'flow'...Up to now, I have been able to copy with more or less success some nice gongbi paintings, and as such, I never had to worry about composition. The artist already worked it out 'for me'.
So I started by painting my bird, standing on rocks, and looking at two fish. I even added some ripples. Then the idea was to add a background: some more rocks on the right. And that's where it all went wrong... as they were meant to be in the background, I should have used much lighter shades of grey than the rocks in the foreground. Instead, I got carried away by playing with my brush strokes and adding more and more ink, to reach the final result you can see here.
To try and save the picture, I decided to focus the attention of the viewer on the foreground, by adding a pine branch. For once, I am relatively happy with this branch, but it was not enough to remove the focus from the meant-to-be background rocks on the right.
So one way to get around that would be to cut the picture, while leaving a sufficient amount of rocks on the right so that at least we can still see what was meant to be there. I am sure that the painting would be much improved by a nice seal and some beautiful calligraphy. My Mandarin is unfortunately not good enough yet !
