Massing In
Art and Art Teaching on the Internet.





Any picture relies for its overall effect on the broad masses of light and dark which organize and orchestrate the whole. This means that the artist must establish, at the outset, the pattern of light and dark over the entire picture area.

Islands of light; pools of dark.

The picture is a flat surface, and it is useful to think of it as in one way, a kind of a map in which we map out not continents and oceans, but the two major masses, the province of light and the province of dark.
If it is not light, it is dark.
It is necessary to be quite clear in your own mind whether a particular part of your picture qualifies as light or as dark. Do not confuse yourself with "halftones", "reflected lights", and "local colour". An observer at the time of the Impressionists (whether friendly or unfriendly) wrote that,"Impressionism is painting done through half closed eyes", and there is much value in this. Simply squint through your eyelashes until hardly anything remains visible. You will notice something interesting: all the darker parts of your subject merge together into obscurity; this is as we may expect, but the light parts retain their brightness, presenting us with a simple, clear, natural massing of light and dark. (As a small child my sister wanted to know why I squinted like this when I drew, and it took about 40 years before I could give her an answer.) So, simply look in this way; if it appears light to you, it belongs in the province of light, and if not, it is part of dark area.
Tone.

The word "tone" does not refer to light and shadow, on the one hand, nor to the intrinsic lightness or darkness(local colour) of any object, on the other. It is simply a scale from the lightest light to the darkest dark we happen to see, regardless of the reason why anything might appear the way it does; and could be compared to the tonic solfa, the tonal scale used by musicians. Any number of steps can be imposed onto this range of tonality, and we shall work with a scale of 10, with 0 standing for the lightest light and 10 for the darkest dark.

The picture and the "reality".
There is a funny paradox in the way we sometimes distinguish between what we call "real" and what we call "picture". In the first place the picture is as real as anything else, but more importantly, whatever reality may be, that is not what we paint. All that we can paint is our visual experience of this world, something we could best call a visuality. In painting we deal with two such visualities, the one on our canvas, and the other that of our subject, and we need to apply our tonal scale to both. In nature our task is to observe, in painting it is to order (not as we like, but as nature dictates).

The great division.
On the one hand light, on the other, dark. At this stage we have to ignore the delicate nuances of tone we think we can see, and to simplify everything into these two units or masses.
Scumble.
Use a large long-bristle brush (I like a no.8 filbert), and in true colour, mix the basic dark tones of your subject.

This is the first page of the teaching unit on "Massing in".
If you are interested in enrolling for his course, go back to Ryno Swart. Painting in Oils.

You can learn more of Ryno's ideas on art
in his regular newsletters, for the Love of Art, or visit his home page.