Tip: Taking Liberties

I have heard the term “artistic license” for many years without really understanding its value. In many cases the term is used in a negative way to justify the distortion of truth or to rationalize doing something distasteful. I like to think of artistic license as the freedom to alter what we see in order to increase the artistic value of an image. In painting, this almost always includes the omission of details and the simplification of shapes, but it can also include adding elements that don’t exist, exaggerating colors, or even relocating key parts of the image. Anything is fair game if it improves the overall effect.

Paul Strisik wrote in The Art of Landscape Painting that “there will always be times when you’ll want to change what you see in order to get closer to the psychological truth of the subject.” I am not sure what he means by “psychological truth” but I am beginning to understand that I must take liberties from what I see in order to get the effects that I want.

Strisik goes on to give an example of taking liberties using gradation, or the range of light and dark tones in a subject. He said the following:

“Since gradation is so important, I introduce it into a picture even if I don’t actually see it. Corrugated metal farm roofs, for example, often reflect the light as a single brilliant glare; you can’t see a hint of gradation. But you won’t express the brilliance of such a roof by painting the entire mass with white and yellow pigment. The roof glows with the reflected energy of the sun, while paint is just paint. When I painted [Saw Mill, Vermont] the roof of the mill reflected light like a mirror. I purposely took advantage of some rusty spots and made the roof gradate toward a few key highlights, working up to an explosion of brilliance.”

Taking these kinds of artistic liberties is what enables some artists to consistently produce great works of art while others don’t. Anybody can reproduce a naturally great scene but it takes a true artist to find striking beauty in most images.

Let's consider Stapleton Kearn’s recent posting on values.

He shares the image he used as reference and also the painting he created from it. Notice how different the two images appear even though he was painting on location from life. Here is part of what he had to say about the liberties he took.

“I have simplified the scene a lot, and I have left out a lot of stuff, but I have done something more. I have set up a big pattern of light and shade, my values, and I have imposed them on the scene. I have ‘enslaved’ my values to my design. My design is more important in the hierarchy of my painting than transcribing the actual values before me."

“I wanted to simplify the entire foreground into a big shadow shape. The benefit for me in this was that it set up my middle ground to be in a contrasting bright light. If I hadn't dropped the value of the foreground, the middle ground light wouldn't have registered on the viewer. Even though I could see all of that stuff in the foreground, I deliberately ‘lost’ it all into the big shadow shape I created."

I have always loved Vermeer’s work. As realistic as his images are you might be surprised at the liberties he took in some of his most famous paintings. The following is a great video showing how several of his works were created. The one dedicated to The Music Lesson shows many wonderful examples of the changes Vermeer made to enhance his composition or increase visual effect in some way.

Artistic license is the liberty for an artist to adjust what he or she sees in real life to make the 2-dimensional representation of that image more effective. It is not license to do anything, but permission to improve the composition, increase harmony, enhance focus, and other legitimate artistic enhancements.