On the Horizon – Perspectives from The Artist’s Road

On the Horizon
Perspectives from The Artist’s Road

The Passage     48 x 48″     Oil     John Hulsey

   In all landscape painting, one of the first and most important considerations in designing a picture is answering the question of where the horizon will be. This sounds very simple, but some knowledge about visual perception is required in order to make a sound decision. It really matters to the success of a picture to know why the horizon line is put where.

   “When the horizon line’s at the bottom, it’s interesting. When the horizon’s at the top, it’s interesting. When the horizon’s in the middle, it’s boring as shit”

                                                                     – John Ford to Stephen Spielberg in The Fablemans

   That quote from The Fablemans is partially right and pretty funny, but isn’t always true. Ford made many western movies located where the sky plays an enormous role in the feeling and impact of a scene. Especially in Monument Valley, Arizona, where so many westerns were shot, it was natural to set the horizon and cameras low to exaggerate the massiveness of the rock chimneys and buttes contrasted with the smallness of the people below. Then, it was easy to have John Wayne walk up closer to the camera and suddenly appear to be so much larger than life against that dramatic landscape. Sometimes that composition was used to communicate the feeling of an oppressively vast, searing hot sky.

   Conversely, setting the horizon high and filling two-thirds of the frame with landscape emphasizes the importance of the figures and action happening on the ground. It can be a very effective placement when painting a road which runs downhill and maybe even disappears until reappearing in the distance. Movie-makers give a lot of thought to where that horizon is in shooting landscapes, and they plan every expensive shot they make in advance. Composition for effect.
 
   A centered horizon line can also work effectively if what is in front of it is skillfully handled. A centered horizon sometimes may communicate blandness, boredom or depression in an industrial or city scene. Although some desert scapes can certainly appear bleak and hopeless, those are not qualities we usually want in our paintings. A centered horizon can be useful in a scene where some major large masses take up most of the image and serve also to frame a bit of the distance. This open spot of horizon is sometimes called the “exit”. Studies in eye tracking while looking at paintings, show that people subconsciously look for the exits in a landscape or city scape. We don’t like to feel trapped—not even in a painting. If one does not provide an exit, then there has to be a beautifully intriguing reason to stay in there. Monet explored and perfected a means for painting his waterlily pond without eye exits, effectively creating a way for the subject to be suggested by the artist and interpreted by the viewer. In those large, courageous compositions, the horizon is gone and the separations between earth and sky dissolve into a nebulous space of color and atmosphere.
 
   Since we are principally designing to create or recreate feeling, it helps to study a bit of the psychology of these seemingly simple first decisions in our compositions and initial sketches before committing to paint.There is a world of possibilities available to us, and it all begins with a simple line on the horizon.