Proportions

There has been a proportion plan guiding me from the beginning. The over-all proportions of the painting would be close to a “one to square-root-of-two rectangle,” (Square root of 2 = 1.41, the diagonal of a square whose side is 1, roughly near the 1.5 ratio of my 60”X40” canvas.) More important, within the rectangle space there are squares bounded by the edge of the trees on the left, and the god dancing on the right. This way of composing space by putting important boundaries or figures on the edge of a square works to to organize space without a central figure of interest. You find it in Titian and many other old masters. It is a key to the sense of strength and repose in paintings like Titian’s “Fete Champetre.”

At the suggestion of John Hunter, I reviewed the ways Titian dealt with compositions with and without a central figure. Titian’s “Bacchus” has the god at the center. A similar composition, the “Bacchanalia of the Andrians”  is more centrifugal.  (The Andrians were given a magical river of wine by Dionysos, so they drank all the time.) There’s even a foreground exhausted (drunk?) female nude that reminds me of my painting, and a male in a similar state up on the hill in the background. The other dancing and drinking figures are arranged around a dark space in the middle of the crowd. Movement comes  from a diagonal, the slant of the hill which the foreground figure parallels, so that whole crowd might be tumbling  down to the left.

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