Let’s Make a Scene

How do you determine the composition of the pieces that you make? Is it purely intuitive in that you just start putting things down until you find something you like or do you look to the designs of other artists to get ideas about how to arrange the layers, patterns, and shapes that make up your creations? Perhaps it is mother nature that you get your inspiration from or maybe your work is highly conceptual and designs arise from planning in your sketchbook.

I remember a couple years into being a full-time polymer artist that it struck me that I had no idea why I composed my work the way I did. I definitely leaned toward symmetry and horizontal arrangements but was that because it was something I’d succeeded at previously and therefore it was comfortable or was that really what I needed for what I wanted to express?

To answer that question, I just started asking myself what I was thinking about before and during the design process and I found that when I was working on jewelry, necklaces in particular, I thought about the body and its symmetry but for wall art, or secondarily for adornment, most of my designs seemed to be rooted in scenery. Desert scenes, mountain scenes, scenes of babbling brooks, scenes with roads and streets running off into the distance, and even the scene of a long studio table scattered with work in progress were fodder for my compositional ideas. I just really like the whole picture, especially anything that could be seen as landscape, which helped to explain my penchant for horizontal compositions. From then on, I thought a lot about design in terms of whole scenes and landscape in particular.

I have found the observation of scenery a great way to educate oneself about composition. It doesn’t matter whether you prefer to create one big beautiful leaf or an abstract design with not a single recognizable shape. There are lessons to be learned by observing the scenes around us.

Most of us react emotionally to wide open scenes, especially those that are not part of our day to day because their novelty allows us to look at them with fresh eyes. If are stopped by a scene because it visually strikes you, chances are, there are compositional elements you can draw inspiration from. For instance, looking across a field to the front of a dense forest, you might admire the line of tall trees reaching up to the sky in unison, recognizing how very strong and invincible they appear. Creating a design with a lot of closely arranged vertical lines can impart that same sense of strength. Looking down a long meandering road running through a desert of rusts, hazy purples, and cream colors may feel calm and relaxing to you. You can re-create this atmosphere in a mokume stack of similar colors with long undulating lines as the impressed texture.

Scenes as compositional inspiration is a huge subject since there are so many different types of scenes to draw from but I thought, this week, we could look at work that literally recreates scenes as the template for the designs and from that, you can consider the composition, how it might translate into more abstract elements, if you work in an abstract or purely decorative mode, or how your own imagery can be used to create a scene and convey emotion or atmosphere. But, really, this is about just getting you to consider scenery itself as inspiration, if you don’t already do so. So, let’s go consider.

Set the Scene

When it comes to literal scenes using cane, Wendy Jorre de St Jorre is an absolute master. Inspired by the landscape in and around where she resides in Western Australia, she creates scenes using multiple but visually connected canes for variation. The care she takes in developing these perfectly lined up canes creates scenes that looks seamlessly continuous and varied. Just look at this three-tier box opening this post. It was created with the canes you see below. Wendy made them so that the canes can be re-arranged in multiple ways to make several slightly different scenes. She even inserts a single small scene on the inside of each polymer box as well. She really likes scenery!

Here is a piece from way back by Carol Simmons. These days we associate Carol primarily with her bright colored canes but I have always had a fondness for this piece. The canes are laid out in lines to show the different strata in scenes she saw while at a polymer clay retreat in 2010. The application of canes onto a piece can be so nicely informed by the variations in natural landscape scenes, city scenes, and even scenes you see any room, and it doesn’t have to all be from the same scene. You can take bits from the various scenes you come across and put them together if they are related or you recognize similarities in mood, form, or compositional elements. Carol’s horizontal bands are a mix of things seen in the landscape outside a window and organisms found on seaside rocks. The commonalities she looks to have drawn from seems to be the textures and patterns, made cohesive by repeating the horizontal bands (also likely an element she was seeing in the scenery) but contrasted with a tall vertical form in which it is all framed.

Of course, imagery using canes is not the only way to re-create compositions from scenes. You can also go textural and sculptural. Jo Anne St. James uses cabochon focal bead forms for her scenery inspired, textured and sculpted compositions. They include everything from literal interpretations of beach side scenes to silhouettes of birds and plant life on cool colored backgrounds. You can see here how the Grand Canyon inspired texture and color in a pretty direct interpretation. However, without the reference photo, some of these might come across as abstract textured pieces but are just as interesting when not associated with the actual canyon scene.

Here’s a great example of mixing literal scenery and decorative inspiration in a scenic composition. Karen Harry is very much inspired by the decorative details and symbology of medieval times as well as the Victorian Gothic era but also seems fond of mixing the sources to create her own fantastical scenes. The sky portion of this mixed media mosaic draws from decorative details of these past times while the building on the sloping land next to a stylized sea looks to be a rendition of an actual place Karen is familiar with. The result is an impression of the joy and beauty she draws from the present-day reminders of the past.

Drawing directly from a scene that you see does not have to be about the forms, lines, colors, and patterns only. Often times, we are inspired by the energy of a scene, the literal movement. Think of a waterfall, the ocean crashing against rocks, the rush of clouds ahead of a thunderstorm, the flutter of fabric in the wind, or the coordinated flow and flight of a cloud of starlings. The dynamic energy of a scene may be the entire reason that it captured your attention. Such movement can also be fantastic inspiration for your compositions.

The most impressive piece of visual movement I’ve seen in recent months has to be this mosaic below by Mia Tavonatti. Mia paints in both oils and in mosaic stained-glass. And, yes, saying she “paints” with glass is appropriate, don’t you think? It’s a term commonly associated with her mosaic work in particular. This immense 7’ x 13’ (215cm x 400cm) glass mosaic won second place in the largest and probably most prestigious (and, I think, most lucrative at a $200,000 for 1st place) art competition in the world, Art Prize, in 2010.

Although the woman in the scene is a natural focal point since we are compellingly drawn to faces, her head is slightly cut off, showing a diminished importance. It’s really the energy and color of the scene, particularly the energy in the flow of the fabric and the color variation and contrast between the fabric, the water, and the rocks beneath it, that dominates the subject. (Be sure to click the image and scroll down the page it takes you to see the detailed photos of the glass mosaic work in this piece. It’s just amazing.)

So, really, everything in a scene that catches your eye, from line to texture to color to energy, can be drawn on for inspiration. And re-created scenes, even in the abstract, are something people can readily connect to in your work since landscape and other scenery is familiar to us all.

Leaving the Scene

I feel like I could talk about the inspiration of scenery for quite a bit longer but I’m going to stop here. There is still a lot to do to implement changes for getting the production end of the Tenth Muse Arts business going again and being shorthanded is not helping. I’m also having to learn how to schedule things within limited work hours and not just work every waking hour to get something done when I get behind. It’s not easy! Who would’ve known?

I will be sending something out this week to existing subscribers for the magazine and hopefully a newsletter as well to give you all a bit of an update. It doesn’t look like everything will be in place as of this week, especially with the Thanksgiving holiday coming up, but I have at least two bits of news I’ll be able to share once we get some changes made on the website in the next couple days.

So, I plead once again for your patience and understanding. I just need to arrange everything into an organized and sustainable situation before I start blathering about our new projects and what you can look forward to seeing from Tenth Muse Arts in 2020. Because I know there will be questions and I want to be sure I can answer them without a lot of ifs, ands and buts.

With my focus on Tenth Muse Arts business this week, I haven’t quite finished the mosaic backsplash in the kitchen but being Thanksgiving is at our house this year, all of my breaks between work and other things is on that backsplash. I can’t wait to share that with you too!

In the meantime, look around you wherever you go and see the beauty in the scenes before you. What details are you drawn to? What are the feelings and emotions they bring to the surface for you? Grab inspiration from these observations and see what you can transfer into your studio time. I’m sure a good number of you in the US will be out and about, road tripping to be with family for Thanksgiving or getting out to enjoy time with visiting family. Take advantage of the less common scenes you’ll see out the car window or that you’ll stroll by while out and about. And we will chat again next week if not before! Very happy Thanksgiving to my American readers!