Ken Goshen and The Art of Composition

Good morning and welcome to the Art of Composition. Thanks for joining me today. I appreciate it. So today I want to take a look at a painting by Ken Goshen. I can't remember where I came across his work but I fell in love with it and I spent some time last week analyzing some of his paintings using the harmonic armature and that's what I'm going to do today. This won't be a long video but I just want to demonstrate how the modern artist can use the harmonic armature to lock in their subject, create vertical and horizontal divisions using the harmonic armature. I did purchase Ken's video on composition. I have a link to it on my home page. You can scroll down to the bottom. It's $15. It's worth the money. The only thing I will say though, he doesn't talk about the harmonic armature but if you analyze some of his work you'll clearly see especially some of his finished products, his finished paintings and I consider this one a finished painting. It's pretty obvious what's going on if you understand design and of course the harmonic armature and so on. So let me get into that. It's not going to be a long video so let's get started. All right so this is the same painting with the harmonic armature drawn out and I can fill in a few areas. Let me just let me demonstrate here where some of these divisions are coming from and then what I'll do is I'll bring up the the painting with a more elaborate grid on it but just a few things to point out. First of all, let me thin that line up just a notch. You have this vertical, this dominant vertical right here and that's being derived from this intersecting diagonal lines right there. So right away you've got that dominant vertical and it runs all the way down her arm. Okay you also have a horizontal line here being locked in with these intersecting diagonal lines. You have another one right here. You have this diagonal line being played out with the arm right. You have this diagonal line locking in the side of the head. You have another one here and I will point out more but just pointing out a few you've got this diagonal line being played out. So you can see right away how the artist is is locking in their subject and I'm going to show another image with a little bit more elaborate lines on it. All right so here's the same painting with dropping all the verticals and horizontals. So let me highlight those again. You have this vertical here and again I'll thin that up just a little bit. You've got that dominant vertical right there and like I said I can bring this all the way down because it locks in the arm. You have this vertical being derived from this intersection here. You've got this diagonal line crossing that point. This vertical drops a horizontal there and then I can drop that vertical right there. So they're connected right. You have this being framed in. If I could just draw it right that would be great. There you have again this horizontal line here and then these divisions lead into other divisions and you can see this happening and I'm just going to highlight these in yellow of how the artist is locking in these elements here and again this is that diagonal line there. Like I said you have this diagonal line from the armature and then you have this intersection here with this vertical coming here. It intersects this diagonal line here and then it locks in the top of the head and I'll show this with another one of these paintings as well but I can bring this vertical down because it connects to this point and you can see all this coming together. You can see how these elements are being locked in right. There's certain divisions that the artist can use with the armature. Certain diagonal lines is locking in the chin here and this is how the armature works. I know this is a little bit quick today but it gives you an idea of what you can do with the armature with not a tremendous amount of lines. Like I said if I can just draw this straight it'd be great. There you go. Frames in the side of the head so everything's being framed in. You have another vertical here locking in the side of the face right there. Generally speaking in a masterwork most everything is accounted for. You have elements being locked in here and this application is not cooperating today but you got one locked in here. Then of course you have this one extending down to that point. Things are framed in. Aristides talks about this in classical painting atelier. You frame in your subject. You create vertical and horizontal divisions but it's not a lot. It's not a crazy amount of lines but you can see the lines matter. There's a reason for the lines in other words. They're not just random lines. They're not just throwing down lines just for the sake of lines to you know to look like you know you're really important in what you're doing. They actually have a function and that function is framing in creating vertical and horizontal divisions using diagonal lines and you can play around with this all you want. There's a reason for all of this and it's important to point out. Again like I said I do recommend Ken's video. It's on composition. It's $15. It's worth the $15. I believe it's about two hours long and it was a Skype session. You can find it on my homepage. Check it out. Thanks for joining me today. I appreciate it as always.