It's Black and White

Arthur Wesley Dow

I have recently been thinking a lot about notans, and trying to use them more in my painting process. What, you might ask, is a notan?  "Notan" is a Japanese word that means, roughly, "light-dark balance". I think of a notan as a black and white image of the subject. I am coming to believe that the notan is an invaluable tool in making good compositions, and therefore good paintings.

Left: James McNeill Whistler, "Symphony in White No. 2,
The Little White Girl", oil on canvas, 1864

A painting involves many elements. But at its heart, it's the arrangement of dark and light shapes that makes or breaks the painting. A painting that is broken up into a bunch of random areas of dark and light appears "dot-y" and busy. It's
confusing to the eye. But a painting that is based on a strong, pleasing arrangement of dark and light shapes is a delight to the eye. 

David Dwyer, "Persimmons", oil on canvas, 2013

Nobody explains this better than Mitch Albala, who has written a wonderful essay on the topic. The images above are from Albala. He deconstructed paintings by Whistler and   Dwyer, in order to show the power of the dark/light arrangement. Pretty compelling. Here's what Albala had to say about the Whistler painting:

"The overall shape of the girl beautifully interrupts the dark background. The horizontal and vertical energies, formed by the reverse L-shape of the girl and her arm, form upper and lower dark sections. A circular path is created within the white channels, which helps move the eye through the composition. With just a few major shapes, Whistler’s painting allows our eye to travel through an extremely unified composition."


OK, that may sound like a lot of gobbledygook to you if you're not a painter. But even if you skip the fine print, the point is that something about the human eye moves along certain paths, and longs for certain patterns. It's unconscious. Yet bringing it into the conscious realm allows us to compose paintings in a way that is most pleasing.

Photo by Lesley Powell

Those of us living in the age of Photoshop have an advantage: the "Threshold" function on Photoshop allows us to take a regular photograph and convert it into a notan-like image. Just above is one of my photos with which I did some notan experimentation, as preparation for a painting. It helped me see a strong surround of dark framing the painting. Using photoshop is certainly a short cut, compared to drawing and shading--a new way to approach an old concept!