One Table Left, oil on canvas panel, (60x60cm)

Capture your viewers' attention by introducing pattern when designing your paintings with Bob Brandt.

The painting above is basically a pattern of blue shapes, punctuated by the brown chair-backs. Note the man standing at top left is looking back at the only available table, which is bottom-right. His eye-line crosses the diagonal of the backs of customers, which is orientated from bottom-left to top-right. Artists enjoy this kind of tease!

Fibonacci

The Fibonacci series is a set of numbers that was explored by Indian mathematicians in the sixth century but only introduced to the Western World by Fibonacci, a mathematician from Pisa, in 1202.

In that series, each number is created by adding together the two numbers before it. Starting with 1, the series therefore runs: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and so on, and the significance of this series is that it is frequently found in natural objects, like the petals and seeds in a flower head or the growth of nautilus shells.

The series is also linked to the proportions observed in the Golden Rectangle.

Attractive designs

Exhibition Visitors, oil on canvas panel, (60x60cm)

It is hard to know whether John Ruskin was aware of the relevance of the numbers when he wrote his hugely influential Elements of Drawing (1856–7). In one passage he shows drawings of a series of clumps of leaves, describing clumps of three or five leaves as being ‘prettier’ that a clump of two.

Some designs do seem to be more attractive than others, but it is easy to fall into the trap of trying to rationalise on some kind of scientific basis why this may be so. The fact remains that we find looking at patterns of shapes, colours and collections of objects interesting, and this interest in patterns for their own sake has led to the development of distinctive branches of fine art, including the geometrical abstractionism of Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley and of course Maurits Escher. Apart from his well-known drawings of ‘impossible’ buildings and staircases, it is worth looking at the many black-and-white designs he made in which one set of shapes morphs into another, for example a flight of ducks merging into a school of fish.

Using an arrangement of colours and shapes to entrance the eye also plays its part when designing predominantly representational pictures, so when we have chosen a particular subject or scene to paint, perhaps the next step might be to consider how this might be incorporated into a pleasing and interesting pattern that fills the canvas.

Demonstration: Andros Afternoon

Andros Afternoon, oil on canvas panel, (60x60cm)

I knew that the pattern for this painting would be complex and involve two elements – the slatted sunshade over the group and its corresponding set of shadow lines on the scene beneath, with a contrasting vertical pattern being provided by the frames of the folding chairs, echoed in the roof supports on the right.

This basic pattern was to be played against the tiled flooring, the knotted trees and the distant view of the town across the bay. The apparent subject of the painting, the diners, would be almost incidental.