Focal Points

an essay on painting

I sometimes hear it said, to my continual astonishment, that a painting ought to have one strong focal point. Why? I suppose this is intended to inspire a feeling of dramatic concentration.

But in fact a single focal point makes a picture dull and dead. No natural scene, nor any passage in a person’s life, nor any moment in our mental lives, is so impoverished. Indeed, in performing for the public as a storyteller I have definitely learned that any drama needs a minimum of three vivid characters. Less makes insufficient fodder for the viewer’s imagination. Concentration is not produced by an absence of focal points but by manifold harmonies between them so that the viewer may imagine them merging across the space between. And of course confusion, when a storyteller wishes it, arises from their dissonances.

Others sometimes say that a clever painter may arrange multiple focal points in such a way to lead the viewer’s eye along a path. This is certainly much better than a single one, especially if the path describes one of the shapes which instinctively inspire some feeling in the human mind. It might be a square to lend a feeling of stability, the open ended “S” that’s called “curve of beauty”, a long diagonal for speed and vigor, or such as that. Of course the path from one point of attraction to the next must be depicted clearly, probably by connecting lines arranged between.

But I would argue that a composition of this kind is prone to two interacting faults: It may fall to pieces when a viewer sets their eye to wandering freely and it may lack surprise. Surprising discoveries are wanted in an artwork as they are in life. And our surprise, actually, is not aroused by either unconnected things nor that which seems inevitable, but by finding things connected in unexpected ways. Thus comes our marvelous sensation of assembling a discovery. And the greatest satisfaction is experienced when, scanning round about, we then discover signs of unforeseen connections permeating our field of view. Disappointment comes from irresolvable disjunctions, boredom from uniformity, resistance from compulsion.

There certainly are great paintings where the viewer’s eye is powerfully urged along a certain path but they are ones in which the difficulties have been overcome. So is there some alternative idea for composition with multiple focal points? Let’s seek a metaphor in performance work again.

Imagine a scene of final confrontation and resolution where the main actors of a play are gathered on the stage. As they take their turns the audience beholds their separate personalities, then their relationships with each of the others and finally likenesses between them. A web is woven.

Now suppose you made a picture with the points of main attraction distributed about the surface and the space between them filled with gradients of various sorts, offering continuous interest to the eye along all possible paths. For example: Suppose you laid out a dark vertical thing, a bright vertical thing, a bright horizontal and a dark horizontal. Then you could fill the space with deliberately placed gradations of light and orientation. Surprise arises when the viewer realizes that one distinct thing has transformed to another. Further satisfaction comes when they take this hint and glance around and find transformation everywhere.

Of course bright/dark and vertical/horizontal are only two of the polarities which human vision hurries to comprehend. Da Vinci’s "Mona Lisa" lures the eye to human face, human hands and a mysterious comparatively amorphous region, all mediated by intervening curves. Van Gogh’s "Starry Night" offers heaven, valley, habitations, mountains and trees, mediated chiefly by their colors.

And that takes us to a deeper wider plane of work. If we emulate the greatest painters in spreading out a picture's focal points at various widely separated places in the viewer's mind – a larger space than any canvas – then whatever visual cues of mediation we provide become amplified by the mind's strong desire to integrate its inner doings.

Speak simultaneously to several different functions of human visual perception. The various dialects of Modern Art have well explored the means to do this sort of thing. For example, you might offer fodder to the mind's proclivity for reading human postures or faces, while also imitating the kind of variations in the visual field that are made by mood and sound. You might craft surrealistic shapes like Dali's, but with their colors weighted like Matisse and arranged in musical rhythms as per Mondrian. If you also offer clues of harmony among these things, the viewer's yearning to understand the world is conjured up to yield a rich and full experience indeed.

Once a viewer steps into the journey of a picture of this kind, it is as though they've gone to see a Shakespeare play; they find themselves immersed in a world of chiming echoes.