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Tag: focal point

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Monday Morning Art School: what is a focal point in art?

All Flesh is as Grass, oil on linen, 30X40, $5072 framed, includes shipping and handling in continental US.

A focal point in art is the area of a composition that draws the viewer’s eye and holds his or her attention. It’s the visual center of interest.

Artists create focal points primarily with contrast in value, hue and chroma, but other elements of design also support focal points. These include lines that guide the viewer’s eye, textural changes, and placement. Detail and complexity will naturally draw the viewer, as will isolation (which is usually also an exercise in contrast). And everything else being equal, a large object will dominate.

Why do focal points matter?

A good visual composer, just like a good musician, guides his or her viewer through the composition. Focal points engage the viewer, and lead them through the space in a calculated way.

Saskatchewan Grain Elevators, oil on archival canvasboard, 8X10, $522 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Should a work of art have just one focal point?

Generally, most paintings have more than one focal point, although occasionally an artist will let just one section of the canvas dominate. Good examples are Rembrandt van Rijn’s self-portraits, where humanity, as expressed through his face, is everything.

A single focal point creates a clear, strong emphasis, but the downside is that there’s no path forward into the painting. Multiple focal points create movement and tension, leading the viewer’s eye through the composition. The longer a person looks at an artwork, the more they engage with it.

Early Morning at Moon Lake, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $348 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

How to prioritize focal points

You, the artist, are the boss here. You should ponder the hierarchy of focal points before you ever pick up a brush. (That’s one reason for a good value sketch.) What is the strongest focal point? What is its spatial relationship to the others? One focal point should lead the band, the others should follow merrily along.

Make sure none of your focal points are at the edge of your canvas or leading off the page. Think of your focal points as elements that are connected compositionally, connected by color harmonies, lines, and value.

Are focal point and subject the same?

While focal point and subject often overlap, they are not always the same thing.

The subject is what the artwork is about—the main idea or theme. The focal point is where the viewer’s eye is drawn first.

In many situations, they might be identical; for example, a black dog running in the snow would be both the focal point and the subject. But in Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Red Hat, the subject is the girl and her stupendous hat, but the focal points are the side of her face, her lace fichu, and the flash of red at the far right of her hat. The focal points are masterfully drawn down the canvas by a single line of light. Rembrandt’s The Night Watch is a portrait of the militia of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch but none of the supporting militiamen are focal points at all.

Athabasca River Confluence, 9X12, $696 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

How do you apply this?

In your next painting or drawing, make a conscious effort to set out and emphasize focal points, using value, hue, chroma and line. Can you articulate where they are and how you want the viewer to read them?

This spring’s painting classes

Zoom Class: Advance your painting skills (whoops, the link was wrong in last week’s posts)

Mondays, 6 PM – 9 PM EST
April 28 to June 9

Advance your skills in oils, watercolor, gouache, acrylics and pastels with guided exercises in design, composition and execution.

This Zoom class not only has tailored instruction, it provides a supportive community where students share work and get positive feedback in an encouraging and collaborative space. 

Zoom class: Signature series

Tuesdays, 6 PM – 9 PM EST
April 29-June 10

This is a combination painting/critique class where students will take deep dives into finding their unique voices as artists, in an encouraging and collaborative space. The goal is to develop a nucleus of work as a springboard for further development.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Monday Morning Art School: Subject vs. focal point

The People’s Census at Bethlehem, 1566, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, courtesy Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

The number one question you must ask about your painting is: is it boring? If your painting is boring, nobody is going to engage with it.

One way to do keep things interesting is to manipulate where you put the subject of your painting. You don’t need to plop the subject in the center of your canvas and the subject does not necessarily have to be the focal point.

Consider Pieter Brueghel the Elder‘s masterpiece, The Census of Bethlehem, above. It’s unlikely that Brueghel consulted a text about composition, because those things didn’t exist back in the 16th century. He came up with this visual trick on his own and used it over and over.

The Procession to Calvary, 1564, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, courtesy Kunsthistorisches Museum. This is a veritable “Where’s Waldo” of a painting.

The subject is not in the middle of the canvas. Nor is it the focal point. In fact, the subject will only be clear to you if you know the Bible story about Mary and Joseph traveling to be counted in Bethlehem. Because of the overall energy of the canvas, you’re engaged enough to hunt for them, and to realize that Mary and Joseph are at the very bottom of the canvas, heading towards the census-taker at the bottom left.

That’s different from the focal points, which are within the swirl of activity that made up the daily life of a medieval village.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1558, either Pieter Brueghel the Elder or a close copy thereafter, courtesy Royal Museums of Fine Arts

Brueghel often made the subjects of his painting seem like almost an afterthought to the big scene. Another great example of this is Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, about which William Carlos Williams wrote:

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning.

In that short poem, Williams says everything about Brueghel’s compositional technique.

The Peasant Wedding, 1566-69, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, courtesy Kunsthistorisches Museum. Brueghel also painted many genre paintings, meant to illustrate a known story or moral argument.

So, what’s the difference?

The focal point is a visual engagement, whereas the subject is what the painting is about. The subject of a painting can be a story or fable, as were Brueghel’s paintings. It can be an object or person. Or, in the case of abstraction, it can be nothing at all.

Focal points are something quite different. They are the points that your eye rests on at it moves through a painting.

What draws the human eye to a specific passage in a painting?

  • Contrast in value, hue and chroma, with value being the biggest driver of the three. If you have a dark shape next to a light shape, the eye tends to look at that place.
  • Detail. Assuming the whole painting is not overloaded with detail, if there’s a lot of detail in a passage, that is where the eye will go first.
  • Line. Lines within the composition act like arrows, drawing your eye to the focal points.

Is there just one focal point in the painting?

I sure hope not, because your job as the composer is to get the human eye to dance its way through the composition, to engage the viewer for as long as you can keep them interested. The longer they spend looking at your picture, the more involved they become with it.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025: