Carlson’s 4 Value Planes
September 23, 2009
Men laying sod.
I got several days behind on my weekly posting schedule because of a couple of landscaping projects. In addition to being a painter I am also a landscape designer. I design landscapes for residential clients and approach the projects as a general contractor approaches a construction job. That means I oversee a network of subcontractors who perform the various aspects necessary to complete the installation. I love it, not as much as painting, but enough to thoroughly enjoy my involvement with it. So, look for two posts this week as I play catch up.
We left off at the end of several consecutive posts discussing “The Form Principle“. The last in that thread was a “still life demo” which showed how to transmit form using the “Five Types of Light” as an approach. At the end of that post I promised to explain how all of that applies to landscape painting. So here goes….
I was first exposed to “the Five Types of Light” when they were emphasized at a workshop with Scott L. Christensen. After that I began to notice in videos and books that, whether they used the terms or not, all great painters are basically painting the Five Types of Light.
Also emphasized at the aforementioned workshop were the writings of John Fabian Carlson. Carlson was born in Kalmar, Sweden in 1874 and died in NYC in 1945. He was a student of American artist/illustrators Frank Vincent Dumond and Harrison Birge. Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Painting, first published in 1929, is widely considered the ultimate landscape painters instruction manual. The book’s content is so valuable that I place it at the top of my list of favorites. (That would be a good topic for a future article, my favorite art books. Someone please remind me if I don’t do it soon.) I wasn’t able to find any Carlson images that came with permission to publish but I am working on that. I did find a nice Harrison Birge image.
November by Harrison Birge; courtesy Art Renew Center
The first significant concept explained in Carlson’s book is the idea of the four value planes:
- the flat lying plane (second lightest)
- the upright plane (darkest)
- the slanting plane (second darkest)
- the apparent arch of the sky (lightest)
Four Value Planes with our vantage point (5)
The elements in our landscape – trees, ground, water, clouds, buildings, etc. – receive various degrees of light from the sky according to their plane. It is this difference of plane that establishes their values relative to each other. The different planes can then be classified according to how much light they receive. The sky is the source of light and is therefore the lightest plane. It is lighter than the flat lying plane, which is lighter than the slanting plane, which is lighter than the upright plane. This is very much like the Five Types of Light used to describe form. Each of those are also classified according to how much light they receive. So, I think it’s fair to conclude that the four value planes explain the basic “form” of the outdoors. This theory may or may not be unimpeachable but it does help us to see things simply. Being able to see simply is a key to good painting. There is so much detail and information outside that we need some means of distilling it down to the essentials or what I like to call “the critical information”. The Five Types of Light incorporated into the Four Value Planes provide such a means. I’ll pick up there later this week when I will begin to discuss how we can incorporate the one into the other. I’ll leave you with a fairly recent field study done at a favorite location in Ft. Desoto Park, Pinellas County, Fl. We don’t have many slanted planes, like mountains, in Florida but this picture clearly illustrates the sky plane, the flat lying plane (water and sand) and the upright plane (trees and mangroves).
Black Mangroves
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Robert, This is one of your very best educational pieces of information on fundamentals of painting and how to approach your composition before putting paint to canvas. It is now part of my painting techniques work book.
Yes, John Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Painting is the landscape painter’s bible. I first learn these principles in the first plein air painting workshop I took from Jeannie McLeish, in watercolor. Since then, I don’t think about it first, but I always double check what I’m inclined to paint according to Carlson.
[...] in the the previous post, are so called because our paintings will not work without them. The Four Value Planes and the Five Types of Light are the pieces of information that we need to look for as we paint. [...]
[...] in the authors who were speaking. Penny knew their work. I didn’t. Unless John F. Carlson and Andrew Loomis were making posthumous appearances there would be no authors I knew. It was a [...]
[...] four basic value planes. John F. Carlson wrote about this in his Guide to Landscape Painting. Here is my blog on that [...]
[...] are lighter, which are darker? Which are warmer, which are cooler? Maybe you just read about Carlson’s 4 Value planes or Sargent’s 5 types of light. Can you find those principles evident in nature or the forms [...]