The Boating Party by Mary Cassatt

“I have touched with a sense of art some people – they felt the love and the life. Can you offer me anything to compare to that joy for an artist?” Mary Cassatt

One of only 3 or 4 female impressionists, Mary Cassatt was also an American in Paris. She seems to have been independent of mind and, as with all female painters until quite recently, she took a path not easily trodden. Her longtime friendship and collaboration with the sometimes difficult Edgar Degas makes me think that she held her own without compromise.

Cassatt painted The Boating Party when she was 49 years old and by then quite successful. The Boating Party depicts an unknown woman, baby, and man in a sailboat. The colours are saturated and dramatic. Not exactly pastel, however a little other-worldly. I love the yellow-green on the boat. The boat itself is quite strange with a canoe stern, a sail that appears to be fighting with the oarsman – the wind looks to be blowing opposite to the direction of travel – and if there’s a sail, where are the boom and the mast? Perhaps because of all these technical quibbles, the painting works superbly. Mary Cassatt has crafted a composition that has enough reality that you know what´s going on and equally, designed a picture space to resonate in our brains.

It is an unusual painting in Cassatt’s œuvre. Whilst it does show her familiar theme of a mother and child, most of her other paintings are set in interiors or in gardens. It’s one  of her most ambitious and largest paintings.

On composition and abstraction

“A well-composed painting is half done.” said Pierre Bonnard and “Even in front of nature one must compose.” Edgar Degas

Three artists I know were recently taking an Abstract painting class. It happened to end  as I arrived to teach a following class. As I met them coming out of the studio, each said to me, totally independently: “Abstract is hard”. What they may have been saying is: “I’m way out of my comfort zone here”. Certainly, when we look at at a painting that resonates, it’s often difficult to say exactly why we like it. It may be the colour, texture, subject. Perhaps a glint of light in the sky or a gloomy passage of an unusual grey. With abstraction – which is pure composition – there is less and less reliance on a safety blanket of reality.

Beneath most great paintings is often found a fine abstract painting.  Although it may not always be true, the abstracted view provides a dimension to imaging which resonates somewhere within the subconscious.

Repetition, Patterning and Rhythm

Developing a picture space independently from the subject takes a little organization. Repeating forms in a structured way and Patterning are ways of creating this, however in many contexts, pure repetition can bore whilst a formal pattern may be a little rigid, prescribed and perhaps overly decorative.

A Pattern with variation is Rhythm and now we are getting somewhere. I think Rhythm is as close a universal idea as you will find in creating paintings that resonate. In the following video I discuss Rhythm in Painting:

Rhythm may be the most important idea in composition. Musicians use the idea, so why not visual artists? It embodies the idea of movement and pacing around a picture. Creating constant interest…never ending variations on a theme, as the viewer notices new ideas.  Nature offers us this endlessly: Variation in colour, shape, size, value, texture, line quality, size, orientation – you get the idea – pretty well anything! That may be why some images affect us more than others. 

Paintings with Rhythm

Mary Cassatt’s The Boating Party has Rhythm. I pointed out some ambiguities in the  masterpiece and perhaps because she made these decisions, the painting really works. I think it’s a great example of balancing some realism – you certainly know what the subject is and who the players are. Equally, the painting just flows around the visual space: the curves of the boat and those of the sails, as well as the three hats and clothes – including his sash, back and forth in a strong refrain.

Here are a couple of other examples:

Anything by Van Gogh has Rhythm. It’s the way he applies the paint – his brush cannot but show his Rhythm. All of his paintings have that Van Gogh hum to them!

Exercise

1. This week, develop your painting from the idea of repetition of shapes and motifs. Perhaps start with an initial composition and then take a predominant shape, or colour, and see how that can be worked into the painting in as many way as you can – creating a rhythmic refrain running throughout your work.
2. As an alternative, start with a shape and develop a pattern based on this motif, conceiving your painting as a predominantly abstract design. Depending upon your inclination, you could superimpose some reality onto this as a second step (rather than starting with the subject). This approach I liken to painting into patterned wallpaper.