Balance in a Fruit Bowl, Spinning Rooms, and Jackson Pollock

I had a bout of vertigo recently.

It’s a crazy condition that is sometimes caused by tiny calcium particles in your ear (or both ears) that break free from their normal positions and fall into the French Horn-like tubes in your inner ear canal. These particles are sometimes called crystals which I think causes people to not believe that this is really "a thing." Trust me; it is really a thing.

It has also been described as tiny particles moving around as in a snow globe. They can sometimes float around and get out of alignment.

The result is a sensation of spinning rooms and needing to cling to the walls as you walk down a hall.

This astonishingly curious system in our head handles issues like dealing with gravity, and being able to look from side to side, without falling over. So, it's a big deal.

My dizziness reminded me of balance. Balance is also a big deal in art. 

A quest for balance is threaded through many art forms: music, dance, sculpture, painting, etc. Balance is considered an essential element of design.

In sculpture, balance is absolutely bound by the rules of gravity. Historic sculptures, such as Michelangelo’s David, were created with a tree stump or other mass at the base to balance the contrapposto positioning.

CONTRAPPOSTO BALANCE IN SCULPTURE

Our young fighter, David, is standing primarily on one leg while his left leg is out to the side. His left arm with his slingshot adds weight to the left side. His right leg is against the tree stump. The extra weight of the tree stump balances out his uneven stance.

Michelangelo started David with an eight-ton block of Carrara marble. It goes without saying, that a sculptor wants to be cautious to not chisel too much off one side of a block of marble. Tipping over is never good.

Plus, this piece of marble started out with flaws. It had been rejected by other sculptors for its expected likelihood to crack when being worked on. But since it was available at no cost, the young and broke Michelangelo accepted the challenge.

And, indeed, currently scientists are ruminating over the problem with the cracks in David's ankles. If he were to be tilted only 15% for some reason like a failure of the floor, or from tremors from traffic or an earthquake, his ankles would fail. Yikes.

Balance can be precarious.

Details about the cracks in Davids ankle are from an article in the New York Times, August 17, 2016. I've shared it as a gift article, but I know it will "time out" within a month of posting this.

Another less obvious example of contrapposto, is Puck on a Toadstool, 1856, by female sculptor, Harriet Goodhue Hosmer.

Hosmer balanced the right arm of the cherub in the air by sculpting the wings at a certain position and precisely arranging the cubby little legs and feet. Everything, even the tilt and weight ot the toadstool, needed to be at an angle to be completely realistic AND to weigh the correct amount to balance the piece.

Thinking like a sculptor takes a brain working in an entirely different dimension. Truly three-dimensional chess.

BALANCE IN TWO-DIMENSIONAL COMPOSITIONS

Compositional balance in two-dimensiol art like photography, painting, or drawing, is not lethal even if you get it wrong.

But it still can be bothersome. Our brains object to a clumsy handling of balance. In two-dimensional art, balance is not a specific mathematical ratio. It’s a design ideal; a concept of what “feels” right. (As is usual for me, I am writing about European art and art in a Western tradition.)

One of the components of compositional balance is that we like an uneven number of objects, like three muses. Our brains perceive that as a pleasing arrangement.

The three Graces in a Fresco in Pompeii, 1-50 AD.

Or, here are seven variations of women wearing a cashmere scarf by John Singer Sargent.

This is a study for using this scarf as a prop in a number of his paintings. But even in this study for his personal practice and observation, he defaulted to a traditional design principle and included an uneven number of models.( Actually they are the same model, his niece, but he includes seven versions of her. )

Or for another example, there are seven mangoes that Paul Gauguin included in his still life.

VISUAL FLOW FOR BALANCE

An additional component of artistic balance is to create a visual flow. We sense that elements should be arranged in a way that has a back-and-forth or circular rhythm to them.

For example in the Gauguin still life composition above, there is a dominant, imposing arrangement of mangoes on the right. So for balance, he places a large coffee pot on the left. Since there is a dark background at the top, he paints a light foreground.

Sometimes the visual back and forth is repetition, sometimes it is a visual opposition.

In this still life by Paul Cézanne, he has arranged five pieces of fruit on the left and three pieces of fruit on the right.

MOMA, New York, describes the visual back-and-forth of the composition in its online text:

BALANCE IN ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST WORK

The above Abstract Expressionist painting is by Jackson Pollock. Seeing abstract art can be confusing. The lack of traditional clues about subject matter is disorienting. Often with Pollock everything appears to be chaotic. The technique used to create the painting is called a poured painting.

Rather than a random application of paint, Pollock was emotionally committed to his physical exertion in the creation his paintings. He felt his process of throwing, spattering, and pouring paint, allowed him to be “in” the painting.

Pollock placed his large canvases on the floor and attacked them with paint and various substances to create marks and texture. He said that with his artwork on the floor "I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting."

When we allow ourselves to change the criteria we use to view the abstract paintings, like Pollock's, we begin to see patterns. Patterns create the illusion of balance. In this painting, the patterns are in the:

• Angles of straight lines
• Arrangement of his black "blobs" (my term not his)
• Brushstroke patterns (or really, spatter and pour patterns)
• Perceived variations in the topography of the surface
• Repetition of colors and his choice of the overall color family

BALANCE IN YOUR LIFE

Obviously there are many types of balance in our lives. This is a reminder to look for the balance. The balance will bring us to a centering. The centering can be very calming.

I just love the illusion of flying through the air by these dancers beautifully balanced as if on an invisible magic carpet lifting them off the earth. So joyful!