Focusing on What's Important

The worth of art very much depends on the person looking at it. Everyone sees the same image when they look at the same work, but everyone sees that image differently. For example, look at the image I have provided of the famous Monet painting, The Garden at Argenteuil. Depending on your personal tastes and interests, the focal point of the piece changes. What do you focus on? Is it the flowers? The house? The couple in the back of the garden? Truly, this is an interesting concept to explore.

The Davis Lab at the Indianapolis Museum of Art has started a new program to get people thinking about the way they see art, and what they focus on. It's called First Impressions, and it is a social tagging experiment that allows you to show others what you see as the focal points of a piece of art, and see what others noticed as well. Recently, they even made a post about it on their blog, where they discuss how looking at what others see in art can change the way you personally see the art, and what you see in it. It's fascinating reading that I highly recommend!

This whole concept is very relevant to framing as well. Depending on the framing components chosen, different parts of the artwork they surround stand out more or less. For an example, I worked up two designs for a Yellowstone Poster published by Doug Leen. It is a beautiful WPA style piece that is posterized in five colors; white, blue, and three shades of yellow-orange.

If I were framing this for myself, this is how I would do it. The dark top mat neutralizes the bold brown that covers the piece, and the blue and white accent mats highlight the focal point of the waterfall. Visually, this pleases me because I see the waterfall first, and that is what I want to look at when I see this poster. However, there is no one right way to look at a piece of art, and as central as that waterfall is, it isn't what everyone would say is the most important part of the poster.

As you see in the above image, I have changed the color of the bottom accent mat from blue to the golden yellow in the piece. Notice how what your eye sees changes from the first image to the second. Now the eye travels across the hills to the right of the waterfall and the text at the bottom of the image. Both treatments are completely legitimate, they just stress the importance of different parts of the print.

Moral of the story? When you are framing art, make sure that what is prominent is whatever is most important to you!


~Kat~