The principles apply to all kinds of art, regardless of the artist. The Art2life principles in general, are all about understanding differences and leveraging them in your art to make it more potent and more aligned with how you want it to look and feel. The principles, these ideas of enhancing differences, apply to all kinds of creative expression whether it is abstract art, realistic painting, drawing, photography, sculpture or even writing and music. The principles provide us with a way of talking, enhancing and understanding our art better. I will talk about a few key differences (principles) that these three artists are using in specific examples below.

Let’s look at the work of these three artists from a perspective of design, value and color...

Matisse

Notice the extraordinary variety of shapes Matisse is using. Notice how your eye so easily moves around and between shapes. These shapes are giving the feeling of movement. It feels like an exuberant dance. Notice how the thickness of the body shape becomes quite thin at the waistline so your eye can visually “hop” across to the other side. All the values are quite dark because he is using this deep blue. The loud conversation is clear and strong.

Rothko

Here, Rothko is doing something quite different than Matisse. There are just two shapes here, and they beautifully complement each other. The shape on the bottom (and going up around the top and sides) is primarily three things: dark, unsaturated, and medium/small in size, relative to the other shape. For maximum effect, the orange shape is different in all three ways. It is lighter, highly saturated, and much bigger. Putting these two opposite shapes together, two things that are different from each other in three unique ways, makes this painting amazing. After all, human beings are hard-wired to love differences!

Diebenkorn

If you truly observe the dark shapes in this painting, you will realize why it is so striking. There is such variety in the small and mid-size dark shapes. Look at the little dark shape in the hand, and the dark shape in the lower right corner next to the leg. All these dark shapes are placed to move our eye around the picture. All of them are different from one another in terms of size and shape, and as a result it, the viewer’s eye is engaged and delighted. Notice how the colorful and saturated yellow background looks in contrast to the dark, dirty color of the hat. That is a gorgeous color combination. The non colorful, dark black areas really help to accentuate the brighter yellow areas of the picture. Also, notice how he is using small perimeter darks along the edges to draw your eye up and around the whole painting. There is a reason why this painting is so captivating, and the way Diebenkorn uses differences of design, value and color has a lot to do with it.