A NOTAN session

At the start of a new term, it is always useful to recalibrate our skills, and the acrylic group did exactly that at the start of 2024. We started looking at Notan studies.  Notan is a Japanese term that literally means “light-dark harmony”. Artists use “notan studies” to explore different arrangements of light and dark elements in a painting without having the distraction of other elements like colour, texture, and finer details.
In practice, this involves painting the darks with black and the lights with white. Sometimes, grey is also used as an intermediate value. 
So we studied this week how to use Notan sketches in our paintings. 
Every painting has some kind of balance between light and dark elements. Sometimes there is a strong clash between lights and darks (like in the Renaissance paintings), and sometimes it is more subtle (like in the Impressionist paintings).
However, the balance of light and dark elements in a painting is not always apparent at first glance, as there are many other elements competing for your attention, like colour and brushwork.
A notan is used to filter out all these other elements so that the balance of light and dark elements is shown. In this way, we discover the most basic abstract design of a painting.
Our acrylic group had a go at this, as we show below.