The Upside Down File and Leonardo

When I first got serious about painting, one of my great mentors-by-book was -- no, not Leonardo -- but Edward Betts, late 20th-century painter of magnificent semi-abstract seascapes of coastal Maine. I still return to his original book Masterclass in Watercolor and still play with one of his suggested exercises -- to look for the possible compositions that can be found in newspaper photos turned upside down.


The trick is to ignore the subject of the photo, blur your eyes, and look for a lively spread of dark and light tones that establishes strong directions -- a composition that could make an interesting painting if you plugged in colours and your own content. Close encounters between football players can be surprisingly useful, but even talking heads or crowd scenes can work.

When I find a good sample (and sometimes it comes with viewing sideways), I might keep it on file or do a quick sketchbook study. The objective, when you paint, is not to reproduce the newspaper image exactly but simply to get down the gist of it as a starting point.


In my Betts-Wannabe phase, it was only natural that I turned to my Upside Down File for my long-ago series of paintings (never realized) called "Howe Sound Creeks." In those days (long before the Sea to Sky Highway was "improved" for the 2010 Olympics), we commuted every weekend to our cabin north of Squamish and came to know every season of the mountains along that roadside and the creeks that pour down them.

This clipping looked like a promising start for my first painting:

Here's the resulting painting. I had fun working on it but can't say I was wildly satisfied with the outcome, finding it too rigid and formalized:

However, this first try was serendipitous. At that time, I was using the flat side of styrofoam egg cartons as palettes, and I noticed that my final mix of colour on the palette made for a very exciting mini-painting on the creeks theme:

I decided to use this as the study for a second painting:

Hmmm....not half as good as the accidental egg carton version! So it was about this time that I decided to return to the Howe Sound Creeks Series another day.

And what does this have to do with Leonardo, anyway? Well, I think my clever mentor Edward Betts offered his students a convenient modern adaptation of an exercise that Leonardo proposed to his own students in his Treatise on Painting.

"I will not forget to insert into these rules, a new theoretical invention for knowledge's sake which, although it seems of little import and amusing, is nonetheless of great utility in bringing out the creativity in some of these inventions. This is the case if you cast your glance on any walls dirty with such stains or walls made up of rock formations of different types. If you have to invent some scenes, you will be able to discover them there in diverse forms, in diverse landscapes, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, extensive plains, valleys, and hills. You can even see different battle scenes and movements made up of unusual figures, faces with strange expressions, and myriad things which you can transform into a complete and proper form constituting part of similar walls and rocks…. Don't underestimate this idea of mine, which calls to mind that it would not be too much of an effort to pause sometimes to look into these stains on walls, the ashes from the fire, the clouds, the mud, or other similar places. If these are well contemplated, you will find fantastic inventions that awaken the genius of the painter to new inventions..."