Looking at Design with Chris Krupinski
Still life is a jumping off point into abstract design for Chris Krupinski. As a graphic designer, it’s not wholly surprising that design is a big part of what draws Krupinski to painting. In the interview, Krupinski talks in depth about both the importance of design and how she uses it in her work. So let’s take a look at some of her paintings and discuss design specifics.
TRIANGLES:
“My big shapes almost always will be in threes, and sometimes twos, but usually in threes. I'll make a triangle. You know your magic triangle is your basis of good design.”
Krupinski uses her big shapes in threes and uses them to form triangles. The eye loves triangles. Ss an artist it’s good to use them because they both move your eye around the painting AND keep your eye IN the painting.
And it doesn’t have to just be shapes you use in threes.
In her painting, “Another Distorted View,” note that Krupinski is also using color in a triangle form. In this case yellow.
In “Citrus and Berries” she is again using the power of three big shapes and three colors.
BIG AND SMALL SHAPES
“It's not a pear. It's a resting space because you need those. You need those big resting shapes and that's what it is….And then the cherries are forming a path… to the focal point. And those big shapes are just resting places so you can take a rest from this path. You need that. You can't have all of this action going on without somewhere to rest because if you do, people don't want to look at that. They don't know where to go. They don't know where to look. They need resting areas. They need a place to stop.”
Krupinski uses small shapes to lead the your eye into the painting and to the focal point. She then uses big shapes to give you a place to rest.
This is also one of the reasons why as a viewer, you don’t feel overwhelmed by Krupinski’s paintings. There is a lot going on in them, all those colors and shapes, but Krupinski doesn’t abandon you within it. She’s giving you a clear path (via her shapes) on where to head. This means she can have paintings brimming with energy and yet still be pleasant to look at.
Take a look both “Squared” and “Lemons, Cherries and Stripes” and notice how Krupinski uses big and small shapes.
SIMPLICITY AND REPETITION
“I don't have 100 different elements in there. I'll have a bowl, a small fruit, a large fruit and a background. Period…Let's say if I have a bowl of cherries with a dozen other cherries outside of the bowl, it's a lot of cherries. But they're the same. They're the same. They're all the same. They're the same color….So it's the repetition of elements…Everything is really related...There's a lot going on. But there’s a lot of repetition, which is extremely important for good design.”
The brain has an amazing ability to group sameness especially when it repeats. So when you look at a Krupinski painting, you won’t process through each individual cherry. You will process “cherry” and then the brain can rest a bit.
Krupinski uses this to her advantage. It allows her to create complicated paintings that, again, aren’t overwhelming. She uses repetition (a design principle) to her artistic advantage.
Krupinski does this with shapes and she also does it with color. Notice that many of her paintings rely on a fairly limited palette. If we look at the painting “Brandied Pears” the main colors are red, yellow and blue. Those three colors repeat in both the fruit and the quilt.
For the painting, “Blue and Gold” Krupinski repeats the colors yellow and blue, which gives the whole painting a sense of unity.
Because that’s what repetition does. When you repeat a color or a shape it gives the painting a sense of unity.
Listen to the interview with Chris Krupinski here.