THE MONDRIAN EFFECT
Borrow from the famous painter and explore the endlessly interesting world of Mondrian
Piet Mondrian was a Dutch modernist painter whose work in the first half of the 20th century went on to have a huge influence, way beyond the art world. There’s even a word, Mondrianesque, and though it’s not used much, it refers to the striking, simple and memorable style of his abstract and geometric compositions. Everyone knows them.
Primary-coloured squares and rectangles set into a grid of black lines on a white background. They’ve become what people in the creative world like to call iconic, or even worse, totemic, which means that they get appropriated for all kinds of uses. From design to fashion, Mondrian’s seemingly simple and endlessly modern style has been repurposed countless times, from Yves Saint Lauren’s fashion collection of 1965, to a Nike trainer design of 2017.
I’m not sure what Mondrian himself might have thought about this, as he was deeply philosophical and also obsessive about the subtleties of meaning and nuance, which isn’t something we really need to go into here. The point is that he was very refined in his approach to composition… Purely from this point of view, his arrangements of vertical and horizontal lines enclosing coloured rectangles in often eccentric patterns have a lot to recommend them, if you’re taking a certain kind of face-on, squared-up photograph.
This is part of a bigger idea of looking for inspiration outside photography, which is a lot less like copying (plagiarizing’s the word, actually) from other photographs we see and admire.
Borrowing from other creative areas is more a creative highway than a creative path. Everyone does it: painters inspired by music, musicians by poetry, filmmakers by novelists, and so on. It can’t actually be copying because the mediums are so different, so that relieves any sense of guilt. However, Picasso is quoted as saying, “Good artists copy: great artists steal.”
The important thing is to find ideas and methods in other creative media and see how they can be useful to us. Mondrian just happens to be widely borrowed from. While his style is graphically simple (all right, full of subtlety as well, but for our purposes it’s the simple structure that counts), it contains some great lessons for thoughtful composition. Two of them are rhythm and asymmetry, both easily translatable into photography.
Rhythm is about graphic relationships – sort of echoes, in a way – as in the two closely spaced verticals in the copy of a Mondrian painting here, but also in the way the eye is forced to start with a larger red rectangle and relate it to the smaller blue and yellow shapes. The asymmetry is striking, and a challenge to the eye, and shows just how effective
placing subjects in corners and at edges can be in being interesting and refreshing, not at all predictable
The photograph here, in which I used both rhythm and asymmetry in the same sense as Mondrian, I had as my subject: a Shaker pantry in New England. The Shakers were a 19th century Utopian society, a breakaway from the Quakers, and their most memorable legacy was architecture and artefacts with photogenic and rigorous design simplicity. This was for a book I shot on the Shakers, and their design ethic encouraged a face-on, squared-up approach in the photography. Here, I opened the cupboard doors to make its insides the dominant square in the composition. I also framed it left of centre for a more interesting asymmetry and to make the left edge of the open door more eye-catching. The lens and the view made a rectangle out of each of the elements, including the oval boxes and bucket, so that the entire frame became an arrangement of rectangles, including the lower strip of drawers. Close framing kept anything other than these units out of frame.
The important thing is to find ideas and methods in other creative media and see how they can be useful to us. Mondrian just happens to be widely borrowed from