There's many reasons we use grids when painting from studies, the first is that's its traditional. While having the grid visible is not, we prefer it, even tho, a few times, it has been hidden, as in this landscape or this cityscape. The Bauhaus design moralist in me says, if your process is to use a grid to transfer the information from a study to a painting, you should make the process visible, because it is the basis for the truth of the image, the source of the image's beauty.
There's usually a grid inherent in paintings, even if it is not used in the painting process. Our paintings are painted on rectangular stretched canvas support, hung on a rectangular wall, in a rectangular room. The subject of our current painting project is the view out a rectangular window at rectangular city buildings and their gridded pattern of windows. It's a riot of grids.
Another reason for using a grid is practical, as I wrote here describing my "Work Ethic" painting series, a grid allows us to paint short bursts of time, necessary, because we work day jobs. Turning a limitation into a strength, is the idea.
Another way for us to deal with short sessions divided by long periods of other work, might be to paint very small paintings, ones which could be completed in a few hours. Essentially that's what's going on with large gridded paintings -- we paint one grid area at a time, like painting a series of small paintings. But, with these, 100 small paintings add up to one big one, which we like better.
The image's link above, it leads here, to it's page on Flickr, where, the description gives an explanation of the process used to make the study. It is a collage containing many different ways to look at the subject, making the statement that the best truth comes from considering all points of view.
In this image, views are captured on different days, at differing times of day, in various weather conditions. In addition to these photographic representations, I've included some "Photoshop drawings" of some of the photographs, produced by using the various image adjustments and filters available in Photoshop to produce rendered images with drawing effects.
What is photography? What is drawing? Is there a meaningful difference between the two? These are questions I've been pondering since I was a kid. I'll consider them in another post.
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