OF THE MANY PUZZLES a painter must solve in a landscape composition, the foreground can be trickiest. Get everything else right, and a mismatched foreground—what is closest in the viewer’s field of vision—can undermine the whole painting.
Fortunately the choices, if not the execution, are quite clear and easy to understand. There are three. The foreground can be dark and vague to accentuate a distant part of the landscape. Second, a foreground can be sharp and distinct, playing off a fading background. Or, finally, the foreground can have the same intensity of the background: the same values of dark and light.
In such choices, the nature of the landscape sets the stage. A bright day rules out too much dark. A sunrise or sunset requires darkest darks alongside muted grays.
Yet the right choice is never easy.
Take the first option, a dark vague foreground. This has served painters well over the centuries. The dark can be the gloom of a cloudy day, sunrise or twilight, or a big shadow on a bright day. Painters often say that this dark foreground must use a pigment that allows some transparency: Thus, the close-range dark is amorphous enough to allow the viewer’s imagination to see things in the gloom.
It has also been said, however, that painting these amorphous dark areas—say, a field or rocks, or a creek—takes more calculation than the bright house or trees in the sun-lit background. Some painters scumble a grayed color over the dark, a perfect fog of unseeing. Others put a super-dark tree or rock in the fuzzy foreground murk—or a sharp glimmer of light—to suggest near objects.
Next, what about a sharp foreground? The academic landscape painters of the French school began to master this by bluing and softening all receding aspects of a landscape. A corollary was to move warm colors forward, versus cool in the distance.
The twin of this warm-cool regression has been to sharpen what is near and nearest. Here is a tried and true rule: near is sharp, far is hazy. This is how the biological eye works anyway.
At any moment, the eye has a small circular focus, while all else is vague. We don't notice this because the eye moves in milliseconds. We have the illusion that all is clear and focused. The painter freezes a millisecond in time. To paint something in sharp focus up close produces a sense of space, mimicking how the eyes train us to perceive close and far.
If, for a third approach, the foreground is painted as clear in color and value as the background, other tools can provide the sense of landscape depth: perspective lines, larger to smaller, and one object in front of another.
The three choices are a feast for a painter's cogitation. Lucky is the landscape painter who can determine which foreground approach works best in each case. Personally, I'm often taken by paintings that successfully use the dark, amorphous foreground. For starters, if you can do it well, it is an easy choice. Just fill in all that space with the right kind of dark.
Easy and yet not easy. In the dark foreground, you need to suggest that something real is there, and yet not paint any clear shapes or outlines. A masterly application of chaotic brush strokes, and transparent pigments, often brings out that “there-but-not-there” effect. A good scumbler can do likewise.
Of the three foreground choices, I find that first (dark, amorphous) hardest to pull off successfully. At the least, it allows the time-pressed painter to fill a lot of the canvas quickly. But beware the big dark area that ends up uniform and flat.
Nothing is simple in foreground choices. The exit plan, of course, is to try them all, and cross one's fingers that on occasion the foreground will help, not hurt, the landscape painting.