Compose styles
Rather than blending styles toward a middle, this gives them roles. The first one carries the structure, the next comes in as the accent, and anything after that shows up in a single detail. Where they fight each other, it says so before you start.
How to divide the work
- Composition
- Follow Precisionism: Build on horizontals and verticals, split planes with hard diagonal shadows
- Type
- Set in Precisionism's manner (Keep only the lettering already on the building and add none), and let Purism's lettering (A light geometric sans aligned to the horizontals, held to two sizes) appear only where you want the eye to catch.
- Material
- Ground in Precisionism's material (Smooth paint with no visible stroke, grey to white tones, hard light); bring in exactly one thing from Purism (Greys and ochres with a little blue, surfaces painted evenly and matte).
- Colour
- Build on #d8d8d1, #8795a0, #34383b and admit one accent from #e4d0b1, #87523f, #11100c.
Where they fight
Nothing obvious pulls against itself here.
Caution
- Precisionism Cleaning up contours without deciding where the light comes from leaves the planes unexplained, and the picture flattens into a technical drawing.
- Purism Bringing anecdote or ornament back turns the objects from standardized types into picturesque still lifes, and the clarity of the machine age is lost.
Image prompt
Produce four original images that take their structure from Precisionism (style, 1910s–1940s) and their accent from Purism (style, 1918–1925). ## What to make Make the kind of thing Precisionism exists for: rendering factories and warehouses as ordered and quiet images, or showing industrial structure as form, with no people in the frame. Choose one subject and hold it across all four. ## Structure comes from Precisionism - Sharp contours - Industrial landscapes - Geometric simplification - Smooth surfaces Composition: Build on horizontals and verticals, split planes with hard diagonal shadows. Type and lettering: Keep only the lettering already on the building and add none. ## Accent comes from Purism, used sparingly - Silhouettes of standardised everyday objects - Compositions built on horizontals and verticals - A restrained number of colours - Contour lines of overlapping forms Let one material quality come from it: Greys and ochres with a little blue, surfaces painted evenly and matte. ## Colour and feeling Build the ground on #d8d8d1, carry the structure in #8795a0 and #34383b, and let a single accent come from #87523f. These are read off real works, so a direction rather than a fixed palette. Feeling to carry: technique, calm, trust, futurity. ## What goes wrong - Precisionism: Cleaning up contours without deciding where the light comes from leaves the planes unexplained, and the picture flattens into a technical drawing. - Purism: Bringing anecdote or ornament back turns the objects from standardized types into picturesque still lifes, and the clarity of the machine age is lost. ## Across the four Keep the roles fixed in all four. Vary the framing, the scale and the arrangement so the set shows what this pairing can do rather than four versions of one picture. ## Constraints - Do not imitate, reference or name any specific artist, studio, brand, character or copyrighted work. - Do not reproduce the composition of an existing work. - Produce original compositions in the general period languages described above.
Related entries
- Precisionism 1910s–1940s / Style / American Modern Art
Paints factories, silos, cities and machines reduced to clear contour, simple geometry and smooth planes.
- Purism 1918–1925 / Style / Modern Design Movements
A movement that attacked Cubism's drift into decoration and called for a return to forms fit for the machine age. Standardized objets-types such as bottles, glasses and guitars are painted within a horizontal-vertical order and a restrained palette. Through the journal L'Esprit Nouveau it became a norm for modern architecture and graphics.
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