[Sc00p-]

I don't know how anyone could say that the gladiator piece has weak composition. Everything in that work is forcing the viewer to see the focal, from the crowd looking at him, to the red placed right behind the focal (red being the most noticable color to the human eye...technically yellow and green are the most receptive, but there is so much of it in everyday environment, the eye picks out red faster.) which was indeed no accident. Then the gladiator looks back at the crowd, then you follow the crowd back to the focal yet again. Even the tiny people in the far away crowd are looking in towards the middle of the picture, so not to have ANY direction whatsoever that would lead your eye off the page.

It almost hurts to try and look away from the focal in this piece, and that denotes excellent composition, in my opinion.

[quaternius]

Steven - AHA! I get it now. You're looking for the "why". I was suggesting more information on the "how", two different things for sure!

As far as Edgar Payne is concerned, he was a landscape painter - his theories deal with the landscape but are obviously useful in general. His book was finally reprinted a couple of years ago, "Composition of outdoor painting" you can probably find copies available at the Scottsdale Artist's School in Arizona if Amazon.com and your local bookstores are out.
Andrew Loomis is big on lines and edges too - his book Creative Illustration is one of the bibles of illustration. You should get a copy for yourself (used book sites). However, I'm going ahead with getting it available online again in another week or two (finally),with Lord Wharfin's help -(all my free file-storage went away.) You probably want the section on "line" - that's where Loomis theories on composition really begin and end.

meat-sack
I hear what you're saying. So often the "rules" enslave us rather than serving us. However, becoming an Artist or a musician or even a good athlete begins with learning certain basics, then more advanced things, until finally you get to the point where there is a certain freedom you attain - where you can break the "rules" because it becomes appropriate or "right" to break those rules in certain circumstances.

I think we can get to that freedom by gaining a certain mastery the basic techniques and the media we use, whether that's hairy sticks and pigment or wacom tablets. Unfortunately that takes time.

Teachers and rules can help us make those little breakthroughs along the way, but just following the rules will kill our art faster than anything else, I agree.

Isn't that part of what you're saying - the "successful" art (however you define it)and the great composition come from somewhere inside?

I think every single artist we call great has broken the "rules" in specific ways that are often at the very identity of their greatness. This shows that the rules are of minimal importance - and there are things still deeper or more universal.

[ June 18, 2001: Message edited by: quaternius ]

[William H. Daniels]

The link was broken Steven. I can't see your new dragonfly. (as of 12:26 CDST on Sunday June 17)

[worthless_meat_sack]

Steven,

I agree that some very basic stuff is wired in, a babies response to loud or soft noises, smiles, etc.

The genetic similarity comes from the population going through the eye of the needle, almost extinct at some point. But standards of beauty, sexual or artistic, seem to me to be all over the place. Some cultures love fat women. It was quite the thing in medieval Japan to paint ones teeth black. Beautiful? To them.

It is interesting to me that what one considers beautiful can to another be the height of annoyance. You would think if you did not like something it you might just be neutral. I think art has a strong social and political component that cannot be ignored.

I would go so far as to say there is no such thing as good art. It is a powerful illusion that there is. If you swallow that, the idea of good composition goes away too. Just look at the variety of art and peoples reaction to it-even the disagreement in this thread about the Gerome painting. There is educated taste, but once again, you are back to an arbitrary set of rules. But again, are those rules arbitrary, or are they based on physiology? I think they are based on culture and politics, personally. I think velvet paintings are beautiful. They actually have very strong “compositions” according to many such systems. I don’t hold that against them

But your ideas are making me take another look at the whole thing. Maybe there is something that will cause involuntary artistic orgasm in every human who sees it. hehe...

One idea- It does seem that every work of art has some kind of contrast. The presence of one element and them the lack of it. Repetition and then relief of repetition. In music there is tone and silence, loud and soft, high and low, etc. In visual art there is the obvious contrast of light and dark, but it goes a lot deeper than that. In your dragon fly think how much the idea of difference plays in it. From flat to texture, activity to calmness, bright to dull. If you think about it, the list goes on forever. And with naturalistic art, you have the whole gee-wiz 2-d looks like 3-d thing. That further complicates it.

I think that maybe the one universal that creates interest. Might be obvious, just a thought.

[Steven Stahlberg]

meat_sack: your last paragraphs there, exactly what I've written on my site (in the howto section), I think, just phrased differently. I was kinda leaving that part out in this thread, didn't want to confuse the issue. But I agree completely with you - this is probably more basic and more important to having a picture easily readable, varying the contrasts, then varying the variation, and so on.

Still I'm very reluctant to completely give up the point that there are SOME things in composition you just should never do, no matter which culture you're from... I'm too lazy now to find a good example but I feel there should be some out there. I don't know. You may be right. That thing with painting women's teeth black though, back in the super-refined and superficial Heiji era, was probably meant to make the heavily made up faces look more like masks than real humans. I doubt if the girls smiled toothy smiles very often.

[Vgta]

Great thread, one more thing I don't think anyone has mentioned.
Ok so far we have been looking at static compositions, one single frame in time.
What about motion? Composition and motion.

[quaternius]

Great discussion!

Meat-sack -
Agreed that "good" art and "bad" art are certainly culturally influenced as well as individually influenced by learned preference - different culturally to huge degrees. Different compositional arrangements and color use are certainly learned or culturally biased as to what is viewed as beautiful or ugly. But I think there's a few more things than contrast - tho' the way you're using the word appears to be more inclusive than I would make it.

Steven -
I should've probably gone back to your web-site and read your stuff again before launching into this, but let me know if this is the kind of thing you're after...

I'd like to take a step back from "the rules" to the basics of composition - since this deals more with the "why" than the "how". Artist-philosophers have stated for who knows how long that the basic elements of 2D composition are universal, regardless of culture. (Humor me for just a little bit.) They exist independently from whatever is culturally viewed as "good" art or "bad" art.

The physical basis for these universals would make for very interesting study - that's for sure. And I think that's probably where you're actually headed.

But to get back to my line of thought, there are certain universals beyond any "rules" that do hold true. Hey, go ahead... feel free to challenge this like I did.

The following is the terminology I learned - your experience may be different. Let me list them just to be clear. The basic elements or raw materials we 2D artists have to work with are - Size, Shape, Line, Direction, Color, Value and Texture.

Then there are only a limited number of things we can do with those elements, which some philosophers have termed the "Principles of Design" - the most accepted descriptions being Dominance, Balance, Contrast, Gradation, Variation, Alternation, Harmony, and Unity. (In the comments above I understood just "contrast", but saw that the other principles I've listed as separate principles were made a part of it.)

These principles and elements are NOT rules. You can't ignore them or break them because they are a part of whatever you draw or paint. They are a part of every "composition". Granted, these are terms are classifications of things that exist independently of these very classifications - so you can classify them as you wish. Regardless of your method of classification, they are very useful for describing an existing picture, or for building and designing new ones - "composing" according to whatever aesthetic you wish. As artists and illustrators I think our goals are not always to be culturally "aesthetic" - but to manipulate the design principles and elements to make them do what we wish - to communicate to others by having them follow along where we wish them to go. For that purpose they are useful to understand.

The elements and principles are universally applicable to folk art, abstract art, realist art, or whatever 2D art you wish - according to whatever aesthetic you find appropriate to what you are trying to communicate.

Having said all that, most of us live in a western culture. I think you'd have to agree, in our western culture certain "rules" for using the elements and principles of design have become accepted as aesthetically pleasing. The rule of "thirds", the "rule" of keeping a horizon line offcenter, etc. etc. Those are the rules that can be broken and changed and done away with or used to excess.

The "rules" can be argued about forever. The universal elements of design and the universal principles of design have no argument. As far as I can tell, they just exist.

[Steven Stahlberg]

Quaternion: well put. I agree with all of it. You clarified it some more for me. I'll think about all the responses, try to put something together, and see if I can't improve that little essay-wannabe on my site as a result.

Vgta: that's interesting. Motion attracts our attention like nothing else. No matter how strong the contrast, if it isn't moving, and something almost invisible starts creeping across the screen, our attention is pulled right to it. In fact we find a soothing pleasure in watching motion, even if it gives us no information (camp fires, waves, wind blowing through trees and grass). Possibly the evolutionary reason might be to see fast-moving predators before they catch us? I don't know.

One caveat though - we must be able to follow a point with our eyes, otherwise it becomes highly disturbing, almost painful - like when panning the camera too fast, or looking straight sideways out of a speeding car. I think the jerky movements the eyes do trying to keep up is called vestibulo-ocular nystagmus, but don't quote me on that.

In case anybody's wondering what happened to the images, the server's full, I'll try to fix it later. And BTW tomorrow I go flying across the Atlantic, so I may not answer for a little while.

Steven

[ June 18, 2001: Message edited by: Steven Stahlberg ]