Composition is Key, Part 1

Or, how I stopped worrying about how good I was and started enjoying the process

I am convinced that composition trumps technique in visual art. This not to suggest that technique is unimportant - it is vitally important. But a piece poor in technique can still be compelling if its composition is strong¹. The opposite is not true. Indeed, artwork that demonstrates great talent but is bereft of a solid compositional foundation is best described as saccharine. Or Rococo.

Composition is why the works of Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko are so moving to so many. Composition is the answer to the dismissive comment that “my four year old could do that”. No, they could not, at least not compositionally. Mastering composition is, therefore, essential to creating artwork that sings.

There are some paintings, very remarkable for the skill they display, which are, however, a mere welding together of factors which belong to many different expressions of nature. Many a school drawing of this character have I seen held up as an example, given a prize, and yet being but a mere patching together of many concepts — unrelated factors nevertheless cunningly interwoven — there is not in them that surge of life, that unity which is the mark of true organization [read: composition]

Robert Henri

Let’s back up, and talk about what composition is and why it’s important. There are layers to what composition means in the context of visual art. Conceptually, composition can be understood as how an artist orders their artwork such that the finished painting successfully evokes an emotional reaction from the viewer.

I want to distill this down to one, straightforward operational definition that can help get a painting started while providing an anchor to go back to if or when we get lost during the artistic process.

Composition is how we make sure that the viewer sees what we want them to see, in the order we want them to see it, in an aesthetically pleasing manner.

All decisions about how a painting should present its subject should be geared towards accomplishing this purpose. This includes the answers to such questions as:

• How saturated of a color should I use here?

• How much detail does this area need?

• Should the contrast be strong or soft?

• Can I borrow those trees to make an implicit line?

• Where do I place my subject?

• How important is this cow, anyway?

• Inter alia.

Whenever faced with a decision, the question we want to answer is, “how will this influence where the viewer is looking?”

Here’s an example from the great 20th century illustrator, Frank Frazetta. This is Silver Warrior (1972). Ask yourself the following question: what are the polar bears doing?

If you said “pulling the sleigh” you’re correct. Now, ask yourself a second question: “How are the polar bears pulling the sleigh?” Do you see it? Or, rather, do you not see it? There are no harnesses, and no reins.

I have it on good authority (personal conversation with his daughter-in-law) that this was intentional: Frazetta felt that the reins were too distracting, and so he simply removed them. The incredible thing about this is that you still see them. The mind is great at finding patterns where there are none. Great artists take advantage of humanity’s penchant for pareidolia, a concern that is squarely compositional².

It’s that level of thoughtful painting that I want to engage in.

Principles and Elements of Design

Design principles guide how the artist deploys design elements. Design elements are the building blocks the artist employs to manifest their vision.

Design principles are nothing new: artists have been making choices guided by structure for at least 4000 years. For example: there’s a reason why Egyptians painted people in profile but painted their eyes in portrait. Similarly, design elements have a long track record. Again, consider Egyptian art. Look at this example from the Book of the Dead. Notice how everyone is focused on Maat. The abundance of lines, both explicit and implied, and the rhythm created by the pantheon on the top row, all lead to Maat as he weighs a heart against a feather. These are decisions made by the artist(s) who created this work of art and follow design principles and elements that are still salient today.

It was during the 19th and 20th centuries that these elements and principles became explicit and widely propagated. The arts and crafts movement of the late 19th century did much towards this articulation, but it was really during the early 20th century that design was formalized. Movements like Art Nouveau, Plakatstil, and De Stijl, along with the Bauhaus school of design, pioneered the idea that there are aesthetic qualities to “good art” that can be understood and harnessed to create beautiful works. But it was ultimately the writings of Wucius Wong and Herbert Simon that fully articulated and defined the elements and principles as we know them today, through their books Principles of Two-dimensional design (Wong, 1972) and The Sciences of the Artificial (Simon, 1969).

Underpinning 20th century thought on design principles and elements was Gestalt psychology. “Gestalt” is a German word that translates as “shape” or “form”. But, like all good German words, it loses something in translation. Gestalt is better understood as meaning something closer to “unified whole” and in our context is used to describe organizing visual elements into groups based on specific principles. These principles (such as proximity, similarity, closure, continuity, and figure-ground) would find their way into the aesthetic conversation that would eventually culminate in the principles and elements of design.

Composition as Problem Solving

The entire purpose of the principles and elements of design is to make a focused composition possible. They are the strategies and techniques that will allow you to create a painting that will prevent someone from taking their eyes off of it?

In a very technical sense, composition means how the shapes, lines, forms, etc. - that is, the elements of design - are organized in a painting - that is, the principles of design. It can be a good or bad composition; weak or strong; boring or compelling. This is where the principles of design come into play: by harnessing these principles, you stand a better chance of creating a good composition. Learning to think in these terms as you engage in the entire painting process - from thumbnail to varnish is, in fact, learning creativity.

Remember this next time you hear yourself say, “I don’t have a creative bone in my body.” Then grow one:)

It’s important to remember that composition is not a linear process, strictly speaking. It’s like how the Doctor describes time: it’s more of a wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey process than the function of going from step a to step b. There’s a lot of back and forth through the whole process from start to finish. This means that sometimes you have to do substantial corrections. It can be hard to take backwards steps, but nothing else will do³.

Approaching art as a problem is a fruitful practice. By viewing artistic challenges as problems to solve, you'll overcome the flawed idea that artists should intuitively know what to do. Every artist encounters moments of uncertainty, often due to inadequate compositional planning.

Robert Henri, perhaps the most influential teacher of American art, put it this way in his The Art Spirit (1923): “Do not tell me that you as students will first learn how to draw and then afterwards to attend to all this [ie., compositional considerations]. It is only through such motives that you can learn to draw.”

With effective planning, you'll either know what to do at any step or quickly find solutions to roadblocks. Proper planning turns obstacles into manageable problems, preventing them from becoming complete stops in your process. Conversely, a lack of planning allows challenges to become roadblocks that halt progress entirely.

So. Let’s go solve some problems! :)

1. Unless the technique is so poor as to distract from the composition.

2. Let’s not take this too far or become hyperfocused on what I am saying, to the exclusion of what I am leaving out. This means: do not discount the essentialness of technique. In matters of technique, repetitio est mater studiorum. Additionally, composition itself is not only a matter of applying the principles and elements of design to an artwork, as I suggest below. These things are nothing more than the gasoline to get the car on the road. Technique and composition are, therefore, only a part of the creative process.

One must also have vision: the capacity to see a painting from start to finish, to adapt and roll with the punches, to push through the doubt with faith and confidence, and to know when you’ve created something beautiful. Vision, more than composition and technique, is personal. Nevertheless, it, too, can be learned and developed through trial, thoughtfulness, instruction, and practice.

3. I have personally learned through painful trials that if I leave something that I know is off, even if it’s the sort of thing only I will notice, the entire painting will suffer as a consequence. It’s not worth it. Better to fix whatever the issue is as soon as possible, even if that means taking several steps back. Fixing it quickly is important because it means any progress you make after the repair will fit within the correct picture and will not need to be changed later when you finally get around to fixing the original problem.