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    Being as how later this month, I'm scheduled as the instructor for an upcoming workshop that has the word 'composition' right there in the title, thoughts on this all-encompassing topic are taking up a lot of space in my brain right now. My understanding of the word composition more or less covers two phases. The first is the planning stage where format and placement are being contemplated and the artist is attempting to form a strong visual image of what the finished piece will look like. A few examples of the concepts many artists, photographers and designers employ to help guide them to a successful result are color notes, value studies, Fibonacci Curve and Golden Ratio. Any activity that someone finds helpful in producing a more efficient avenue for their self-expression is all good as far as I'm concerned. 

     In school, many years ago, we were taught to do a full value underpainting, plus a small color note to help in the planning stages. In later years when I moved to a direct painting method and began doing almost all of my work from life rather than photos, a lot of that advance preparation became condensed into more of a mental process, but I wouldn't want anyone to interpret that as minimizing the importance of planning ahead. The thing to keep in mind is there's always a trade-off and depending on your experience, tastes and temperament the planning stages can vary by quite a bit. There are artists who map out every detail in advance while others will plan as little as possible and rely on a mix of luck and spontaneity to carry the day. My approach falls somewhere in the middle where I try to have a definite destination in mind but also leave some flexibility to reinterpret what the painting needs as it goes along.....just in case.

       Once a basic design is considered and the painting begins, a second phase of composition comes into play. Composition in this sense is about making sure that all of the areas of a painting end up working well together as a whole. I've found that visually creative people often arrive in class with a fairly well developed sense of design, proportion, harmony, etc. and many have studied the various theories either in school or on their own. What I find less common is to see someone come to class with a strong sense of how to respect the power of their palette, establish a strong center of interest, and carry through to the finish without veering off track along the way. For many artists it is not a natural tendency, but rather something that has to be developed, to consider every stroke, every note of color and every aspect of a painting in terms of how it relates to the whole. Occasionally things do just fall into place without much effort but it's more typical for  speed bumps to appear and need to be dealt with. As an instructor this is the aspect of composition I emphasize a bit more in my teaching  because my mission is to zoom in on the things that students are less likely to be practicing on their own.

        To illustrate the concept of a center of interest, below there are 2 photos of a magnolia tree. Although the blossoms are all the same, due to angles and background variations,  photo #1 has an area toward the lower right corner with more contrast and definition that catches the eye first in spite of the sea of similar blossoms surrounding it. Photo #2 is a slightly different view but in this image the elements that attract the eye are more evenly divided and spaced so there is no one area that clearly dominates the attention.  This causes the viewer to have difficulty focusing on any one spot and gives a somewhat more chaotic feeling as though the image is almost vibrating.

                                Photo#1                                                                                         Photo#2

In this second set set of photos, I've taken photo#1 and rotated the image in different directions.Notice how the eye is grabbed by that same area with more definition and contrast regardless of the way the image is turned. Viewing a painting composition from different angles and perspectives by rotating or reversing the image can be a helpful way to stress test the strength of the center of interest and to check that the original concept of the composition is being maintained.

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While coming up with a strong center of interest and getting it on the canvas in a favorable location can be a challenge, this process is fairly straightforward. Assuming the composition isn't radically pushing the envelope in some way, a checklist can even be employed to ensure that the various elements that will attract the eye are in place. The next steps are where all of the judgement calls come into play and that can present a different kind of challenge. It involves a lot of discipline to respect those initial statements and not get carried away by the urge to keep adding on to the story, allowing other areas of the canvas to become competitive with the original concept. The relative value and color differences can be pretty subtle and the process of relating each area to one another and keeping the painting as a whole in mind continues until the final stroke. Ideally the technique of each individual artist will also play a role in how a work of art holds together so carrying off a painting to completion can certainly lead to that thankfully temporary condition artists sometimes refer to as 'easel brain'. At the beginning, the choices are wide open and any statements of color and value are only limited by what the pigments are capable of. Once the outside parameters are established though, complementing and not competing with the center of interest becomes a primary objective. Taking into consideration the objectives I'm after in my own work, thinking of composition in this way helps me create not only designs that I feel the viewer will find compelling, but also allows me to capture a stronger feeling of light and depth.