Composition - examples of note

[Carol Norton]

[QUOTE=Mike McCarty]


Based on the volume of Myspace entries that yuz guys are producing I can only conclude that you are bored out of your minds. So, maybe we can exercise our brains a little more on this matter of compositon.
t have to answer that question, you're not the boss of me. A theme I've heard from the random child on occasion.

If you can pull yourself away from your Myspace (I was not accepted at Myspace, but instead was juried into Assface - a slightly smaller community) maybe you could ponder the following:
_____
Mike, I laughed so hard at your take on Myspace that I forgot to think about the subject! Thanks for the interjection of your very special sense of humor. I've missed the many valuable learning experiences provided by this forum before the popularity of Myspace. When I stop laughing, I'll be able to think about a thread several eons ago, I just might have started. Composition is one heck of an important subject.

[John Reidy]

". . . an arrangement of visual elements."

M-m-m-m-m-m. Maybe I am simple minded but isn't this precisely what composition is?

As I appreciate and understand composition, especially in portraiture, there is a volume of information of smart and artistic composition styles. Sometimes the portrait can tell a story, which could be a theme of sorts but to make a distinction between compositional choices as to themed or unthemed and to relegate one to art and the other to something less is more of a view of the critic and not the art.

Thanks, Mike for your look back and for the cleverness that you always seem to be able to wrangle. Leave it to an Okie to tell it like Will Rogers.

[Mike McCarty]

SB,

Critic Theodore F. Wolff wrote in 1989:

"There can be no doubt that Rockwell's production was uneven, that most of it was trivial, even, at times, embarrassingly hackneyed. He had a difficult time avoiding the obvious and overly sentimental: little boys were invariably freckled and gawky, had big ears, and loved baseball; little old ladies were kindly and loved nothing so much as to give cookies to children and to beam at evidence of young love. And everyone was God-fearing, patriotic, hardworking, and respectful of motherhood, apple pie, and the sanctity of marriage."

Overly sentimental? Not so much in his 1964 "Murder in Mississippi."

He had his critics, but probably not so much to his compositions.

Bloody critics!

Tom,

conceit that comes from the mind of a wordsmith

... that's a good one, Tom.

Have you pondered the Cosmology, Gender and Aesthetic Imagination in your work?

"Defying the visual bias of art history, a number of artists and writers since the nineteenth century have concerned themselves with the possibility of engaging the proximity senses in art. In 1836, for example Theophile Thor

[Tom Edgerton]

Mike--

Oh yeah, Andrew the elder not Jamie the younger.

I think as much as anything for me, what makes the composition of your boots work is the abstract rhythm and placement of the darks. If this painting were posterized into two or three black/white/gray values (for fun and learning), we'd see that the ascending march of the darks from left to right makes it swing.

I've also heard the rule that there should be more space in the direction that somebody/ something is looking, but I've seen about a million examples where this isn't so and it works just fine...superbly in fact.

I once heard someone say, "I love deadlines...I like the swooshing sound they make when they fly by." I'd paraphrase by saying, "I love rules...I like the racket they make when they collapse."

[Mike McCarty]

There is somewhere buried in this long thread a discussion on "The Golden Mean." James Gurney, of Dynotopia fame, recently discussed the topic on his blog in his usual thoughtful manner.

There are five parts to his discussion that he titles: "Mythbusting the Golden Mean." The first part is here: http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/20...an-part-1.html

The whole purpose of our thread here was to focus on composition and try and discover the "why and the how" of how things should be aranged.

Mr. Gurney conludes his discussion with this:

"Art cannot be reduced to any absolute formula. The golden conditions are situational, not preordained. A great creation pierces our hearts through an unexpected combination of factors. Beauty arrives in the night and hovers just outside our window, shifting and shimmering, floating just beyond the reach of our strings and calipers, unwilling to fit into any box we build for her."

Well said, Mr. James Gurney.