The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 10

THIS WEEK – 
        A short section finishes some of the detailed discussion, including pictorial composition, before next week’s FINAL summation.

D.   Composition

        The real work of surpassing the material world is done not through a preferred abstraction, which can vary, but by a discipline named severally “design,” “composition,” or “visual organization,” whose ground rules never vary.
        If the tasks of composition were always as badly carried out as they are poorly understood, we should suffer a scarcity of well-done work even greater than we now endure. But our burdens of misunderstanding are real, and work their share of damage.
        The study of visual composition is closely similar to learning Rhetoric in language. If Rhetoric is the study of how to say something persuasively, then Composition in a picture becomes the study of how to show it beautifully.

1. To this purpose we select, alter, and reject visual parts by an aesthetic faculty included as a bonus attribute in our wider capacity for instinctive judgment that we own as a survival tool. This has not much to do with the careless prejudices we acquire of choosing blondes over brunettes or, some years ago, the fashionably favored “Ashley” for naming the daughters of this country.
2. If a weight threatens to fall upon us from a height, we do not squander time to straighten some item of apparel, but leap away as quickly as we may. And there are animals as well as man who will retreat from evil smelling food in favor of more appetizing fare.
3. My preferred example of how composition works differs from that final observation only in its specific parts, but is identical in principle and function:  If we played chamber music against the strident screeching of some mechanism, we should not stop the music in order to get better access to the screeching, but rather, silence the screeching because we want to hear the music.

           
              We should un-learn, as best we may, our socially acquired prejudices, but the
               instinctive operations of the aesthetic sense we have to study, observe, and seek
               to understand.

      4.  Tinkering with my demonstration pictures, I shall not try to establish balance.
             Already the impressionists learned by the snapshot photograph and the Japanese
             woodblock print that this may be a dubious rule. A double portrait may require
             balance. But, as we saw, the profile drawing of a head must prefer the character of
             facial features to the skull in back, and would suffer damage if a rule of balance
             were applied. 
  
              Nor shall I tell you that your eye will move from one point to another. Perceptual
              researchers can – with the assistance of a suitable appliance, show any scan path
              with precision. And it will not often match the claims of artists.

         5.  Rather, my examples try to demonstrate how the screeching may be silenced
               and the music played. But the music sounded here is visual, and the screechings
               are visual distractions, that is, demands for an attention not justified by any
               optical appeal.
   
               A distracting “noise” will not be nearly so interesting as it may be loud – but not
               “loud” necessarily. For whispering too can be an emphatic bother and distraction.
               My process of fitting and adjusting can – to some degree – be duplicated by
               sequential slide transparencies.

                But, for a most persuasive showing, it must be demonstrated live.


   E.   The Action of the Paper Snippets

Relationships differ from place to place. Thus, only within a given setting can we visually judge and mend what is too big by shrinking, too small by making larger, too bright by making duller, and too dull by causing it to shine. Also, what seems shapeless needs to become form-full, and what is vague – and therefore puzzling – be made clear.

1. The gravity of all such faults and measure of their damage can be assessed by the extent of unprofitable notice they command, determining thereby the amount of mending needed in the opposite direction, with smaller errors being not so urgent.
2. In art we aim for and adjust only that which shows, so that the management of emphasis, by showing weightily and showing lightly, becomes the signal skill of composition. An emphasis is here not solely made through visibility and contrast. But the small as well as large, the exceptionally vague or dull as well as the crystal-clear and bright, all can be emphatic.
3. If there is accord among us that my live demonstration pictures have altered for the better, then my paper snippets have rendered them, step by careful step, more beautiful, by letting our visual participation be a little less impeded and more fully possible each time along the way. Thus I have gained, perhaps, some sounding of my music and silenced, in the end, the screeching.

Coherent unity, the desired outcome of this effort, means the best works are best because they have become themselves – that is, without distraction – the full embodiment of all their theme and striving.