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It would not be unreasonable that, from the statements of many artists, in respect to composition one might develop the view that composition only dealt with metrical and formal properties of the still image. That an attempt to analyse composition might begin to dwell on geometry and shape and the semantic and emotional resonances of colour and figure. Much of the literature (both artistic and scientific) dealing with composition starts from such a premise. So for example we have this statement from the Expressionist painter Morgner “My medium of expression is colour. By means of correct composition in colour, I want to communicate the living god in me, directly. Not by shading and modifying colours, however, but by purposeful juxtaposition of masculine and feminine colours. Light does not exist for me any more.”
However there are other ways to characterise the stuff of composition. We can
think of it as the passing on of a stimulus, that composition is both
contrived and received in the sure knowledge that the eye and mind do not come
to rest. When, for example, we look at a composition, it is not about
the arrangement of form, it is instead about changing thoughts and the
moving eye. In short composition might only be understood and explained as a
durational, psychological phenomenon. Another Expressionist August Macke gives this
explanation of composition “Time has a large part to play in looking at a picture. A picture (a stupid empty surface to begin with) gets covered, in the course of its creation, by a rhythmically measured network of colours lines and dots, which evokes in its final form a total of living movement. The eye jumps from a blue to red, to green (even if there is only a change of form), to a black line, suddenly comes upon a sharp white eruption, follows it, floats on to a delicate yellow patch, from which little red patches are released, the little red patches turn green and all at once the eye runs over the blur, red and green again, led on by different forms this time, starting on a new cycle… It is impossible to take it all in at once. Time is inseparable from surface.”
In fact there are any number of explanations of visual composition available ranging from those that dwell on varieties of universal harmony such as the Golden Mean; physiological predisposition; and others still on variations of Chomsky's generative grammar and an ensuing concept of 'visual language'. In a sense such explanations reveal as much or more about the origin of explanation as they do about the referent. The initial intellectual frame or premise of analysis is also often hidebound by a requirement to maintain its coherence, thus the opportunistic thinking and emotional processes of the artist are rarely matched by the tidy serial dissections the theory affords.
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