On Composition

This morn­ing by email a friend asked me to tell her what I know about com­po­si­tion. It’s a tough sub­ject to sum up in a few words, not because I know so much about it, but because there’s not real­ly a right or wrong way to arrange a drawing.

My take is that it’s all about bal­ance, but there are a lot of things to con­sid­er when you talk about bal­ance. There’s the bal­ance of the “weight” of the pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive spaces in the piece, but also emo­tion­al or the­mat­ic impor­tance. A draw­ing with lots on one side and a lit­tle tiny fig­ure of some­thing dra­mat­ic on the oth­er will like­ly be weight­ed toward the dra­mat­ic fig­ure unless some­thing is done to draw the atten­tion back to the oth­er side.

There’s also a ques­tion of lines and the direc­tions that each set of lines, on paper or implied, draws the eye. The tilt of a head, flow of hair, the direc­tion of eyes or where some­one is point­ing all cre­ate invis­i­ble lines that draw the atten­tion in dif­fer­ent direc­tions. So that’s anoth­er set of ele­ments to be balanced.

It’s impor­tant also to con­sid­er the ways that the atten­tion of the view­er will trav­el the piece with­out help from the artist. In the West we read left to right and a view­er will “start” a piece of art­work on the left. It’s help­ful there­fore to weight the bal­ance of a com­po­si­tion with ele­ments that bring the eye back to the left and back to the top, to keep the atten­tion from drift­ing off the side of the page.

Also, cul­tur­al­ly we’ll tend to see some­one fac­ing to the right as look­ing “for­ward” or “ahead” and some­one fac­ing to the left as look­ing back. This ten­den­cy is reversed in oth­er cul­tures where read­ing is done right to left.

The cul­tur­al vari­ances in how place­ment and direc­tion affect theme are not lim­it­ed to East ver­sus West. The album cov­er for Peter Gabriel’s first album has a guy’s face look­ing out of a rain­drop-cov­ered auto­mo­bile wind­shield. I don’t even think about cul­tur­al dif­fer­ences because Peter Gabriel is part of my cul­ture. Yet on fur­ther reflec­tion I remem­ber that Mr. Gabriel is Eng­lish. While we in Amer­i­ca share a lot with the Eng­lish, we dif­fer on the side of the street on which to dri­ve. Many of the themes are the same, it’s still a pho­to full of long­ing and lone­li­ness, but made more poignant by the fact that he’s sit­ting in the pas­sen­ger seat and not the dri­ver’s as I’d first assumed. The assumed sto­ry is dif­fer­ent, not some­one who showed up to wait, but who is wait­ing for some­one else to take him some­where else.

The trou­ble is, so many ele­ments can affect com­po­si­tion. Ulti­mate­ly, com­po­si­tion is not nec­es­sar­i­ly just about mak­ing some­thing bal­anced, but using the bal­ance or imbal­ance in the pic­ture to con­vey the mean­ing or feel­ing you want the draw­ing to have.

In prac­tice, that most often means try­ing things out and see­ing how they feel, then look­ing for pos­si­ble rea­sons why you get those reac­tions, then strength­en­ing or weak­en­ing ele­ments to align the draw­ing to your own feel­ing of what it should evoke. There’s a lot of tri­al and error because it’s hard to pre­dict all of the lines or all of the emo­tion­al weight or the effect of con­trast or col­or on the bal­ance of your com­po­si­tion. For­tu­nate­ly as well as unfor­tu­nate­ly, bal­ance is a del­i­cate thing. Often small adjust­ments make a big difference.

[EDIT — on look­ing at the album cov­er again, I see that there are no wiper blades vis­i­ble. So the face is seen through the rear win­dow. In which case it makes lit­tle dif­fer­ence which side he’s on, and the set of assump­tions and impli­ca­tions is very dif­fer­ent from the same face look­ing through a windscreen.]