Enzie,
The book is called: "Famous quotes that Mike McCarty found while trolling the Art Renewal web site" -- Houghton Mifflin, third printing, TexMex edition.
The quote above is the last half of his full remarks which can be seen just under Leighton's biographical information here:
www.artrenewal.org. Just click on one of his paintings on their home page.
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Of course Leighton above is not exactly preaching conformity.
These are difficult concepts to convey. To me, the so called "rules of composition," are more a subset of the laws of nature than of the laws of man. It's not just that some governing board has set out some set of arbitrary rules; they are inherent, and they run deep. They are inherent in the way that humans visually perceive.
I think that if you picked ten bright citizen laymen and set before them a series of paintings, drawings, etc., and ask them to pick out the most aesthetically pleasing, for the most part I believe their selections would coincide with what we artists would agree are the paintings that follow our "so called" rules. I do not, however, believe that the lay persons could well articulate the reasons for their choices. They might say -- It just looked good to me.
If you accept my hypothesis for a while longer you might ask -- how then do they know how to pick? I think they know because they are following what I would call the compositional laws of nature. It has to do with the way we humans see, how we perceive the world through our two eyes that are placed in the front of our heads. Shapes, edges, intensities of color and contrast, and especially the relationship to edges (this is what brings all the senses to bear -- the act of defining the edge) present themselves either in harmonious patterns, or, they do not. Over time artists have come to document some of these more obvious pattern flaws into sets of "rules," but we are just documenting what nature has already lain out, given our human perceptions.
But, alas, there are some practitioners that just don't get it even by half, and they lay down the most awful discords to nature. And, I think, when you don't get it, you don't even know that you don't get it, and so you press on.
I ask myself the question morning, noon and night -- Do I get it? What if I am successfully realizing my vision, but the vision I aspire to is crap? How would I know for sure? Where would I go to get my vision checked? Can a flawed vision be corrected, or is it like the size of your foot, or your height? I think this is one of the saddest things about pursuing art -- you can be perfectly successful in achieving your vision, it's just that the vision you've chosen is universally accepted as not good, and you can't understand why.
Of course it matters whether you are creating art simply for the joy of creation, or whether you seek acceptance outside the walls of your own place of worship.
Also, there is the real possibility that these views simply further the notion that I am more full of it than the upcoming Thanksgiving turkey, but I'm not completely sure, so I press on.