Composition - examples of note

[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.