A picture plane has activity. The compositional choices using the flow of shapes you select to paint is more than likely the most important feature you, as an artist, can create on your painting. It becomes the over riding theme of movement and structure in your work of art.
When looking for something to paint, it’s the natural existence of shapes that presents itself first. However, to create a painting will require arranging and adjusting the shapes to create a coherent flow.
Remember, you are attempting to put the world you are seeing onto a small rectangle, square, or round painting substrate (no matter how large it is). You must learn to transform what you are “seeing” in the world to an engaging composition that works with abstract and realistic shapes interacting with the proportions you have chosen for your canvas. Seeing the shapes, selecting them for your composition, and arranging them in a manner that affects the viewer’s eye movements is a major challenge to any artist.
There are many compositional choices an artist can use to complete the flow throughout their creation. From the “masters” to contemporary artists of the the day, they have become standard and appear over and over again. Each of these are a blog post within themselves, and we will not attempt to discuss them here. However, we do recommend taking time to study the great masters and their creative genius using composition in their paintings. The creation of art composition has been very mathematical when it comes to it’s original creation. We artists of today simply take it as fact.
One of the compositional choices many artists use is the cruciform (cross). It’s one of my brother’s (Lynn Burton) favorite choice for his many compositions. It’s a method that utilizes both horizontals and verticals. It’s very good for landscapes because one can see the way it engages all sides of a picture frame.
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