Chapter One: The Principles of Composition

The first principle of compositional analysis is identifying how your eye moves around a painting and being able to describe that movement. The principles that follow here build upon this idea. They become more technical sounding: this is only because there’s a need to give a name to the principles so they can easily be referred to. Donis A. Dondis calls these principles the “syntactical guidelines for visual literacy” (20), arguing that they’re more like grammatical rules than technical tricks: they explain why things are in the order they’re in, like a language. This section is about establishing a shared language for talking about images, so think of it as a lesson in the language of images rather than a secret specialist skill reserved for artists.

These principles are derived from Dondis’s book A Primer of Visual Literacy. They are very simplified explanations, so if you’re interested in knowing more about Dondis’s theories of how we intuitively decode images, I recommend reading the chapter of the book titled “Composition: The Syntactical Guidelines for Visual Literacy” (especially if you’re an artist).

The exercises which follow the explanation are devoted to helping you learn to use these terms: the terms themselves are incredibly useful for describing how paintings work, of course, but they remain powerful for everything from film stills to photographs to graphic design to ads and memes too.

Balance

Sense perception comes before thought. By this I mean that most of the time our senses are not something we think about. Our ability to identify something we’re looking at usually happens before we are conscious of our brain trying to work it out. Before even identifying objects, though, in any visual field our eye looks for which way is up.

This is a search for balance and it is primal – we rely on it to orient ourselves safely in the world. Imagine waking up in the morning and not being able to identify whether you were standing or lying down or upside down or on your side. When we confront a painting, this part of our brain is triggered in the same way: we search for the horizontal axis and the vertical axis in our field of vision.

After we identify these axes, we know which direction gravity is working in, so we can identify what’s balanced and what’s unbalanced, what’s about to fall and what represents a danger, and what’s safely planted on the ground. Take a look at this picture of a man balancing – is he balanced or unbalanced? Leaning or falling? What about the brain and the heart? What if you look at it from a different angle?

Stress

The counterpart to balance is stress. When things are unbalanced, it produces a response in our brains and even in our bodies. We might unconsciously tighten muscles or flinch as we witness something about to fall. This can be true of images too. Try tuning into the feelings an image like the one above produces in you; it’s a good way to begin articulating the unconscious responses we’ve learned to the things we see.

Stress goes beyond just balancing acts and falling over, however. It goes back to our brain’s search for which way is up, and what happens when it can’t work it out. Compare this Mondrian painting (first) with this Kandinsky painting (second).

Mondrian, Piet. Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow. 1930, National Museum, Belgrade.

Kandinsky, Wassily. Composition 8. 1923, Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Your brain can likely identify the horizontal and vertical axis comfortably with the Mondrian. You probably find that your eye finds and follows the black vertical and horizontal lines top to bottom and left to right. But in the Kandinsky, you might find that your eye scrabbles across the painting, trying to find the axes. You will probably find them eventually – but it will take longer than with the Mondrian. That period of searching can be referred to as the stress that the painting causes.

Leveling and Sharpening

An artist can use the mind’s response to balance and stress to artistic effect. Imagine a dot dead center in the middle of a piece of paper. That dot is levelled – it is even, balanced, and level with the whole of the composition. It produces no stress in our mind’s eye.

Now imagine the dot in the bottom right corner. The dot has made the composition slightly unbalanced, which is called sharpening. In order to find order in the image, our eye might imagine vertical, horizontal, and then diagonal axes, trying to make sense of the position of the dot. The dot might not sit on an axis, but our brains will be able to understand its position in relation to the imagined axes.

A dot that doesn’t seem to sit evenly related to an axis has gone one step further than sharpening into ambiguity. This is a state where it’s difficult to find any balance at all. We might also call this chaos.

How much stress does the position of each of the following dots cause?

With imaginary axes, we can understand the position of the dots more comfortably – or not. Note the importance of the distance from multiple axes as a form of balance:

In the second, the dot isn’t as stressful when we think of it as near the center of the section it’s been divided into. But the third continues to produce stress, even with all the axes drawn in, because it doesn’t correspond to a balanced position relative to any of them.

This is a very complex way to talk about a few dots on pieces of paper. But it acts as a learning tool for understanding the principle of leveling and sharpening an image, which you’ll see used in much more subtle ways by artists in the future.

Lower-left Preference

Look back at the Mondrian painting above (the red square).

Do you find the image satisfying? Does it seem balanced in ways that go beyond simply enjoying balance and straight and horizontal lines? One reason for this might be what Dondis calls the “preference for lower left”. Dondis argues that our eyes scan a painting somewhat like a book: we start at the top of the page and read downwards. We then scan left to right. This causes our eye to do a loop in the lower-left corner, as shown below.

This movement might be more specific to cultures that read from left to right. But the result is that many of us tend to focus most on the lower left of an image and find that when a composition puts its most important activity or “information” here that the image is less “stressful” and more balanced. Notice in the Mondrian painting the structural focus of the composition on the lower-left, with all of the activity placed along the vertical and horizontal edges. Does the rotated version below seem like a less balanced or more stressful composition to you now? Why?

Attraction and Grouping

The idea of attraction and grouping is that our eyes draw connections between similar objects. The best example of this is the way our eyes are able to work out what a “connect the dots” image is before we have actually drawn in the line that connects everything together. As a child, this is usually less true, and there’s more of a surprise at the end when the object we’re drawing is revealed. So as we’ve grown up we’ve developed the ability to connect the dots in our minds. This ability is called attraction and grouping.

With a dot drawing, there is only one “group”: the dots. But in an image involving a series of squares and circles, for instance, your mind will usually connect the squares together into a shape and the circles into a separate shape. Notice in the Frida Kahlo painting at the end of this chapter how the black strands of hair form a separate group in the painting to the white one: color is also involved in grouping.

Positive and Negative

Images where it is difficult to tell what is positive and what is negative fascinate us. Positive and negative are not about black and white, but rather about what dominates an image (positive) and what becomes the background (negative). When it’s unclear, our eyes move between two states, first seeing one as positive and the other negative, and then seeing it the other way around. The use of “negative space”, large patches of vacant background in an image, is an artistic strategy. Watch out for it in Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas.

Consider the following images and determine whether the black or the white seems to be positive or negative to you. Can you see it the other way?

Those are the basic compositional principles for describing an image. Learning to use them will improve your ekphrastic abilities – your ability to describe the technical structure of an image. The following exercise will encourage you to practice using these new terms on a painting, and then to see how they’re mirrored in literary techniques in a poem.

Works Cited and Further Reading

Bruegel, Pieter. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. 1560, Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Belgium.

Dondis, Donis A. A Primer of Visual Literacy. MIT Press, 1973.

Kandinsky, Wassily. Composition 8. 1923, Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Mondrian, Piet. Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow. 1930, National Museum, Belgrade.