The Painter in oil

mountains, and every and any other natural fact, you may consider as so many bits of
form and color with which you may work out of a scheme on canvas; and how you do it
to consider them as pawns in your game of æsthetics.
With these as materials, what you really do is to combine mass and line and color by
means of proportion, arrangement, contrast, and accent, that a beautiful entity of
harmony, balance, rhythm, grace, dignity, and force may result. And this is composition.
No rules. - Naturally in dealing with a thing like this, which is the very essence of
art, rules are of very little use. Ability in composition may be acquired when it is not
natural, but it calls for a continuous training of the sense of proportion and
arrangement, just as the development of any other ability calls for training.
The best thing that you can do is to study good examples and try to appreciate, not
only their beauty, but how and why they are beautiful.
Cultivate your taste in that direction; and with the taste to like good and dislike bad
composition will come the feeling which tells you when it is good and when it is bad, and
this feeling you can apply to your own work, and by experiment you will gain knowledge
and skill.
Rules are not possible simply because they are limitations, and the true composer will
always overstep a limitation of that kind, and with a successful result.
Principles of composition, too, must be variously adapted, according to the kind of
picture you haven in hand. The principles are the same, of course; but as the materials
differ in a figure painting and a landscape, for instance, you must apply them to meet the
difference.
Suggestions. - The first suggestion that might be made as a help to the study of
composition is to consider your picture as a whole always. No matter how many figures,
no matter how many groups, they must all be considered as parts of a whole, which must
have no effect of being too broken up.
If the figures are scattered, they must be scattered in such a way that they suggest a
logical connection between them as individuals in each group, and groups in a whole.
There should usually be a main mass, and the others subsidiary masses. There should be
a center of interest of some sort, whether it be a color, a mass, or a thing; and this center
should be the point to which all the other parts balance.
Simplicity is a good word to have in mind. However complicated the composition may
seem superficially, you may treat it simply. You will control it by not considering any
part as of any importance in itself, but only as it helps the whole; and you may
strengthen or weaken that part as you need to. Don’t cut the thing up too much. Let a
half a dozen objects count as one in the whole. Mass things, simplify the masses, and
make the elements of the masses hold as only parts of those masses.
Study placing of things in different sizes relative to the size of the canvas. Make
sketches which take no note of anything but the largest masses or the most important
lines, and change them about till they seem right; then break them up in the same way
into their details. Apply the steps suggested for drawing to the study of composition,
searching for balance chiefly, or for some other quality which is proper to composition.
Line. - Each of the main elements of composition can be used as a problem of
arrangement. You can study composition in line, in mass, or in color.