Painting involves many kinds of things aside from the difficulty one can have getting a brush and paint to do what one wants it to do. Learning to become a painter takes years. It takes decades. Composition, however, is often not considered by the student and is one of the most important things consider.

Composition is the order, or the structure, in painting; the formal elements. You want to think of what a painting looks like when you focus on things other than the subject matter. All works of art have some something going on within them in addition to what is recognizable as subject matter. You might ask yourself what makes a painting different from other sorts of images. How are paintings different from snap shots? (Snap shots are photographs made by non photographers. Great photographers select, frame, and control what happens in each image they make. There is nothing random in fine photography). Consider what makes one painter’s depiction of a particular Bible story, for example, different from another painter’s depiction of the same story. You can see countless paintings with the same elements, with, for example the Virgin and Child or the Resurrection. Piero della Francesca’s painting is different from anyone else’s. What allows you to know a Botticelli from a detail of his painting? A foot of a Botticelli figure is recognizably by Botticelli. To begin to understand these things is to begin to see what is there other than the subject or narrative content in a painting.

There are countless kinds of compositional structure. Some are rigid systems of geometry in which the larger forms and spatial divisions fall on positions on the picture plane according to a set of rules. These systems could be based on divisions of the format according to the golden section, or the “rabatment” of the rectangle, or a structure involving circles or squares or triangles or a combination of those geometric shapes. And, on the other hand, there are compositional structures arrived at entirely intuitively. These tend to be continually adjusted during the painting process according to barely understood responses to what feels right.

Generally one feels the need for visual balance in a painting. Balance can be based on something as obvious as bilateral symmetry, or there can be balance where quite unequal forms arrive at equilibrium. The visual weight of different sized patches of color can feel as though they are in balance with one another. An object can be in equilibrium with a void if they are placed in such a way that they are made to feel in balance.

Often we see curving forms juxtaposed against straight lines. This happens in most of the Medieval and early Renaissance painted and sculpted crucifixes, for example, but it happens throughout the history of art as well as in all kinds of things designed by people (in a chair, in a teapot, in a logo… if you look for it, you find it everywhere).

In paintings all elements or forms should work together. Forms are related to one another as well as to the edges of the picture. The edges are very important.

When we speak of forms we mean shapes. They may or may not be “things”, or identifiable objects. A form might be, for example, a triangle of light on the floor or a bit of drapery next to something, often incomplete in itself as an object.

A painting will tend to complete itself within its edges, or frame, so that one doesn’t feel that it is a detail of a larger image. That happens when things within the composition are related to the edges. A painting is not the same as a view of the real world. In a painting, order replaces randomness.

When looking at paintings you will find that in some there is an imbalance between the compositional structure and the degree to which things look real. In Medieval and early Renaissance painting the compositional order is stronger than the realism of the figures and objects depicted. Figures may look awkward and room space or landscape space may look unnatural. In those paintings there is a stylization based on conventions used in those times and places, and compositional order is more obvious. (Medieval anatomical treatment of the figure is different from any other. Figures of greater importance may be twice the size of other figures. Flemish drapery is depicted in a way that is Flemish, and looks quite unlike Italian Renaissance drapery). In much of the Italian high Renaissance painting (or in contemporary realism), the balance is tipped in the other direction. Figures and space can look so real that we may be fairly unaware of underlying compositional structure. The awkwardness we might feel in Medieval art is replaced by a rendering of the visual world more like that we see around us. Neither one is better painting than the other. And compositional structure underlies the images in both Medieval and later paintings.

19th and 20th century painting from observation (in landscape, figure, and still life) begins to break down even more into formal compositional structure. In Cubism and other kinds of modern painting the balance is tipped still further toward formal ideas and we get into various kinds of abstraction. Abstraction can move into non objective painting where there is no longer any subject matter (other than that of the abstract forms). In the mid 20th century Minimalists simplify non objective abstraction yet further. The extreme examples are all black or all white paintings.

In contemporary painting one can find almost anything. I return to painters who concern themselves with composition to a greater degree.

Balthus is a painter who was always very interested in compositional structure in a traditional sense. When Balthus was young, he painted copies of Piero della Francesca frescoes. Piero della Francesca is a favorite of many contemporary painters precisely because he was so concerned with composition. The same is true of Balthus. Balthus’ paintings from the 1930s are strongly influenced by Piero’s paintings. In both painters one senses an order so tight that nothing is out of place. Nothing can be moved or taken away without disturbing the totality of the composition. Every shape is carefully considered and refined. There is a purity of structure that is beautiful. It is this that I believe accounts for the importance of Balthus and Piero della Francesca to contemporary figurative painters.

The same attention to refining every shape and creating a tight order within a painting exists in the early figure paintings of Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and John Graham. These painters shared ideas and influenced each other. Their paintings are fine examples of a kind of abstraction in which observed forms are redesigned to become a new and personal language of forms.