Elements of Design

A few years ago I read an article in International Artist magazine about a study that was done to determine how people looked at paintings. They tracked the movement of viewers' eyes when looking at two different paintings and plotted the paths their eyes followed. It was fascinating to see them refute a few of the oldest "truisms" in terms of compositional theory.

If you read art books, or take painting/drawing classes, or participate in online art forums, you'll hear some of these things repeatedly, as if they're chiseled in stone:

• Your picture must have a center of interest (or "COI" for short).
• You should always paint with the Golden Mean in mind (or, at least, remember the "rule of thirds") and locate your COI at one of the Golden Mean points.
• Your composition should "lead the viewer's eye."
• Etc.

The study they described in the magazine found that none of these "rules" count for much when it comes to the way a viewer looks at a painting. Apparently, viewers bring to each painting a unique set of preferences and predilections. What you look at first in a painting may well be something I look at after looking at other stuff. You might linger over one part of a picture, but I might only glance at it momentarily and then look at something else.

The notion of "guiding the viewer's eye" is one that I've considered nonsense since I first heard it a long, long time ago. Not just because, intuitively, you have to wonder if "guiding the viewer's eye" is even possible but because, why would you care to do that? You just spent hours, days, months painting a picture. Don't you want the viewer to look at everything in it? Do you think that guiding the viewer to your COI is important? How much of a COI is it if you have to lead someone to it?

If you've looked at some of my pictures, especially the blossom and cascade pictures, you've probably seen that there's no COI in most of them. The blossoms and cascades are meant to have rhythms and patterns, but only as a vehicle for letting a viewer sort of relax and sense things. There's no "payoff" in terms of a COI. If, on the other hand, you look at some of the "dark background" pictures I've made, you'll see that the COI is pretty blatant: I'm not trying to "guide" your eye; I'm putting a light object against a dark background, which basically says "Here, look at this thing, this is what I want you to look at." My pictures aren't very subtle, I guess.

Anyway, next time you're in a gallery or an art museum, or you're looking at pictures in a book or on the internet, see if you can tell what your eye first looks for, and then see whether your eye is "guided" by the composition. (And then, ask yourself how much your viewing of paintings is influenced by photography. The overwhelming majority of digital cameras encourage people to place the most important part of a photo directly in the center, simply because that's how most cameras focus. The "rule of thirds"? Sorry, I think the rule has shifted to the middle of the picture plane.)