Page:LA2-NSRW-1-0510.jpg



COMPOSITION IN FINE ART

436

COMPOSITION IN PINE ART

thistles, daisies, ragweeds, sage-brush, lettuce, dandelion and others.- They are characterized by the fact that their numerous small flowers are closely packed together in heads which resemble flowers. The sunflower, for example, is a head of very many small flowers, the head being surrounded by a set of bracts known as the involucre, which resembles a calyx. The outermost flowers develop showy petals, and thus resemble the petals of an ordinary flower. Another peculiarity of the family is the transformation of the calyx into the so-called pappus, which commonly, as in the thistle and dandelion, takes the form of a tuft of fine hairs for transporting the seed-like fruit (akene).

Composition in Fine Art. In the essay upon the fine arts it is shown that the essential quality in a work of art is the power of bringing about a certain repose in the mind of the person who is contemplating the work. Hugo Miinsterberg observes this in defining the mission of art instruction: "To bring into every life the ideal repose, the repose in the ideal; to bring us that rest which is not fatigue from work, nor the rush of amusement; no, rather that rest which is complete satisfaction beyond the struggles of the day, complete harmonization of all our energies, complete fulfillment of our real personality."

A work of art, in order to give this complete repose, must have but one theme; it must be free within itself from conflicting attractions or suggestions; it must, in other words, have unity. Whether it be a sonnet, sonata, picture, vase or cathedral, it must give one impression. That impression may be simple, as is that given by the architecture of the California missions: it may be complex, as is that of St. Mark's cathedral in Venice; but it must be one. It may be grand, as in the sculptures of Michelangelo, or it may be delicate, as in the carvings of the Japanese, but it must be an unconfused impression. It may be brought about by combining many similar forms, colors, lines or suggestions until they add power to one another, as in some of the poems of Joaquin Miller — giving that quality which we call harmony; it may be brought about by leading the attention to an unlikeness in certain related things, as in Keats's sonnet The Grasshopper and the Cricket j producing a contrast; but in either case a single impression must result.

Now, it will be clear that nature does not always exist in perfect harmonies or perfect contrasts. Nature indeed has other business in hand than the forming of perfect pictures. If he would produce pictorial beauty, the artist must make many a change in the " landscape with figures amid which we dwell." Let us review some of the demands upon him in this respect.

When, in looking over the fields, we send our glance from the trees to the hills beyond them; when we remove our eyes from a person to whom we are speaking, to the walls just behind him; when, in fact, we leave off looking at any one thing and look at something either farther away or nearer than that at which we were looking before, our eyes change their focus for the occasion in somewhat the way in which the focus of a camera is changed to suit varying distances. The eye, however, is by far the more subtle instrument, and is sensitive to variations of distance which would make no apparent difference to the camera. It may therefore be said that each thing we see in nature is, when it is being seen, the center of a little picture all its own and that it is the sum of a number of these little pictures which gives us our impression of "all outdoors." Now, if the artist were to try to paint in one picture the hills as he sees them when looking directly at them, the trees as he sees them when looking directly at them, the clouds as he sees them when looking directly at them, he would have a picture with as many separate interests as it contained objects— a picture which could never have unity or give repose of any sort. So the artist must select some one thing for the main theme of his picture, and to this he must subordinate all other things which may occur in it.

A study of great paintings and illustrations will show the various ways in which artists accomplish this suppression of the secondary things and emphasis of the important ones. It will show that a figure may be made prominent by the position it occupies on the canvas, by its relations to other figures, by its having a space of comparative quiet around it (notice the effect of the halos around the heads in the old-master paintings of the saints), by the focusing of many important lines upon it or the introduction of a contrast near it, by its being more minutely drawn and finished than the rest of the picture, and by the suppression of other figures or groups of figures through partially hiding them from view, turning them away from the spectator, causing them to look or point toward the principal figure or throwing them into a subdued tone.

In nature it is sufficient if the form of a tree be beautiful against the sky; in a picture the visible shapes of sky seen through the tree must be equally beautiful. The picture, since it is all to be seen at once, must be a beautiful pattern in which every shape involved is fine, the background spots not in any sense being left-overs from the shaping of the motif-parts; rather, being conceived in the same aesthetic spirit which characterizes those parts. The contours which distinguish tone from tone may