Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/102

LANDSCAPE PAINTING gloom of the lower register. Of equal importance with this question of altitude in the register is that of the numerical scale—whether to use ten, twenty, fifty, or seventy of the possible 100 points in the full scale. This will depend largely upon the effect to be produced, whether the message we have to convey is one of dramatic power, of brilliancy, or of tender and poetic charm. It will depend also considerably upon the character of the work and its ultimate destination. In a mural decoration, for instance, the demand for a restricted scale of values is absolutely mandatory, because the first consideration in a work of this character is that the observer must always remain conscious (or subconsciously conscious) of the flat surface of the wall. If this plane were destroyed, the architectural unity would suffer—the sense of the supporting [70]