Composing in Visual Arts

Abstract

front of a painting, we tend to think about composition as an arrangement of its visual structure: lines, shapes, colors, and textures organized by the artist to guide our sensory experience, engage our imagination and, hopefully, provide us with a powerful aesthetic experience. From this perspective, composition is a characteristic of a work of art; a testimonial to the ingenuity and skill of the artist; and an object of contemplation of the spectator. It is the interface between the ideas and intentions of an artist and the experience of the viewer. Composition, construed in this way, is a subject of research for every artist each time he or she engages in a creative process. It has long been a focus of theories concerned with articulation of elements and principles of art and design. It has also been a subject of empirical studies aiming to understand patterns in visual scanning of artifacts as well as explorations of quality of aesthetic experience. When we enter an artist’s studio and see him or her engaged in a creative act we are presented with another meaning of “composition.” Here, the focus is on the process, on the ways in which ideas find a tangible visual form; where a moment of concentration translates into an image; and where engagement with a medium allows new meaning to emerge. In this chapter, I address the topic of “composition” as understood in these dynamic terms: as a verb rather than a noun; as a creative act rather than its outcome. I focus on the examination of cognitive processes, cultural and social conditions and other contextual determinants of what in the educational literature has traditionally been termed as “artistic development.” I present in this chapter an overview of theories that explain how people: young children, adolescents and adults develop their visual vocabulary of expression and how they grow (or decline) in their ability and interest to “compose” in art. While doing so, I attempt to situate these theories in the context of the changing world of art and suggest ways in which the long neglected distinction between “composing visual imagery” and “composing in visual arts” may be articulated and further researched. I try to account for the fact that not only the medium and the repertoire of tools of