civilized ku # 2018 ~ letting your eyes work from inside out

In-home tableau ~ Au Sable Forks, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggenA few days ago in the still life ~ the light entry, I opined that I believe many studio based picture makers most often know light better than their non studio based picture making brethren. Along similar lines, it is also my belief that those who demonstrate an ability to make good still life pictures* are also damn good landscape picture makers, arrangements of color / form / shape / space on the 2D print surface wise.

IMO, this is true simply because the picture maker in question has an innate sense of spacial and color relationships. That sense is not something they have to think about when making pictures. Rather, it is something they just "feel", which is why, when asked, most can not define / explain how they do it with any sense of a replicable MO.

As Nike says (or did say - I don't keep up on such things), they "just do it". Or, if you prefer a more picture making oriented quote, as Edward Weston stated:

Now to consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk. Such rules and laws are deduced from the accomplished fact; they are the products of reflection.

This notion reduces the "rules" of composition to an after-the-fact description, as opposed to a before-the-fact prescriptive method of making good pictures, compositionally speaking. This descriptive awareness is useful for discussing composition (aka: one element of why a picture looks good), but it is not so useful for the creation of art - an act which most often requires "breaking the rules", or, perhaps more accurately stated, the creative act of making new rules.

Most amateur picture makers, when seeking a replicable compositional formula, react in both horror and dismay when confronted with the idea of composition as being a feel-it thing. How, they ask, can I learn to "feel it"? Or, more to the point, can it be learned? And, if I can't learn to "feel it", am I doomed to forever making compositionally clichéd pictures by consulting and following the "rules of composition"?

The answer to the last question is, "yes". But ...

... IMO, one can learn to "feel it", but it requires a very concentrated effort (and, it should be noted, making that effort doesn't always guarantee success). That effort - often measured in years, not months - revolves around identifying, in your own body of work, those pictures which "work" for you. That is to say, those pictures which work for your eye and sensibilities. Once identified, study those pictures, looking to discover an after-the-fact descriptive awareness of why they "work" for you.

Once you recognize that after-the-fact descriptive, you have begun to get at least a fledgling feeling for your own personal sense of composition. However, avoid, at all costs, trying to over analyze it and turn it into to logical / rational proscriptive "rule" to be employed in all of your picture making. Rather, learn to identify that same feeling of "it's just right" when at the point of making a picture.

As Weston also stated, it's all about learning to ...

... Let the eyes work from inside out ... [T]hen so called “composition” becomes a personal thing, to be developed along with technique, as a personal way of seeing.

*In my commercial picture making salad days, about 50% of my work was spent in making still life pictures. To this day I still can not shake the impulse to "arrange" things - case in point, scattered all over our house are a sizable number of my still life tableaux (witness the picture in this entry). When the wife is in a generous mood, she calls these arrangement, "your museum(s)". At other less generous times, she refers to them simply as "clutter".

I don't think she understands how important these things are to my growth and refinement as a picture maker. Although ... guess who she asked to decorate and arrange her office (which resulted in a actual paying commission to do likewise for another partner in her firm.