Composition

When producing a piece of landscape art, composition is everything, composition is the way you place features in your work in order to lead the viewer through your piece. Composition can also be used to convey concepts the same way that shape language does, an example of this is a mountain, a mountain is a triangular shape and conveys strength and stability. 

A very popular compositional method is the rule of thirds, in this you split the page into nine equal portions and the theory is that important features you would place on the places where the lines intersect. The rule of thirds can also represent how the viewer naturally moves through a page, in western culture we read from left to right, top to bottom, this means that the viewer will move through the page in a backwards N shape as shown below.

This information can be really useful as an artist, because of this we can tell that we should put the features we want our viewer to focus on on the bottom left and top right intersections. 

However some artists choose to ignore this particular information. 

Salvidor Dali, the surrealist painter in the above work (The Persistence of Memory, Dali, S. 1931) Dali chooses to place focal points on the top left and bottom right, this could be because he was attempting to produce a dream-esque landscape that surrealism is well known for and therefore wanted to lead the viewer through a more nonsensical path. 

This work of a landscape from Ghost of Tsushima (Douglas, D. GHOST OF TSUSHIMA - Burned Pine Biome. 2020) uses the rule of thirds slightly differently. In this piece Douglas has used the rule of thirds as a framing method, using the torii as the main focal point that is lead to by the path. Having the torii along the rule line shows how important this is and also the strength of it to still be standing despite being burnt.

Here are some different compositional studies I did in order to explore the ideas more, personally I quite like the framing one (left hand side 3 down) as it automatically leads the viewer to the main focal point with very little variation. I am also a fan of the point perspective compositional methods as they clearly lead the viewer through the piece, particularly with one point perspective, using leading lines to pull you through the piece.

Overall I feel that composition is really effective in drawing the viewer through the artwork how I wish it to be perceived. I feel the only issue would be finding a compositional method I liked before beginning to draw as the composition is the foundation of the landscape. I will certainly be using a variety of compositional methods in my work going forward.

Bibliography

Dali, S. (1931). The Persistence of Memory [Oil on Canvas] Museum of Modern Art, New York

Douglas, D. (2020). GHOST OF TSUSHIMA - Burned Pine Biome. [online] ArtStation. Available at: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/lxGbQY [Accessed 1 Dec. 2020].