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ural fact, you may consider as so many bits of form and color with which you may work out a scheme on canvas; and how you do it is to consider them as pawns in your game of aesthetics. With these as materials, what you really do is to combine mass and line and color by means of proportion, arrangement, contrast, and accent, that a beautiful entity of harmony, balance, rhythm, grace, dignity, and force may result. And this is composition. =No Rules.=--Naturally in dealing with a thing like this, which is the very essence of art, rules are of very little use. Ability in composition may be acquired when it is not natural, but it calls for a continuous training of the sense of proportion and arrangement, just as the development of any other ability calls for training. The best thing that you can do is to study good examples and try to appreciate, not only their beauty, but how and why they are beautiful. Cultivate your taste in that direction; and with the taste to like good and dislike bad composition will come the feeling which tells you when it is good and when it is bad, and this feeling you can apply to your own work, and by experiment you will gain knowledge and skill. Rules are not possible simply because they are limitations, and the true composer will always overstep a limitation of that kind, and with a successful result. Principles of composition, too, must be variously adapted, according to the kind of picture you have in hand. The principles are the same, of course; but as the materials differ in a figure painting and a landscape, for instance, you must apply them to meet that difference. =Suggestions.=--The first suggestion that might be made as a help to the study of composition is to consider your picture as a whole always. No matter how many figures, no matter how many groups, they must all be considered as parts of a _whole_, which must have no effect of being too much broken up. If the figures are scattered, they must be scattered in such a way that they suggest a logical connection between them as individuals in each group, and groups in a whole. There should usually be a main mass, and the others subsidiary masses. There should be a centre of interest of some sort, whether it be a color, a mass, or a thing; and this centre should be the point to which all the other parts balance. =Simplicity= is a good word to have in mind. However complicated the composition may seem superficially, you
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