Composition and hierarchy

Most good real­ist paint­ings are about some­thing. They have a clearly read­able hier­ar­chy. There is one thing that is most impor­tant. There are other impor­tant things, while every­thing else is subordinated.

The fail­ure to orga­nize is a a com­mon beginner’s error, and one that more expe­ri­enced artists make as well some­times. It’s easy to get caught up in “just paint­ing what you see” with­out real­iz­ing that a paint­ing is a state­ment about what you think is impor­tant. If you don’t cre­ate a hier­ar­chy, you make the state­ment that noth­ing in your pic­ture is impor­tant. Paint­ings with­out hier­ar­chy don’t attract the eye and don’t have wall pres­ence. Even big com­plex paint­ings, with many fig­ure groups doing var­i­ous things, have a clear sense of hierarchy—the more com­plex the com­po­si­tion, the more impor­tant the need for mak­ing some things more impor­tant than others.

There are a vari­ety of meth­ods for estab­lish­ing hier­ar­chy, includ­ing light/dark con­trast, selec­tive focus, selec­tive detail, lines and blocks for lead­ing the eye, and many others.

David Apatoff also dis­cusses the issue of com­po­si­tional pri­or­i­ties in this post on his excel­lent Illus­tra­tion Art weblog.