Composition Quotes - Page 7

• RAW is very forgiving. I was photographing a farm woman in Ecuador cooking over a small fire and my fill flash didn't go off a few times. I was about to delete the RAW files but decided to play with the curves first because I like the composition. It turned out that the image, although underexposed by two stops, was better than the fill-flashed images because the fire was the only source of illumination and it looked more real.

  Peter Menzel

  Real, Fire, Curves

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• At some point, sitting in the school library, during reading period, I looked up from my leopard print hardcover composition notebook where I was scribbling a derivative [John Ronald Reuel ] Tolkien epic full of purple prose in tiny handwriting and thought to myself, "Damn! I am a writer! How did that happen?".

  Vera Nazarian

  Notebook, Reading, School

  Source: fantasyworlds.wordpress.com

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• Jazz, isn't that just a series of mistakes diguised as musical composition?

  Michael McKean

  Mistake, Musical, Rock N Roll

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• A small garden, accordingly, gives its owner a far greater opportunity to express himself ... in a garden any man may be an artist, may experiment with all the subtleties or simplicities of line, mass, color, and composition, and taste the god-like joys of the creator.

  Harrison Gray Otis Dwight

  Men, Garden, Artist

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• Sometimes you can define a composition or a couple of notes by the silence that goes around it.

  Steve Tibbetts

  Couple, Silence, Sometimes

  "The Exotic Sound Of Steve Tibbetts". Interview with Liane Hansen, www.npr.org. July 9, 2010.

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• The way I listen to music goes in waves depending on a lot of things. How busy I am, if I'm in between composition projects, if I'm starting a new project. So, the only time I listen to the radio for music is with my daughter's when I'm driving them to school, or driving them somewhere.

  Tod Machover

  Daughter, School, Radio

  Source: bigthink.com

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• I think, at the L.A. County Museum of Art, I saw my first example of Kerry James Marshall, who had a very sort of heroic, oversized painting of black men in a barbershop. But it was painted on the same level and with the same urgency that you would see in a grand-scale [Anthony] van Dyck or [Diego] Velazquez. The composition was classically informed; the painting technique was masterful. And it was something that really inspired me because, you know, these were images of young, black men in painting on the museum walls of one of the more sanctified and sacred institutions in Los Angeles.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Art, Wall, Men

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• There is much modern music that is better adapted to a wind combination than to a string, although for obvious reasons originally scored for an orchestra. If in such cases the interpretation is equal to the composition the balance of a wind combination is more satisfying.

  John Philip Sousa

  Wind, Balance, Orchestra

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• On one level, I'm interested in how the space dictates the effect visually - how the composition of a given work changes depending on the nature of each wall. But I'm also trying to emphasize less tangible elements: the amount of time it takes to walk the gallery's perimeter; how one's physical distance affects his or her sense of the overall composition; how the size of the space creates a sense of visual rhythm. It's really a matter of seeing how much structure is necessary to impose for those things to become apparent.

  Landon Metz

  Wall, Distance, Trying

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Both of our political parties, at least the honest portion of them, agree conscientiously in the same object: the public good; but they differ essentially in what they deem the means of promoting that good. One side believes it best done by one composition of the governing powers, the other by a different one. One fears most the ignorance of the people; the other the selfishness of rulers independent of them. Which is right, time and experience will prove.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Party, Believe, Ignorance

  B. L. Rayner, Thomas Jefferson (1834). “Life of Thomas Jefferson: with selections from the most valuable portions of his voluminious and unrivalled private correspondence : with portrait”, p.386

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• Chance in music doesn't have to involve the I Ching or rolling dice or throwing yarrow stalks. It can involve an out-of-tune guitar, or other impossible-to-replicate moments of awkwardness - even more so than an awkward, out-of-tune live performance, because there's something incredible about the way that an out-of-tune guitar becomes part of the song on a record. I won't be precious and say it's part of the composition - that's nonsensica l - but chance occurrences are so crucial to what's distinctive. It's the fingerprints all over so many of these recordings.

  David Grubbs

  Song, Awkward, Chance

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• When I read the rules of criticism, I immediately inquire after the works of the author who has written them, and by that means discover what it is he likes in a composition.

  Joseph Addison

  Mean, Criticism, Likes

  Joseph Addison (1872). “The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison”, p.221

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• All the old bogeys of 'dignified subject-matter,' of 'balanced compositions,' of 'correct drawing' were laid to rest. The artist was responsible to no one but his own sensibilities for what he painted and how he painted it.

  Ernst Gombrich

  Responsibility, Artist, Drawing

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• Satire is, indeed, the only sort of composition in which the Latin poets whose works have come down to us were not mere imitators of foreign models; and it is therefore the sort of composition in which they have never been excelled.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Latin, Poet, Satire

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• The concept of an independent system is a pure creation of the imagination. For no material system is or can ever be perfectly isolated from the rest of the world. Nevertheless it completes the mathematician's "blank form of a universe" without which his investigations are impossible. It enables him to introduce into his geometrical space, not only masses and configurations, but also physical structure and chemical composition. Just as Newton first conclusively showed that this is a world of masses, so Willard Gibbs first revealed it as a world of systems.

  Lawrence Joseph Henderson

  Independent, Science, Space

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• I have toured with Klemens Marktl, playing his original compositions and arrangements. He is a wonderful drummer, a writer possessing a high degree of creativity, and an assured band leader.

  Joe Locke

  Creativity, Leader, Degrees

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• The epic poet collaborates with the spirit of his time in the composition of his work. That is, if he is successful; the time may refuse to work with him, but he may not refuse to work with his time.

  Lascelles Abercrombie

  Successful, Epic, May

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• My Father is a photographer, so it was always around. I was trained in painting, so I learnt a lot of skills about composition, light, colour, the formal attributes of images.

  Patricia Piccinini

  Father, Light, Skills

  "Interview with Patricia Piccinini and Peter Hennessey". Interview With Daniel Palmer, www.patriciapiccinini.net. 2001.

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• If you want to know what true art is: Go outside on a clear night, wait until it gets very, very dark, then look up! You will see no rules of composition, no evidence of superior technique. Yet, you will be staring into the very face of pure, unadulterated beauty and wonder. That is the unattainable Ideal for which I must constantly strive.

  Derek R. Audette

  Art, Dark, Night

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• Is there in painting an effect which arises from the being together of repose and energy in the artist's mind? - can both repose and energy be seen in a painting's line and color, plane and volume, surface and depth, detail and composition? - and is the true effect of a good painting on the spectator one that makes at once for repose and energy, calmness and intensity, serenity and stir?

  Eli Siegel

  Artist, Color, Serenity

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• I make a composition with a white and a black, and make adjustments when the white has become a paper and the black a shadow.

  Juan Gris

  White, Black, Shadow

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• To my way of thinking, the concept drawings that Rembrandt did, the drawings he made that he used to model his artists, to work out the compositions of his paintings: those are cartoons. Look at his sketch for the return of the prodigal son. The expression on the angry younger brother's face. The head is down; the eyebrow is just one curved line over the eyes. It communicates in a very shorthand way. It's beautiful, expressive, and, in a peculiar way, it's more powerful than the kind of stilted, formalized expression in the final painting.

  Jim Woodring

  Beautiful, Brother, Powerful

  Interview with Ross Simonini, staging.believermag.com. 2008.

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• I criticise these compositions by analysis but an illustration cannot be made that way - it must be made by inspiration.

  Howard Pyle

  Inspiration, Illustration, Analysis

  Howard Pyle, Howard P. Brokaw (1998). “History and Romance: Works by Howard Pyle from the Brokaw Family Collection : the Exhibition, April 4 Through May 17, 1998, Brandywine River Museum, Brandywine Conservancy, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania”

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• In 1966, while working on a feature about a Picasso exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, I recorded the pre-opening preparations and observed a moment: One of the cleaners stopped, puzzled, in front of the Picassos. I think that this is an image that can be universally understood, but with a grain of salt. I never chose this image in edits before because it seemed to me that it felt posed-the composition was a little too perfect. But, believe me, it was a lucky moment.

  Micha Bar-Am

  Art, Believe, Thinking

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• Composition is interesting because, in a sense, you always have to let it go. Unless you're a true composer/performer, you're always sending a PDF and then someone else makes it. It's like instructions for a short story, faxed to every English student who's studying it.

  Nico Muhly

  Interesting, Let It Go, Stories

  Interview with Sean Michaels, believermag.com. October 1, 2008.

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