contemporary-art-canvas-paintings » oil painting

Great artworks: Portrait of a Young Boy holding a Child’s Drawing

admin — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:31:00 +0000

When Picasso went to a show of children’s art, he remarked: “When I was their age I could draw like Raphael; but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.” He wasn’t alone in this ambition. Primitivism was a big thing in modern art; along with tribesmen and the insane, good European children were a model of the primitive. Many 20th century artists tried to draw like kids: Kandinsky, Klee, Miro, Dubuffet…

They didn’t always succeed. Partly they didn’t want to. Child art was an inspiration, not a template. Most of these artists used it as a resource, combined its naiveties with more sophisticated procedures. But partly, as Picasso pointed out, to really draw like children is very difficult.

Child art has several distinctive aspects. Some can be picked up easily. There is the “conceptual” anatomy, the figure made of definitive bits – head, hairs, body, arms, hands, fingers, each a separate blob or stick. There is the “map-like” view of the world, same-scale figures laid out all over the page, or the “section” view, with a ground-strip at the bottom of the page and a blue sky-strip at the top. There are the fixed angles: trains and horses shown from the side, faces and houses from the front.

But the most telltale characteristic, and by far the hardest to imitate, is simply the quality of a child’s drawn line. It’s wrong to think of it as wildness. That wouldn’t be so tricky. You can lose control and fling your flailing arm at a page at any age.

Child art is not pure wildness. Children are trying to get something right. They want to but they can’t. Their drawing desires are ahead of their bodily knacks. And this gap between want and can’t – this failure – is the secret of children’s drawing. It’s where its charm lies. The tension between want and can’t is what gives children’s lines their electricity. This failure is what taught adults find so hard to imitate.

Once you’ve been taught – and the teaching involves much more than mere art-teaching, it involves all the physical training you get in childhood, designed to turn you into an operating and coordinated person – your body will never let you down in quite the same way. This know-how is in your muscles. Even useless adult drawers can’t draw like children. Give them a drawing task and their age will show. Their bodies can’t fail like that now.

To recapture that state hasn’t got much to do with innocence or spontaneity. So put aside Primitivism. But any artist might be curious – and basically they have two options. They can try to unlearn what their body has learnt through its upbringing and training. Or they can fake it, using their most perfected skills to copy literally from the real thing.

Around the time when Raphael was at the height of his powers, a minor Veronese painter made his great one-off. Giovanni Francesco Caroto painted the Portrait of a Young Boy Holding a Child’s Drawing. The boy’s eager, slightly toothsome smile gives this picture a place in the history of portraiture. But the page he holds upstages it. It has the first depiction of child art in a European painting.

Whoever the boy is, this stickman is presumably meant to be his own work, proudly presented. But study the sheet more closely. Lower right, notice the profile eye, drawn with an expert hand. We can imagine the boy hanging around the studio, picking up bits of paper used by the artist or his pupils for sketches, adding his own.

But what of the stickman itself? It’s an attempt by an experienced artist to imitate a child’s handiwork. It’s uneven. The scratchy, wobbly lines are persuasive. Some of the formations seem too complex – see its right eye, constructed from curved eyebrow and eyelid. Indeed the incomplete head in the corner suggests a grown-up approach. Children of this age push ahead, don’t have a second try.

And of course, this drawing is not a drawing. It’s a painting of a drawing, made in the infinitely correctable medium of oil paint. Caroto has closely observed how children draw. He probably hasn’t tried to unteach his own hand. He has faked it. And his careful copying has preserved for us evidence that while art styles change, children 500 years ago failed much as they do today.

The artist says: Thanks for reading my contemporary art blog! If you are involved in the art and culture industry in any way, and would like to syndicate content from or to this blog, or if you simply enjoy art and would like to get in touch, please leave a comment! This article has been kindly provided by: The Independent – Art RSS Feed

Artists Mat Collishaw, Tracey Emin and Paula Rego, The Foundling Museum, London

admin — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 01:27:36 +0000

The Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury was created in the 18th century by a venturesome sea captain and shipwright called Captain Thomas Coram. It existed to alleviate the appalling suffering of the many wretched foundlings who were abandoned on the streets of London. Captain Coram’s hospital took some of them in – alas, not all of them by any means. The great hospital itself was swept away in the 1930s, but there is still a Coram Foundation devoted to the needs of deprived children, and a glorious open space where the hospital once stood called Coram’s Fields. One of the most entertaining public notices to be read in the whole of London is displayed at its entrance. This is not a public park, it reads. No adult is to enter unless accompanied by a child. We critics sometimes feel that way about exhibitions of contemporary art, that the sanity of a small child might help to refresh our eye.

And then, right at the back of Coram’s Fields and the little public park that
abuts it, there is the Foundling Museum, first created in the 1930s – as a
penance perhaps for having wantonly destroyed that finer hospital. It is in
this building that Coram and his achievements as an exemplary philanthropist
are memorialised. Here is panelling from one of the great hospital’s rooms,
a replica of its picture gallery (complete with pictures), and fine
paintings and objects donated by the hospital’s many benefactors, among whom
were Handel and Hogarth. There is even a Handel Room on the top floor, which
contains manuscripts, his books, and other fascinating memorabilia.

For the next couple of months, three contemporary artists have joined the
ongoing conversation here about the plight of children by displaying
sympathetic works in various parts of the building. And even outside the
building. It is often quite difficult to find their contributions. In fact,
it proves to be a game of hide and seek, which is sometimes interesting and
at other times exasperating. As you walk up the steps of the building, you
spot the first artwork – Tracey Emin’s tiny bronze cast of a baby’s mitten,
painted a suitably grubby pink, and folded back as if about to be slipped on
to a tender foot. The morning I visited, the sock itself was partially
overshadowed by a bullying leaf.

The single most arresting intervention is Paula Rego’s huge Oratoria, which
sits on the first landing, opposite a bench from which you can sit and
contemplate its shockingly arresting display of miseries and horrors. “Ugh,
scary!” says a teacher as she hurriedly pushes past me, pulling at the
arm of a small child. I couldn’t agree more. This is a huge tableau, with
opening wings. Painted, papier-mâch figures, life-size and tricked out in
18th-century Foundling Hospital costumes, sit and loll around at its centre;
paintings rise up at their back, and on its opening wings. It is just like
something tiny grown nightmarishly large. An emaciated, puppet-like child
hangs over the knees of a black nurse like some grotesque pieta. The figures
have over-large heads; they have a demonic fairy-tale quality about them in
common with so much of the work of Paula Rego.

In another room, amid venerable portraits of beaming male benefactors, a rack
of baby clothes, courtesy of Tracey Emin, waits patiently for a baby. Mat
Collishaw’s Children of a Lesser God, a giant, wall-mounted transparency
blown up to the size of a portrait of an eminent benefactor, makes the flesh
creep. Two wolfish dogs, surrounded by scraps of torn animal skin and animal
offal, seem to be protecting two naked young babes inside a wire compound. “An
image of paternal strength and pride”, interprets the exhibition guide.
Hmm.

To 9 May (020 7841 3600)

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Art Painting: Delaroche’s Execution of Lady Jane Grey: Royals to the slaughter

admin — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 01:17:31 +0000

Why was this art painting of Lady Jane Grey’s beheading such a hit in 1830s France? Jonathan Jones on Delaroche’s hidden agenda

Jane Grey was one of the finest classical scholars of her age, despite being a teenager. One day, a schoolmaster visited her family’s country house near Leicester and found her reading Plato, for fun. If that makes her sound like a prig, her teachers were also concerned about her love of clothes and music, while surviving portraits confirm her beauty. Jane Grey had it all – until she was manipulated on to the throne to preserve the Protestant succession (she was Henry VIII’s grandniece), then deposed days later.

At the Tower of London in 1554, the 16-year-old walked to the block that awaited her pale neck, her weak body clad in silk, her long hair streaming loose . . . Sorry, I’ve just slipped from fact to fiction – diverted from documented history by the operatic, tear-jerking painting of her execution at the heart of a new show at the National Gallery in London.

Few works can be said to have shaped historical memory in the way Frenchman Paul Delaroche’s 1833 painting, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, did. Ever since it first went on show at the 1834 Paris Salon, Lady Jane Grey has become synonymous with this blindfolded victim – never mind that she was an astonishingly precocious scholar.

Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey holds this painting up for serious examination. In the catalogue, historian John Guy argues that Delaroche based his scene on an unreliable source that tells of Queen Jane walking calmly to the block, speaking her last words, saying a psalm, putting on a blindfold and then panicking, asking where the block was and stumbling helplessly. The same story was accepted by another leading historian, Eric Ives, in a more recent study. So maybe Delaroche got it right. If there’s one thing this show reveals, it’s that Delaroche’s painting is not just a sensational crowd-puller, but a work by an artist who drew deeply from history – only to his own ends.

This painting is one of a series by Delaroche on the same theme: the violence of history. The young princes in the tower await their fate; Oliver Cromwell stands contemplating the corpse of Charles I. But why did these English deaths from long ago matter so much to Delaroche and 1830s France?

The answer lies in later paintings, where Delaroche no longer disguises his true theme. He portrays Marie Antoinette on her way to the guillotine, and Girondin liberals in the French Revolution receiving the news they are to be executed. It’s clear that when Delaroche shocked the Paris public in the 1830s, what he was really doing was presenting them, indirectly, with the mayhem of their own very recent revolution. The death of Lady Jane Grey had taken place centuries before; it provided a safe space for contemplation, allowing onlookers to meditate on the cruelty of history.

It still does. It is one of the National’s most popular paintings, even though it often strikes critics as silly or mawkish. This exhibition vindicates Delaroche, showing that he had a coherent – and disturbing – vision of history. To him, it was as unpitying as the ravens tearing up rabbits on the grass of Tower Green, where Lady Jane took her last walk.

Jonathan Jones

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Canvas Art Paintings

admin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 23:03:20 +0000

Rather than use acrylic printsto have photos made in a wall artthat one can be proud of, the use of canvas art is the most popular and revered. As most individuals try to find special gifts, inimitable and largely special for all their beloved people, many will just offer them presents and gifts that they are used to. There are a diverse offering of tokens but the pleasure of valentine turns to be an issue when you cannot provide a gift that is unique and raises joy in a person.

When you go to purchase a gift for a special person, you might work across the shopping complex and at the end of the day lack anything special and personalized you can give to your lover. Perhaps you might consider the irresistibility of canvas art and the provisions it comes with. Finding an alluring print that is well suited on canvas is a perfect present for a love one, since the extraordinary nature of the image does have some lasting feelings and effect. If you want a masterpiece at a cheaper rate, you can have them transformed using the art of canvas while you could also have the photos or even negatives of any size made into very dazzling and transforming pieces of art.

When it comes to canvas art, canvas comes endowed with a natural aspect that aids in the implementation of very high quality types of canvas jobs. The onset of inks that cannot fade and high class, quality fabric such as cotton and the advent of modern digital technology has made it easy to get a waterproof and qualitative product. Most of the canvases are well stretched well across wooden frames and suited superbly ready to adorn walls while creating very nice atmosphere that brings tasteful details to a home while transforming the present décor.

Have you ever thought of having your own digital photo or any other image of yourself and a special message put on the canvas? You might count yourself missing a unique chance like no other. It can be a great present for your boyfriend or girlfriend, canvas art that radiates love and happiness. With sweet lovely pictures, kisses and apt smiles adorned on the picture, you could add some very fine adorable words that will definitely shine in your love life forever, lasting longer enough like the canvas photo itself. Perhaps you have forgotten your old parents and the significance of valentine even for them.

However, you can run through their photo album, have the loveliest of all their black and white wedding photos, and have it transferred into canvas art where it will be harmonized with bright and new hues. No one will be surprised like your own parents while sending a lovely feeling and improving the mood of the day. Such small canvas photo moments transform a person, while lasting not only on the canvas for a long time but in the hearts of those in the image.

Art collector proved right as van Gogh painting verified (source: Scotsman)

admin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:59:31 +0000

The painting, Le Blute-Fin Mill, is the first to be authenticated since 1995. It was bought in 1975 by Dutchman Dirk Hannema.

Louis van Tilborgh, curator of research at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, said the painting was unusual for the 19th-century impressionist, depicting large human figures in a landscape.

It shows Parisians climbing wooden steps to a windmill in the Montmartre district.

But the work was typical of Vincent van Gogh at that time in other ways, with its bright colours lathered roughly on the canvas.

Mr van Tilborgh said it was painted in 1886 when the artist was living in Paris. The canvas bore the stamp of an art shop he was known to use, and used pigments common in other works.

The work “adds to his oeuvre”, he said. “You can link it to certain works of van Gogh in that period, but not that many of them.”

Mr Hannema bought the painting from an antique and art dealer in Paris who did not believe it was of much value.

But the Dutch collector did: he paid £2,000 for it and another unknown work but immediately insured the painting for 16 times what he paid.

Getting A Gift In The Form Of Contemporary Art Canvas Pictures

admin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 09:49:31 +0000

Creating canvas pictureshas become a very popular enterprise in recent years. With so many people taking lots of digital photos in their anniversaries, weddings, parties, holidays and travels, the need to put them on canvas is very high. This goes hand in hand with finding a better and unique gift idea that is apt to be timeless. This perfectly suits canvas printing, through making the happy memories of the pictures into a lasting form and offering them as a gift, birthday, Christmas or just an anniversary one. When it comes to anniversaries and birthdays, they are genuinely the most crucial times in the life of two people, not only personal but also memorable.

If you have parents hitting 30 or so years together, you want to make canvas pictures the standard gift for that elaborate occasion. The photo canvas will definitely not disappoint. Many people are realizing the importance of the hundreds of pictures in their closets, why they are important and the need to make them ever-lasting is seen in the high demand for canvas print UK where the canvas printing is easily perfected.

Canvas pictures just mean a photo transferred onto a canvas of a higher quality. The kind of pictures, images and photographs that you make use of are largely dependent on your choice. This offers a vast independence in choosing the photos you feel represent the best moments and worth recalling. You might want to choose the picture of a couple elegantly on the day of their wedding or even an image of a holiday they might have graced. Just to make canvas print UKproduce you the best canvas photos ever, you might want to create a wall collage that represents the two individuals marrying or of your son or daughter during his or her birthday.

The choice for the right canvas picturesgenerally is dependent on you. Canvas photo gifts are immensely valuable because of the memories they tend to treasure, as well as the chance to place them on ones walls as a classical and splendid work of creative art. With the use of digital photographing, you have an additional option of brightening and enhancing the image of choice together with the canvas texture. This will create you a very stunning picture more than you can get from traditional photographs. If you are after a huge canvas print, get yourself digital images of a high resolution.

Remember that is not usually possible when you are working with wedding photographs taken decades ago. To get the best canvas pictures as you might want, just go for a service provider able to transform the standard photos into quality and immense wall canvas. When it comes to printing photos in the normal way, issues of size and format also crop up. It is quite possible to purchase a canvas photo that has been rolled just like an elegant picture, although the normal way is having it wrapped across a wooden bar of choice.

New Art Technique: Bas Relief Painting

admin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 05:48:55 +0000

Art has been around in many forms for a long time now. Even ancient civilizations like Egyptians or Mayans use to practice arts in forms of rock sculpture or painting or even literature which dates back to 2100 B.C. Music has been around for quite some time also.

However one of the latest arts that has been born in the last century is Cinematography, the art of creating motion pictures, also knows as films, or more commonly, movies.

The “foundations” of an art is generally called talent. That’s right, not everyone is cut to be an artist of any kind, you just need to have that special something. It is very hard to learn how to become an artist without being born with the talent required. For example, when I was a little kid, in elementary school, I just couldn’t understand how other kids couldn’t draw a perfect circle when it all seemed so easy for me, so therefore, a talent must be recognized by other because in many cases an individual could have a particular talent without even knowing it.

I have been an artist, for what, 20 years now… I always liked to draw thing, and I did.. a lot. So I was getting better and better. After high school I even took art classes and started painting with oil on canvas. After that I just liked it so much, paintings were coming and going.

Several years ago, while I was at the countryside, just sitting and chilling in a cool summer evening, an idea suddenly came to my mind. I started thinking about the new 3D technology I saw back then at news, so I wondered how would that look like combined with paintings.

So I did some research, and found about about bas relief sculptures. bas-relief actually means “low relief” represents the quality of a projected image where the overall depth is shallow and the background is compressed or completely flat.

After doing the research, I began testing methods to combine the bas-relief technique with a painting. My idea was to grant a wall painting the properties of bas-relief. First I tried using gypsum on a special canvas… but unfortunately the end result wasn’t what I expected. The weight of the modeled art was too big, so therefore I had to rethink it.

After some time I had another great idea on what material to use and the final result was outstanding, five times less wight, it was perfect. Soon after that, in a few months I made about 30 of these paintings and had an exhibition in the local museum. It all went so good all the people were impressed so I didn’t even wonder why at least half of them were sold in a couple of days.

If you are interested in the looks, check out the gallery I had, just to make an idea and feel free to contact me.

Arts review: Painter William McTaggart

admin — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:04:44 +0000

THIS April will mark the centenary of the death of William McTaggart. He was one of Scotland’s greatest painters, but he is unlikely to be commemorated with much fanfare. Unlike our poets, our artists don’t seem to rate in our national consciousness and Raeburn’s 250th anniversary passed with scarcely a flicker of notice. The Scottish Gallery has, however, put on a modest exhibition of about a dozen pictures to commemorate McTaggart. The gallery has good reason to remember him gratefully. The Scottish Gallery (aka Aitken Dott) has been in business since 1842 and over his long career McTaggart was one of its biggest-ever earners. He could command £1,000 for a picture, roughly equivalent to £70,000 in today’s money, and he was prolific.This small show includes the loan of two pictures from Kirkcaldy, Summer Sunlight and Broken Water, Port Seton. Kirkcaldy has one of the best collections of McTaggart’s work and, though neither picture is large, both remind us just what a great artist he was. Summer Sunlight is a picture of just that and little else. There is a hint of beach in the foreground. The rest is rolling waves in sunshine beneath a strip of sky. The picture’s only inhabitants are a flight of patrolling gannets. The blue and white of the sparkling water is set off by a hint of warmer grey in the transparent shadows of the rising waves and by a few touches of red where scraps of seaweed mark the shoreline.

The picture is typical of McTaggart in both its economy and its liveliness. Broken Water, Port Seton is as lively, but whereas the former picture is almost all silver and blue, for a sea painting the latter has a surprising amount of warmth in it. Indeed, it is painted on a brown primed canvas. Built up of solid lights and warm transparent shadows, the constant contrast of depth and surface, of warm and cool, is what gives the picture such a vivid sense of the restlessness of wind and water.

A third picture here, Summer’s Glamour, is also of outstanding quality. It is a glorious evocation of a warm summer evening. The golden corn and a row of red roofs in the distance are touched by the pink glow of the setting sun. The harvest moon hangs pale in the sky above two children in the foreground and a row of reapers in the distance. The picture is a small variant of The Harvest Moon, one of three pictures that represent McTaggart at the Tate B. It is particularly fitting that it should be here. It belonged to P M’Omish Dott, who, at Aitken Dott, provided McTaggart with support even when his pictures went far beyond the limits of contemporary taste.

The conventions of Victorian landscape that formed that taste were largely literary, variations on a set of associations that together formed the standard clichés of Scottishness. In direct contrast, McTaggart’s painting was experiential. It was about sensations, about physical experience and its power over our emotions – the luxury of summer warmth, the scents of it even, or the freshness of the wind in your face beside the sea. For McTaggart, not just sight, but the other senses too, especially hearing, were important to his experience of landscape. The whole sensation was what mattered, not just how things looked. In that, he was both very original and very modern.

Born in 1835, McTaggart was two years younger than Manet, five years older than Monet. This conjunction of dates has meant an awful lot of ink has been spilt about his relationship, or otherwise to Impressionism. It is a complete red herring. He was a quite different artist. He only parallels the Impressionists in his rejection of the convention of finish. On this he was emphatic, and his dismissal of WP Frith, the Victorian master of detail and high finish (and with him most of his English contemporaries), is majestic: “He suffers from the English dread of giving expression to his inmost promptings – a feeling that makes so much of their art commonplace.”

The persistent attempts to push McTaggart into some subset of Impressionism reflects the enduring tendency to want to see art as centralised, as at any one time reflecting one dominant idea to which it must either be beholden or else be of no account. That is certainly true today. No ambitious artists would dirty their hands with paint. To get ahead, all you need is the wizard wheeze that gets you media exposure.

William McTaggart, RSA, RSW (1835-1910): A Centenary Exhibition runs until 27 February.

Art Allotments

admin — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:52:56 +0000

# 3 [23 February 2010]

Art allotments started as a weekly swap of images and ideas, like packets of seeds. We posted and received A4 envelopes of collage materials made up from what came to hand, a mix. The idea was to have an artist¹s conversation through something different, accessible and spontaneous. The focus was on doing. It has grown over a year and so now it is time to see what this looks like in an exhibition and find out what other people think. The exhibition space is a long gallery connecting two buildings with windows on one side and zigzag walls on the other. Outside is rough ground.

The thing about the art allotments and growing ideas is that it is about seeing what would come up. It has also been about working on an idea with another artist and friend. This has given two different perspectives in our choices of materials, the collages and the effect all this has on our other work. The exhibition is itself another collage to sort, place and build. There are narratives that appear accidentally, cumulatively and the ones that, for me, reappear. What I love about collage is that its like a puzzle without a picture on the box. The activity is about space and placing things, shapes, colour, noise, creating sets, and movement. The exhibition is a process in progress. I can be wary of process but in this case, it¹s key. Its great to see work recycled and returned and images have started to resurface such as figures as part of the furniture or moving through it. The process has made new images and new work to develop and grow. I find it hard recycling some images sent to me and it is hard to rip up someone else¹s images!

Ok now I am starting to worry as one of the other things is that the strength of this conversation is that it has persisted in the face of many other demands of everyday lives. I am clearing the path for this week and keeping my animation (work) sessions at bay.

Angela

Oils, Paintings: A Still Life Set Up

admin — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:48:55 +0000

Still life is one of the disciplines in drawing and painting. Although it is becoming increasingly less popular as time goes on it is till one of the major traditions undertaken by the artist, and one taught readily in schools and colleges.
The aim of the still life drawing is to capture the different textures, tones and light effects that radiate from differing still objects. By selecting a wide range of objects, it is hoped that these objects will contrast with each other, producing sharp discrepancies between, say, the smoothness of glass and the roughness of lemon peel. Depicting such contrasts calls all of the artists skills into play, and depends, to begin with on choosing the right objects and arranging them correctly.

Setting the Scene

There are many ways that you may wish to choose objects for a still life. Some artists arrange their still life to depict and allegory: That is to say, they pick elements that express certain meanings; an animal skull to represent death; a bowl of coins to suggest wealth and exuberance. Taken together these two elements warn of the fallacy of worshipping wealth – put simply, you ‘can’t take it all with you’.

Alternatively, you may wish to paint or draw an autobiographical still life, focusing on a drawing of a collection of objects that either belong to you, or reflect some interests you have. This arrangement could incorporate clothes, musical instruments, objects from nature, and so on.
However you choose to pick your items it is worth taking some time to pick those that will be represented well in a finished picture, and ones that will sit well together. Popular subjects of still life include fruit, vegetables, dead fish, dead game (one benefit here is that you can eat them afterwards!), lobster, steel kettles, silverware, furs, jewels, wine bottles, and so on.
Still Life set ups tend to be arranged around a central focus point, such as a large vase, a pheasant, a bowl of fruit, with other objects arranged around it. The key is to arrange the space in such a way as to fit well within the rectangular format that you then wish to draw or paint upon. Ideally, in this case, if you were to divide your paper lengthways and width ways down the middle, you would aim to have equal amounts of activity in each of the 4 sections of your page or canvas.

Angles

Once you have selected and arranged your still life the selection of an angle from which to draw it from will help you to better compose the deal picture.
It is a good idea to start out with a few sketches, to try and accurately portray the varying tones and textures as well as possible. From here it is possible to begin to abstract forms in order to compose a picture of your choosing, that better expresses you relationship with the objects. For example, if you are painting a vase, and wish to portray both sides of the vase, simply draw them side by side, or overlapping. Cézanne (1839-1906) and Picasso (1881-1973) were masters of this style, effortlessly reinventing scenes to portray the elements they most wanted to show to us.
Engaging with still life is an excellent way both to hone your descriptive mark making skills, and to better understand the principles of composition (as you create your own ‘scene’) and of abstraction (as you later diverge from it).