MENTAL NOTE #142, SIMPLIFY YOUR COMPOSITIONS, SOMETIMES TOO MUCH IS TOO MUCH!

“All good drawing or painting is compositional.
Better see what you can do on your canvas with these simple notes and for the time being let all details go.
It is useless to keep on adding things to a canvas.
Some painters put thousands of big and little features into a face, colors and more colors.
All day long they keep adding more and more.
They are like whales in a sea with their mouths wide open swallowing everything that comes along.
Much can be done with little.” ~ ROBERT HENRI ~ Henri, Robert, and Margery A. Ryerson. The Art Spirit: Notes, Articles, Fragments of Letters and Talks to Students … Westview Press, 1984.

This is Great advice from Sage-Master Painter, ROBERT HENRI. I WISH I could say that I follow his advice all of the time, but I fail, often. I have quoted Robert Henri, more than any other artist. His advice for Art, and Life, is profound. If I could go back in time and apprentice, or study with any artist in history, I think I would travel back in time and study with Robert Henri — VERY CLOSE ALTERNATIVE CHOICES would be Whistler, Klimt, or Kandinsky.

The advice from Henri also works for PHOTOGRAPHY! Don’t clutter your photographs up with unnecessary items. Compose on your main topic of focus, and crop in-frame. Leave unnecessary items out or the frame that add nothing to your photo-story.

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