I can remember, I guess it was about six or seven years ago, when I saw my first Charles Bargue drawing, from the book that I believe translates to a "course of design". I was immediately struck by how much the drawings resembled the early cubist drawings of Picasso and Juan Gris. Particularly the first or block in stage diagrams. They had that same kind of schematic, straight line, abstracting of form. Picasso was trained in the classical method and one of his drawings that's always featured in discussions of his beginnings as an artist is clearly a copy of one of Bargue's drawings (although oddly enough it's never credited that way). Of course Cubism veers wildly off from any intentions that Bargue and Gerome (the co-author) may have had, but it does point out some things that are common to most types of visual art; that the beginning stages require one to think abstractly in order to get to the essential nature of what's being drawn or painted.
            Good design and solid compositions rarely have anything to do with ones ability to faithfully replicate a variety of textures and surface details. Not that these are neccessarily bad skills to have, but they are the icing on the cake, not the cake. Without a solid design sense, it's a pile of frosting and little else. So where does this come from, this ability to disassociate oneself from the subjective or empirical nature of what's being seen and instead tune into the order and organization of the shapes and tilts and black and white patterns, etc;? It's not easy. The brains survival mode is set up to scan and file quickly. This requires a database of known symbols and signifiers. When I scan a face I'm seeing every face that I've ever seen and making comparisons and distinctions. In order to objectively render that face I need to dump all of the symbols and associations that will naturally come to mind and in fact it would be best if I didn't think of it as a face at all, but as a series of light and dark patterns with boundaries. More like a map, less like a portrait. That's a pretty abstract way of thinking about the world but it's nothing new and can be traced back to the ancient Greeks whose statues are like math theorems made whole. That's not to say that their statues are cold and lacking in humanity, but that their timeless beauty goes beyond the mere recording of human physiognomy.
              There have been several occasions where someone has pointed out to me that the composition in one of my paintings or drawings falls along divisions associated with the Golden Mean. The Golden Mean or Section is a divison of any rectangle by a fraction, roughly about a third (.6218 to the whole) . It is a fractional division that can be found in the growth pattern of most living things, including humans( the location of the elbow to the arm, and the hand to the elbow) and was thought to be, by many of the Old Masters, the most pleasing division of a composition. I have to admit that any Golden Sections that can be found in my work are purely accidental. I wish I could be that methodical or cerebral, but alas, as I've come to realize, it is not in my nature. But that doesn't prevent me from appreciating it in the work of other artists.
              So, following this line of thinking, there must have been a point in the creation of Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" when his canvas was criss-crossed with lines and shapes and little else. Did Botticelli than stand back and analyze his painting from a purely formal design sense before committing to his figures and subject matter or did he quicly sketch in his figures in a rush of creativity and then corral them into Golden Mean harmonies? It boggles the mind to think about it. I chose "The Birth of Venus" because in most of the diagrams that I've seen laid over the painting, the composition is overrun with structural grids and designs.Does that make it a better painting? Botticelli must have thought so. Still, I think that at a certain point abstract design is not something that can be quantatively measured or codified. I believe that it's largely intuitive or instinctual. I have seen some contemporary artists who have used the Golden Section in their paintings and yet their compositions are dead in the water. Setting up points of location in a design and using them to locate centers of interest, etc; is not neccessarily good abstract design. When one is moved by the pattern of dark clumps found in the foliage of a tree or the shapes made by cloud formations (go Joanie) , one is responding to something that I think is inherently human and yet something that cannot be labeled or bottled to say "this is what it is".
         The great painters of the past and present have many things about their work that can be analyzed and written about but there will always be that certain something that is intangible. It is why the students of Rembrandt could mimic his style exactly but rarely ever approached his greatness. It is why I think that labels and categorizations, when it comes to paintings, are pretty meaningless. I respond to paintings as a painter. I don't really care what style it's painted in. Either it works for me or it doesn't. It has to hit me in the gut. That's probably going to have very little to do with, initially, what the subject matter is. Once I've been drawn into the work than I will begin to contemplate the subject and mood etc: But if the first response isn't there, I don't care if you call your painting "The Greatest Story Ever Told", I'm moving on. I despise Bonnard's drawing abilities but yet I find myself liking his paintings in spite of myself. Whatever "it" is he clearly has "it" in spades. This isn't really meant as a discourse to present anything new. I think most painters realize these things whether they consciously think about them or not. I'm really thinking out loud about ideas that I have because I realize that as my work begins to get technically sound I mustn't lose sight of the bigger picture; that the work must be expressive as well as descriptive and that I need to constantly be tuning in to my own frequency or whatever essence I may have that's worthy of contemplation, will be lost.