Untitled

Michael,

  Beautiful creative abstract with wonderful colors & design. Take care, Patsy

I love the rich textures and colors here, and I really like how the darker edges make the center glow--this may be the first time I've ever actually liked vignetting! I also really like how you've used the lines and circles to create the composition and weave it together--my eye follows the bright line to the circle, orbits around it a few times, then spins off around the inner edge of the dark margins, then back to a line, and repeats, stopping occasionally to soak in the textures and patterns in the color. There's also a delightful moment of surprise when I see the eye watching me back. Really nice!

Thanks for your support; positive comments always buoy me up.

To say that you put a lot of time and thought into comments is a gross understatement.  Your interpretation is both comprehensive and interesting.  When I did all the post work on this image, I simply was interested in creating some intricate geometric patterns and a melange of colors I felt would work with those patterns.

And that's why I'm always so curious about why folks seem to be so hung up on "rules of composition" and such--to my mind, a successful composition is one that feels right. And it feels right to me as a viewer if it keeps me interested in the content of the artwork, and it keeps me interested if the elements that draw my attention lead me around inside the image and don't let me slide irretrievably off the edge. But that's also what drives the artist when they're composing the work--you did what you did because it led to an image that feels right to you, and because we share a certain aesthetic sense, if it feels right to you there's a darned good chance it'll feel right to me, too. I see "rules of composition" as post-hoc descriptions of things that tend to feel right, and I don't think I know anyone who consciously composes images of any kind by following rules. I'm particularly amused by the "rule of thirds"--if you look at most of the published illustrations of the "rule of thirds" in action, you realize that the author is comfortable labelling anything that falls within the same county as an intersection as being "on" the intersection, or if any part of a house-sized object overlaps the intersection, that object is "on" the intersection. Anyway, what I'm doing when I first look at an image is figuring out where my eyes are going, and then I try to figure out why they went where they did. If they're going someplace that the artist probably didn't want a viewer's eyes to go (like off the edge), then that's a clue to me that there's a potential opportunity for reediting to make the composition more effective. If I can figure out why it happened, then I can figure out ways of making it not happen. In the case of this image, it feels really, really right to me--I like it a whole lot. And I don't think I even mentioned how enamored I am of the color combination--it really sings.