Artistic composition

The forms of presentation of art or creative work, after the choices of content and medium are made include and depend on the elements of technical execution, nuances of feeling or emotion in interpretation or rendering, style, and the binding act of composition which imparts unity by bringing all these elements into relation and completion. Esthetic theory is prolix on the subject of composition, Aristotle having first pointed out that unity is one of its aims. Other elements of composition often cited are proportion, that the magnitudes of parts are commensurate with each other and that no one of them exceeds or dominates the whole. Besides proportion one may mention compositional principles of harmony, symmetry, succession, repetition, consistency, and appropriate scale, volume and duration. While it is true that artistic and other creative works are composed or structured, esthetic theory is reductionist or analytic in speaking of discrete elements as though they were modules to be built up mechanically into masterpieces. The act of creation is itself unitary. The so-called elements of composition often appear simultaneously and interrelated with one another in a supra-rational non-analytic manner. At its highest, artistic perception (and subsequent expression) is holistic. It is a view of the Real and consequently its expression or consumnation in the act of creative composition is real. The unity of the composition reflects this reality and it is a whole greater than the sum of its parts. This is true in poetry, in Homer and in Dante, in great architecture, music and other arts. The reason may be that artistic composition is a man-made form which may approximate or even attain to the Forms, eternal, archetypal and beautiful, of which the Platonists philosophized.