We perceive the plant's texture without having to taste or touch it. In a more complex instance, when an artist includes a directional line through the center of a painting or a large shape on the side of a sculpture, the artist is prompting the viewer to follow the line through the painting or look immediately to the side of the sculpture. In all academic fields, as well as everyday life, we are constantly negotiating with visual information, making visual literacy a key aspect of intelligence.

Teaching compositional elements to children allows them to read and better understand the visual messages in their world. There are three levels of visual information that we perceive: physical, perceptual, and conceptual. Physical realities are objectively factual - a maple tree has green leaves, a cat's fur has a smooth, soft texture, a pen is smaller than a computer. Not everything that we see has a physical reality that is tangible and thus our brain "fills in" the missing information. For example, we may read a portion of a television screen as one color, when our brain is actually blending several pigments together to create a single color in our minds. This is the second type of vision - perceptual. Interpreting visual information allowing one to understand meaning in information is the conceptual, the final tier of visual information. Conceptual messages may be as simple as understanding that someone is choking because of their gesture, even though they can't speak, or as complex as interpreting a work of art. Visual literacy is achieved through intepreting visual messages of all types and understanding their inherent and subjective messages.

Physical Reality

The ability to see physical details in images, such as those found in science, aid in the categorizing of visual information by learning to see differences and similarities between physical elements. Science images contain physical realities that are not unlike compositional elements found in art, such as the shape of a cloud or the number of segments and legs on an insect. The skills of perception used to distinguish physical realities may be used to differentiate parasites under a microscope. For example, when categorizing ants into taxonomic groups, the same compositional elements found in a work of art are found in nature. Ants can be distinguished by their hue, shape and number of their segmented body parts, direction and shape of their legs, and texture of their exoskeletons.

For example, ants of the Formicae group, a type of Japanese ant, all have two smaller segments in the centers of their bodies, with large posterior and anterior segments. The anterior segments, or heads, have the same upside-down heart shape. All of their antennae have one bend at their center. Within the Formicae group, the ants are distinguished by color, overall size, and their varying textures.

These physical realities are objective facts seen by all. The ability to differentiate between physical realities forms the first stage of visual literacy.

Perception

Compositional elements in works of art do not necessarily have to be physical realities, the way they must be in real objects and beings, such as ants. For example, if asked "What color is Claude Monet's painting Waterloo Bridge, London at Dusk?" most people would reply "Green."

The majority of the water and sky are green. However, the pigments used for the bridge are various hues of blues, grays and bits of white, which is the focus of the painting. Why do most see this painting as green? Green dominates the background, silhouetting the bridge. Although the water and sky have flecks of white, reds, pinks, yellows and blues, green is the dominant color because Monet combined many of the other colors to suggest green. Yellow and blue combine to make green and when they stand alone, they enhance the green because they are part of the same color family. Monet's whites are not pure white, but have touches of green. Only the red hues stand in opposition to green, and these are used sparingly. Therefore, our perception of this painting has been skewed to see green, when in fact their are hundreds of hues of the basic colors used.

The majority of compositional elements are not complete forms or colors but mere suggestions which shape our perceptions forcing us to see dominant elements in a work. The Cezanne painting used for the second example in the practice exercises does not in fact have a diagonal line running across the center of the canvas. However, we perceive that it does. Cezanne created a shadow there with slightly darker hues, which creates a gully in the hillside. The viewer perceives this gully as a line drawing our eye up (or down) the hill, although no line exists.

Conceptual Seeing

In examining compositional elements the savvy viewer will not stop with delineating the formal characteristics in a work of art, he or she will search for meaning. Compositional elements convey meaning by telling our brains where to look, forcing us to read a work of art. Let us take for example Man Ray's Indestructible Object.

This work is a metronome with a picture of an eye paper-clipped to the metre-stick. Formally, the piece prompts you to look at the eye because it is looking at you. Unlike a more traditional work of art without movable parts, the eye moves constantly on the metre-stick so the directional element of the piece also forces us to move with it. The flimsiness of the magazine clipping with the eye contrasts with the solid construction of the metronome. The most obvious aspect of the composition is that both objects are found objects - Man Ray needed only to put them together, he did not actually construct either the metronome or the photograph of the eye.

Man Ray's title prompts us to imagine what might be indestructible in this work. The metronome is less destructible than the picture of the eye. Even a real eye seems more fragile than the metronome. The concept of vision, however, is more permanent. Even if one person is blinded, another will always be able to see and, therefore, witness our actions. Similarly, the metronome itself could be destroyed, however, the rhythym that it measures is also permanent. The permanence of vision and rhythym are echoed in the formal aspects of the piece because as viewers we have difficulty taking our sights off of the moving eye. The destructability of the metronome and the magazine clipping of the eye are highlighted by the fact that Man Ray did not make either object, but found each. They are manufactured objects, which like most objects made in the 20th century, will decay, break or be replaced.

Children may not, of course, read all of the meanings just discussed in such a complex work as Indestructible Object. However, compositional elements will help them to explain the stories that they read in works of art. Though they may not understand the social context reflected in a painting or sculpture, they will see the subtle relationships between people or objects in a work because of formal elements. As they become more sophisticated in targeting these elements, they will be able to verbalize why they read a painting in a particular way which is the ultimate goal of visual literacy.

Bibliography