Composition is the arrangement of elements within a picture — the way shapes, figures, masses, and intervals are placed across the surface and in relation to one another.
To talk about a composition is to talk about decisions of placement before anything else: where the major weights sit, which directions the eye is led along, how the parts balance or refuse to balance. A composition can be described as centred, off-centre, diagonal, frieze-like, pyramidal, scattered, dense, empty. The term carries over from music, where it names the act of putting elements in deliberate relation, and the visual sense kept that emphasis on structure. When a description says the composition is held together by X, what follows is usually a structural device — a repeating axis, a colour echo, a framing edge — rather than subject matter.
See also
- picture-plane — the surface it is composed on
- framing — the edges that bound it
- scale — the relative sizes within it