# Composition Templates — the grammar of great pictures, applied

> *Composition is content.* At wall scale the viewer is inside the event, not
> reading a diagram. These templates art-direct the generator the way a painter
> art-directs a canvas — by fixing the **geometric skeleton** first, then letting
> the seeded physics fill it in.

We deconstruct eight famous compositions to their bones — discarding the imagery,
keeping the *structure* — and map each onto our vocabulary:

| our element | the role it plays compositionally |
|---|---|
| **sea** (ridgeline field) | the horizon band / ground plane / colour field |
| **horizonY** | the single most decisive ratio in any landscape |
| **disk (sun)** | the focal anchor — where the eye lands first |
| **bubble (event)** | the figure / incident / counter-focus |
| **grid (two-point floor)** | constructed depth, the thrust line, the perspective pull |
| **glow / vignette** | atmospheric light, the luminous centre, framing |
| **negative space** | the silence — as much subject as the marks |

---

## Eight archetypes, deconstructed

**1 · Hokusai — *The Great Wave* (dynamic asymmetry).**
Low horizon (sea owns ~⅔), a single off-centre swelling mass, a tiny human incident
dwarfed beneath it, the sacred form (Fuji) small and distant. A φ-placed vortex; a
diagonal thrust top-left → bottom-right. → *high sea mound, small high sun, tiny low
event, indigo/Prussian palette, a faint deep grid.*

**2 · Friedrich — *Monk by the Sea* (the sublime void).**
The most radical ratio in Western painting: ~85% empty, a horizon sliver near the
bottom, a lone Rückenfigur the size of a thumbnail against immensity. Verticality of
emptiness. → *horizon very low (thin sea band), one tiny cool sun on it, no grid, no
fiduciaries, vast pale sky.*

**3 · Rothko — colour fields (frontal symmetry, edge-glow).**
Two–three stacked horizontal rectangles, soft breathing seams, no figure. Frontal,
symmetric, hovering colour; the drama is the *seam* and the inner light. → *flat calm
sea as one band, a contrasting ground, a centred horizon seam, strong glow + vignette,
no event.*

**4 · Turner — atmospheric dissolution (the light-centre).**
Form dissolves into luminous vapour; a bright vortex of light near centre; horizon and
objects half-erased. Light is the subject. → *very high warm glow, everything at low
opacity, a bright high sun, a dissolving warm grid, gold-haze palette.*

**5 · Hiroshige / *ma* — asymmetric negative space.**
Forms shoved to one edge or corner; a single bold diagonal; the empty area is load-
bearing. Balance by tension, not symmetry. → *event + sun clustered to one side, a
strong two-point diagonal grid, a large quiet void opposite.*

**6 · Malevich — Suprematist (single form on void).**
One bold geometric form floating in near-empty space, often canted; pure figure-ground;
maybe a faint tilted plane. → *one large saturated/dark disk off-centre, sea off, a
single faint tilted grid plane, no event (or one tiny counter-form).*

**7 · Renaissance φ / rule-of-thirds (classical balance).**
Focal point on a φ intersection (0.382/0.618), a counter-focus on the opposing third,
horizon on the lower third, a curl or line leading the eye in. Balanced asymmetry,
resolved and calm. → *sun on the upper-left φ point, event on the lower-right φ point,
horizon on the lower third, a measured grid.*

**8 · Frank Lloyd Wright — organic rectilinearity (the cantilevered horizontal).**
Architecture, not a painting, but a composition grammar of its own and the orthogonal
counterpole to Hokusai's curve. Insistent **horizontals** hugging the earth; interlocking
**rectilinear planes**; cantilevers reaching into space; asymmetry resolved around a heavy
anchoring mass — the **hearth/chimney** — with ornament born of a structural lattice (the
leaded-glass windows). Right angles, no curve; continuity with the land's horizon line.
→ *low strong horizon, a bold near-frontal orthogonal grid (minimal yaw, present, not
faint), flat horizontal sea, an off-centre dense anchor (disk as hearth, Cherokee red,
dark-cored), earthy Taliesin palette (ochre / prairie green / Cherokee red).*

---

## The commonalities (the axes a template sets)

Every composition above is, geometrically, a choice along these axes:

1. **Horizon ratio** — where the dominant horizontal sits (Friedrich ⅛, Constable ⅔,
   Rothko ½). The first decision.
2. **Focal placement** — centre (Rothko, Malevich-ish), φ/thirds (Renaissance, Hokusai),
   corner (Hiroshige), absent (Friedrich's void).
3. **Dominant thrust** — curvilinear/vortex (Hokusai, Turner), diagonal (Hiroshige),
   **orthogonal/rectilinear** (Wright), none (Rothko, Friedrich). Curve ↔ grid is itself
   an axis: Hokusai and Wright are the two poles.
4. **Symmetry vs. asymmetry** — frontal balance (Rothko) ↔ tension (everything else).
5. **Figure-to-void ratio** — how much is *left empty*. The single biggest lever on feeling.
6. **Atmosphere / light** — flat (Hiroshige) ↔ dissolving glow (Turner).
7. **Palette mood** — *earned* from the source (Hokusai indigo, Turner gold, Friedrich
   cold blue, Rothko saturated fields) — geometry first, colour in service of it.

A template is just a coherent point in this 7-axis space, expressed as a composition
config. The seed then supplies the *content* (which event, which tracks) without
disturbing the *structure* — so one template generalizes across many plates, the way a
master's compositional habit persists across many paintings.

Implemented as `src/compose/templates.js` → `tools/templates.mjs` → `output/templates/`.