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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:
- Horizon ratio — where the dominant horizontal sits (Friedrich ⅛, Constable ⅔, Rothko ½). The first decision.
- Focal placement — centre (Rothko, Malevich-ish), φ/thirds (Renaissance, Hokusai), corner (Hiroshige), absent (Friedrich's void).
- 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.
- Symmetry vs. asymmetry — frontal balance (Rothko) ↔ tension (everything else).
- Figure-to-void ratio — how much is left empty. The single biggest lever on feeling.
- Atmosphere / light — flat (Hiroshige) ↔ dissolving glow (Turner).
- 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/.