Cropping for creativity

One of the things I learned best from photography was the art of cropping. How you frame a subject makes all the difference. It's not just the inclusion or exclusion of visual information, it's the emotional content and conveyance. This helps with composition in painting. It's something that the Impressionists worked with, having had the benefit of the new art of photography maturing beyond just imitating painting styles, plus the exciting influence of Japanese ukiyo-e prints and zen sumi-e paintings.

Not every painting gets all the scene in an appreciable way. Most often the artist spends more time on some parts and not others. So a painting can have a good passage, but overall feel mediocre. Being willing to crop it down, literally cutting it apart, takes some guts!

Last summer attending my first workshop (I don't learn best from classes at all, too much an autodidact) with Fr. Bruno Segata, he and I kept coming back to one section of a scene that I liked and he raved about, likeining it to some famous impressioinists. I never cut down the painting, but was sorely tempted to.

Here's the whole painting:

Here's what we both liked instead:

So now I come to a recent pastel. Posting on a FB page for Plein Air, several artists raved about the bottom half of the painting, but not the top. Though the top was also representative of the scene, the bottom had a stunning and vibrant composition. So I'm seriously thinking of cutting the pastel painting in half!

Here's the whole tthing:

Here's the proposed crop:

The whole painting coveys the information of the setting, the whole scene, volcanic rocks (the intended subject) and foggy coastline in the background. The cropped version carries the emotion and light of the stairway and flowered cliffs framing the ocean. I have to admit, the suggestions have merit. The black volcanic rock formation was the intended subject with the cliffs and the stairway only intended as a compositional pathway for the eye. But the reverse order works better, it seems.