| The purpose of this tutorial is to explore
the formal possibilities of balance and contrast as compositional
ideas. It is an active tutorial in that it is you who will do the exploration.
The ideas of balance and contrast make a jump in your application
of formal composition to your work. Balance and contrast are more open
to interpretation than are the ideas we have worked with so far (experiential
revelation, symmetry, asymmetry, and figural space). These ideas are
also culturally dependent and as teachers, we inevitably teach against
the background of our own culture—we draw on a Eurocentric view
of formal composition. Views from other cultures are different. For
example a practitioner of Ikebana (a Japanese form of flower arranging)
would have a very different view of balance.
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