Principles of Design

Balance, emphasis, movement, pattern, repetition, proportion, rhythm, variety, unity: the principles of design used by artists in the process of creating a work that feels whole, a work that offers each viewer a path toward meaning without distracting paths leading in the wrong directions. It’s not so different in poetry, these principles. 

The guiding principle that unifies all these is, I think, order—art (visual, verbal, etc.) takes chaos and puts a little corner of it into order.

For almost a year now, I’ve been using collage as a parallel to poetry, to see if I can make visual on the page some of the meanings I explore through words. It has been an interesting journey, only successful now and then. I am a lot more comfortable creating images with words than I am with, well, with images. I am afraid of color; my comfort zone is earth tones. My collages tend toward cliché. In other words, I’m a beginner in one medium, while exploring new realms of proficiency in the other. I’m in two places at once, artistically.


And really, that’s kind of cool!

Go create lots of beautiful art in 2018.