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While oils were used as early as the 7th century in Afghanistan, it was the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck who perfected the technique in the 15th century. Traditionally, artists used egg tempera, which resulted in a matte, quick-drying finish. Van Eyck’s genius lay in the formulation of a stable oil medium that allowed for incredible detail and translucency. In masterpieces like The Arnolfini Portrait, he utilized thin layers of translucent oil paint (glazes) over opaque underpaintings to create the illusion of light reflecting off metal, fur, and skin. This “Flemish Technique” revolutionized painting, allowing for a naturalism that had never been seen before, and quickly spread to Italy, transforming the course of Western art.

Composition is the arrangement of the picture: where the masses sit, where the lines run, where the eye is led, and what is left out. It is the painter’s first decision and the viewer’s first impression, and no amount of brilliant color or drawing can rescue a picture whose architecture is weak.

The oldest wisdom about composition is that a picture needs a center of interest, a place the eye can rest, and a clear path to it. Painters have arranged this focus in countless ways. Leonardo built his figures into pyramids, a stable, self-contained structure that gathers the eye upward. Rembrandt placed his faces within pools of light, so that the darkness itself becomes the composition, directing attention like a spotlight. The Dutch landscapists balanced a low horizon against a vast sky; the Impressionists, following the new art of photography, cropped their scenes with casual boldness, cutting figures at the edge of the frame.

Beneath every good composition lies a pattern of shapes, and painters often plan this pattern first in a small monochrome sketch, a notan, in which the picture is reduced to a few masses of dark and light. The classic scaffolds are few: the triangle, stable and calm; the diagonal, dynamic and restless; the S-curve, which leads the eye on a journey; and the rule of thirds, which places the focus off center, where the eye finds it most naturally. Balance can be symmetrical, solemn and formal, or asymmetrical, where a small bright object balances a large dark one by weight of contrast rather than size.

Negative space, the emptiness around the objects, is as much a part of the composition as the objects themselves, and edge control, deciding which shapes are hard and which dissolve, gives the picture breathing room. The painter’s habit of stepping back, or of looking at the work in a mirror, exists to test one question above all: does the whole arrangement hold together as a single, inevitable image?

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