Balance

Balance

To set all in equilibrium is well; to put all in harmony is better. —Victor Hugo

Balance is the arrangement of elements to create a sense of visual stability or harmony.

Artists balance line, texture, color, space, and form. There is no formula for making these elements feel harmonious. Looking at sketches that artists have done before painting the final “great work” demonstrates the need for ongoing experimentation in order to have the result be “just so.” E. H. Gombrich says of one of Raphael’s series of sketches before the final painting, “What he tried again and again to get was the right balance between the figures, the right relationship which would make the most harmonious whole.”

In two-dimensional art, balance concerns the distribution of visual weight across a composition. A sculpture also needs physical support to stand as intended, but physical stability and visual balance are different: a stable object can still look lopsided.

We use the concept of balance in more areas than art. A balanced diet provides a suitable mix of foods and nutrients. Work-life balance concerns the time and energy someone gives to work and nonwork activities, like socializing or exercising. A balanced view of something is one that considers multiple opinions on it. These uses share the idea of attending to several demands together.

Visual artists need to consider the balance of left to right, of up to down, of foreground to background. They can use elements such as color, shading, or forms to achieve the harmonious effect they are aiming for. Artists sometimes need to compromise among competing goals, such as painting all of what they see, accurate rendering of all the details, or emphasis on a particular motif or story. “The suggestion of space and the faithful imitation of reality must not be allowed to destroy the balance of the composition” was a statement written by Gombrich in reference to one particular piece, but it highlights various challenges an artist may face when trying to create something balanced.

Symmetry is one way to create balance, and people often find it appealing. It is believed that the more symmetrical a person’s face is, the more attractive people are likely to find them on average. Biologists believe that, for our ancestors, facial symmetry may have signaled overall health and, consequently, genetic fitness. This meant someone with a symmetrical face was likely to be a good choice as a mate.

Our attraction to symmetry extends far beyond faces. Research indicates that symmetrical text, like the balanced columns of The New Yorker, may aid us in paying attention to what we read. We find it easier to cognitively process what is symmetrical.

Many of the objects in nature we find most beautiful, such as flowers or shells, have an element of symmetry. Indeed, symmetry is encoded within our bodies. Our overall body plan is bilaterally symmetrical, and there is fossil evidence showing that animals have been built this way for at least the last five hundred million years. There might then be a survival benefit to this kind of balance.

When it comes to art, we don’t require perfect and obvious symmetry, such as the same forms repeated on both the left and right sides of a painting. Artists use asymmetry all the time, and thus we can be attracted to a variety of visual arrangements. But the way all of the elements of an artwork are brought together is what creates a feeling of harmony or engagement: the forms may be stacked to one side, but the shading balances them out, or the lines are arranged to offset the clusters of color.

Anybody who has ever tried to arrange a bunch of flowers, to shuffle and shift the colours, to add a little here and take away there, has experienced this strange sensation of balancing forms and colours without being able to tell exactly what kind of harmony it is he is trying to achieve. —E. H. Gombrich

What is perceived as balanced and harmonious in a work of art is not universal. The experience of art is heavily influenced by cultural sensibilities and personal preference. Some artworks invite viewers to examine how they judge these relationships. Julian Bell says of Tableau I: with Red, Black, Blue and Yellow that artist Piet Mondrian “was asking the eye to focus on its own capacity to judge relations and balances, and on its own desire for clarity.” The art critic Peter Schjeldahl says of another Mondrian piece, “We intuitively gauge weights and tensions that constitute the picture’s stability. Epiphany happens when you grasp how finely calibrated the stability is, poised at a breaking point.”

Learning to notice visual relationships can help you understand why an arrangement works and how changing one element affects the whole.

The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes. —Barbara Kingsolver