Visual Diary

The Grammar of Composition
The point I am attempting to make with both Malevich and Mondrian is that accidentally the were both, through working with abstraction, involved in developing a formal system through composition and that composition in this way, as part of the semantics of the image become a grammar. The Grammar of Composition, where elements combine to form a complete whole - just like the phrases and sentences of a paragraph. But where this is realised visually. But not just in terms of pictures seeming to be equivalent to language or similar to it in some way, but that pictures have their own potential in terms of grammar. This is what I take Kress and van Leeuwen to mean when they say that composition behaves as an independent system from language, similar to it, possibly, but different. In my critique of Visual Literacy - yes, this is becoming something of a critique - I would like to take issue with Kress' version of the relationship that pictures have with words and that composition can be seen as both an independent system as well as an adjunct to language as a kind of bimodal system that can never really be free from language.