You know it as a photography guide, but it’s also a recognizable compositional design. Melinda Tidwell introduced it in her abstracts class, and to me, it immediately means a very conceptual landscape.

I’m fascinated by the options within this simple structure, which is a good sign of an appropriate art constraint. I started to rough out some ideas, using these joyous collage fodder patterns:

I varied the sections of light, medium, and dark values, playing around with how they read as landscape. Dark at the bottom reads most directly as foreground to me, but moving it through the middle and top sections works too.

Now, armed with my “hammer” of thirds, I’m applying it to all kinds of compositional play, in pursuit of a new series:

Like my other work, these pieces have layers from many sources, but new to me, they tend NOT to have photography. I’m working mainly with hand-pasted paper collage, scanned printmaking and painting, and looking for that recognizable division of three sections. When I surprise myself with the results, as above, I see scratches, remnants, and marks peeking through, indicating a mapping of our lives, and all those changes and pivots we go through in order to survive.