Consider the difference between singing or chanting a group of words and speaking them. Music arises from the regularization or patterning of sound. Musical timbres (that which makes a flute sound like a flute instead of like a saxophone) appear dramatically simpler on an oscilloscope than speech or other random sounds. Musical scales are a series of simple mathematical ratios to a base frequency. Musical rhythms divide time into regular intervals. One might propose a theory of aesthetics such that art is the process of humanizing sensory input. By humanizing I mean distorting the input so that it partially conforms to regularities that appeal to the data processing activities of the human nervous system.

If that sounds technical, let's just say that at the core of the artistic process is an impulse to create repeating patterns. To quite a degree we prefer complex patterns over simple patterns. We also want an element of surprise, of pattern-breaking. So another aspect of art is the tension between pattern and disruption of pattern.

Returning to 2D visual art, many a clay bowl or plate over the centuries has been decorated with a sawtooth or wavy pattern, the precursor of more complex designs, such as the early sophistication of the Celts. Yet in the visual arts, much more than in music, there is a countering impulse to literal representation. However crudely drawn, earthenware decorated with recognizable representations, such as stick figures, are at least as common as those decorated solely with abstract patterns. The Greeks and Romans created images that still survive out of small coloured glass or ceramic tiles – an organic fusion of pattern and representation:

Fig. 4 is also an early example of attention paid to what I call meta-texture. Hair and skin have very different visual textures. Yet in this mosaic individual strands of hair and smooth regions of skin are equally replaced by small tiles – the meta-texture. Representational detail is sacrificed for strength in design resulting from the repetition of similar shapes.

In Western art since the Middle Ages we see a never-ending sashay between the extremes of pure pattern and pure representation. Once artists of the Renaissance learned the techniques and technology needed to create accurate representation, camera-like literalness became the expected standard for over two centuries.

Finally, in the mid-1800s the Impressionists rebelled, returning to a certain primitivism and essentially tiling the plane of their paintings with brush strokes.

There are many forces which must have driven painters to abandon literalism, but the one I want to focus on here is the desire to regain the aesthetic tools of pattern and disruption. Which I've discussed in my Composition Tutorial under the labels of unity vs. fragmentation as well as rhyme and repetition. Like post-Renaissance artists, the mainstream of art photography since the f/64 Manifesto has been almost obsessively enamoured with its strength in literal representation. Yet from the vantage of pure design, this very strength is it's greatest weakness. Picasso once said that to work from nature is to draw toenails. However graceful the overall elements of a natural scene may be, at the level of fine detail it is often chaotic.

The orthodox approach to handling this in photography is to find scenes with as few elements as possible – to create icons rather than vistas.

Yet one can tire of always eating sweets.