Scissure - A reader's cool input

I got some intriguing email the other day from Judy, a self-professed "frustrated gallery-owner-wannabe." She loves to follow artists, and had some interesting feedback for me about Scissure, my last post. As she said, "I took the liberty of cropping this painting (I LOVE THE COLORS!), and I wondered what you think of it. It has so much movement, and I love both your original and my cropping of it. I’m an asymmetrical kind of character, I guess." I totally didn't mind her doing this, and here's her cropped version:

Interesting! I wrote back to her and said "In most cases I don't like exact symmetry either. There's a book called The Simple Secret to Better Painting, by Greg Albert, and his theory is that, in composition, you should never make two intervals the same. This applies to shapes, colors, values, etc. I tend to follow the 1/3 rule and put a fl point at one of the intersections of an imaginary tick tack toe grid placed on your painting. I violated that in this painting because, well, maybe at first because the center is where the colors fell in the original composition. But also, to me it seemed like with a monolith composition it asked to be centered. I could be wrong. The way you cropped it gives it a more organic feel."

I love that Judy wrote me, and I love that both croppings work. Judy, it was wonderful to hear from you.

(BTW, for the last few months I've been associating text with the image so that when you hover your cursor over it, a small message appears. No biggie. Just something fun.)