December 2017
Intermediate to advanced
208 pages
3h 39m
English
A work of art can sometimes be made more compelling and engaging by increasing the amount and density of information it displays.
Overloading an image, creating a surfeit of incident and interest, can be a spectacular but also a somewhat primitive strategy. Some early northern European art delighted in a great wealth of visual information, packing each part of a composition with dazzling rendering and elaborately crafted detail. Such artworks often suffer from the negative feature of overload—the lack of clarity that results from the absence of a clear hierarchy of importance within the image.
Some contemporary artists have deployed overload as a positive strategy. The quality of surfeit and the sense of claustrophobia that can ...