In the search for finer relations there must be every opportunity for choice; the better the choice, the finer the art.
The scientific mind has sought, by analysis of many masterpieces, to discover a set of perfect proportions, and to reduce them to mathematical form… Art resists everything that interferes with free choice and personal decision; art knows no limits… A master in art is always intensely individual, and what he does is an expression of his own peculiar choices.
No work has art-value unless it reflects the personality of its author. What everybody can do easily, or by rule, cannot be art.
In times when art is decadent, the designers and painters lack inventive power and merely imitate nature or the creations of others. Then comes Realism, conventionality, and the death of art.
–Arthur Wesley Dow,
“Composition: Understanding Line, Notan and Color”