Digesting Art and Other Information

Some Assembly Required. Oil, acrylic, cold wax, collage on wood. Anne Kearney

I was recently working on an abstract collage in paint and fabric and was stumped about what to do next. What else does it need? What should I add? Do I go for the glue gun or the paint brush? In a moment of inspiration I went, instead, for the utility knife. Slicing off a sizable chunk of the piece seemed dramatic but was just what was needed to create a unified whole.

Looking around at my other collages in progress lying on the studio floor, I sought further composition inspiration by thinking back to the two-hour lecture I’d taken a couple years ago from an artist of note. What were those actionable guidelines and strategies? What were those juicy bits of advice? My mind was a blank. Perhaps delusionally, I chose to believe that the absence of useful knowledge was a function not of my aging brain but of the presentation itself.

The lecture felt informative at the time. It was chock-a-block full of compositional rules and guidelines. It ran through long lists of things to keep in mind, like rhythm and balance, contrast and repetition, line and pattern. And it included image after image. Paintings marked up in grids of thirds. Paintings overlaid with the golden ratio. Paintings crisscrossed with webs of lines showing relationships.

There was so much information, in fact, that apparently none of it stuck.

As artists we communicate not just through art but also about art. We talk about our work. We write. We teach. We care about helping people understand. And yet in our excitement to share everything we know, it is all too easy to share too much. This is a tendency that I have to regularly fight against when writing these blog posts.

Just as it is easy to lose sight of the big picture when putting paint to surface, it is easy to lose sight of the big questions when putting words to paper. Am I imparting something with sticking power? Am I helping people understand?

As with painting, guidelines can be useful in the composition of information—not just for artists but for anyone engaged in the creative act of communication.

What are some of those guidelines? Read on – and I will try not to make you cross-eyed with the verbal equivalent of crisscrossed lines.

Organization Aids Digestion

Painters might not care about the neuroscience behind information processing, but effective composition in painting works because it resonates with the way the brain works.

Artists learn that paintings are often strongest if they have one main focal point. They learn to organize the painting along a visual hierarchy by using, for example, color intensity and value, so that viewers aren’t overwhelmed. They organize the elements of the painting to help lead the eye. And they ruthlessly edit, cutting away elements that distract from the whole. Often this editing involves getting rid of the artist’s favorite marks in a process that can be so wrought we call it “killing our darlings.”

There is a parallel here with communication. A good TED Talk, for example, gives the brain a focal point in the form of a central theme. It explains that theme by exploring a hierarchy of related concepts. It guides the listener by effectively leading them from point to point. And it gives enough detail and imagery to be interesting along the way.

Breaking information down into bite-sized pieces and then weaving those pieces together resonates with the brain’s natural system of organizing knowledge. This resonance makes the information easier to digest. If the lecturer on painting composition had given his talk a clearer unifying principle, and then organized his main points into bite-sized concepts with accessible examples, my brain might have something to show for the time I spent.

Don’t Overfeed Me

In my attempt to learn about composition, I would have been much better off learning three useful things rather than forgetting the twenty or so that were presented. Our brains can only handle so much at a time. And if we are asked to simultaneously take in more than we can handle, we get overloaded and often tune out as a protective response.  

How many things are we capable of thinking about at once? The magic number, based on a whole lot of research in psychology, is five plus or minus two. 

Great, you might be thinking, I can talk about seven things in my next presentation. Not so fast.  For complex things or for people who have competing demands on their attention — which is most of us, most of the time — that number is at the lower end.

As the ubiquitous “menu del dia” in Spain attests, a three-course lunch with small portions is digestible on a normal workday. Five courses might be reserved for a special dinner when you have more time. And seven courses comprise an event to which you must be committed.

It is no coincidence that painters often break the canvas into three main areas by value or pictorial space, that major concertos have three movements, and that June Cohen, former executive producer of Ted Media, says that a great talk should clearly articulate a single main idea and have no more than three supporting subpoints. Sometimes three really is the magic number.

Cheating by Chunking

While going broader with the amount of information you try and share comes with risks, you can sometimes go deeper. It is possible to effectively get around the brain’s limited capacity by grouping information into categories and subcategories — or as psychologists like to say, “chunking.” With chunking you are packaging bits of information inside conceptual containers so that they are easy to carry around. It’s a little bit like opening a bento box and finding three or four mini-trays nestled inside.

Painters chunk in a variety of ways, for example by starting with a small number of large shapes and then dividing those shapes into smaller shapes to add more detail. Writers chunk by nesting sub-themes under themes.

How many levels of chunking can you effectively include? That will depend on what you are trying to say, the timing and format you are using, and on your audience. Are you a presenter with limited time to present? Do you have an audience of beginners or people with many demands on their attention? You can probably really only cover three concepts related to your main theme before you start to overwhelm or lose people. Do you have your audience for a longer period of time? Are you sharing information via a long-form essay with people who are interested in what you’re saying? You can probably go deeper. But even then, you need good structure and compelling content.

The painting composition teacher had a group of interested artists for two hours. He could have effectively covered a fair amount of information – though not nearly as much as he tried to pack in – if it had been better organized. Concepts like dynamic symmetry, diagonals, dominance and rhythm, for example, could have been organized under a limited number of compelling themes like how to keep the eye moving or how to achieve visual balance.

Please Don’t Feed Me Bonbons

Often the importance of structure is summed up as “less is more.” And this is not a bad place to start. Keeping to one main theme is important. Sharing a limited number of concepts related to that theme is much more likely to be effective than trying to cram in too much information.

And yet I have noticed a trend toward oversimplification in much of the information that is shared these days. Important concepts are presented as lists – Stephen King’s 20 rules for writers, Diebenkorn’s 10 rules for artists. Politicians stop trying to communicate real information in their efforts to oversimplify and provoke emotion at the expense of understanding. News feeds give us sound bites that grab our attention but often fail to deliver anything of substance.

In our information diet we are increasingly being fed the equivalent of ultra-processed food. Like these foods, this kind of information is hard to resist, goes down easily, but ultimately does not nourish us. 

We are warned of waning attention spans and told to keep it simple. Yet it is the dense informational packages of stories, imagery, and examples that provide the conceptual vitamins, minerals, and flavors that make food for thought worth eating. Detail in information, as long as it sits within a structure and isn’t the equivalent of an overwhelming number of crisscrossed lines, gives us something to cognitively latch onto and explore. It sparks emotions, memories, and associated ideas making the information more likely to stick.

As communicators ourselves, let’s not add to empty informational calories and the collective sugar crash that ensues. Give me information that is easy to digest but please don’t feed me bonbons.

Beyond and Back to Rules

Good composition doesn’t necessarily ensure a good outcome. Many other ingredients go into successful communication. Many examples of communication follow all the rules but still fall flat.

Some works of art ignore compositional rules altogether yet are still captivating. Jackson Pollack’s drip paintings lack structure at first glance. Edgard Varèse’s avant-garde music compositions were sometimes written to deliberately challenge the audience. And the great Russian novels where everyone has at least three different names now need guides to help the modern reader keep everything straight.

One can argue that these works are successful not because they lack structure but because their audiences – typically people with expertise or inherent interest in the genre – are willing to put the mental effort into creating structure. For some people, the challenge of discovering or creating structure from information is immensely satisfying.

A reviewer of a book I recently read — and had trouble navigating — noted that this was a “difficult” book but that pulling out the themes was ultimately worthwhile. An artist I admire deliberately spends time with paintings that aren’t immediately engaging or likable in an attempt to understand what the artist is saying.

You can learn a lot this way. You can also get a headache.

I applaud experimentation. But with everyday kinds of communication most of us simply don’t have enough time, mental energy, or interest to put effort into extracting structure from information in order to more fully digest it.

So please, if you want to reach us, help us. Organize your thoughts. Tell us something rather than everything. Make it interesting.

Paying attention to how you communicate and not just what you communicate will help your information stick.

What do I do I hope sticks with you from this post? Three general guidelines for effective communication:

Share bite-sized ideas – they are easier to chew
Is there a clear main idea? Are the supporting concepts and themes coherent? Would cutting things out bring clarity to the whole even if you – like I have done many times while creating this post – have to kill your darlings?

Respect limited digestive capacity
Are you overwhelming your audience by asking them to think about too many things at once? What information can you cut or chunk to make it more manageable?

Make it nutritious
Is the information nutritionally dense? Are there enough interesting details to engage your audience? Are you giving them meaty things to think about?

If you can do these things, you are well on your way to making the information that you share understandable and impactful. As the French painter Pierre Bonnard said, “A well-composed painting is half done.”

Anne Kearney is the 2025 ReDirect Artist in Residence. You can read more about her here.