I like the composition of this Sykes. Here’s a band of natural parts layered like lasagna high from another Horace Golden Tree at the bottom. The massing is democratic with the four banded and imbricating parts taking nearly equal shares of the composition. This is merely descriptive, and not meant to offend either royalists or tyrants. The parts could be unbalanced in another composition to effects and pleasures of their own. I am reminded of Prof. Yates and a college class in aesthetics. Yates was very angular, a thin man and tall enough to regularly bump his head into a lamp hanging from the ceiling of his classroom near a window he liked to open wide for deep breathing. He was made in central casting for the part of absent minded professor and wore his tweed well. For the course he chose a prescriptive history in a thin volume that after considering a variety of historical approaches to “art and beauty” came to its own conclusion, that both had to do with “perceptual relations,” the play between the parts of what we perceive. It was not a very emotive approach, this “perceptual relations.” Or I might have also titled this composition “sturm und drang,” which is, many readers will know, a romantic period in German cultural history that I learned first down the hall from Yates room in Dr.Simpson’s class in world literature. Really it was a class in Western – not World – literature. (Click Twice to Enlarge)