The principles of visual art are the rules, tools, and guidelines that artists use to organize the elements of in a piece of artwork. When the principles and elements are successfully combined, they aid in creating an aesthetically pleasing or interesting work of art. While there is some variation among them, movement, unity, harmony, variety, balance, rhythm, emphasis, contrast, proportion, and pattern are commonly sited as principles of art.
Rhythm (from Greek rhythmos, "any regular recurring motion, symmetry" (Liddell and Scott 1996)) may be generally defined as a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions" (Anon. 1971). This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time may be applied to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or frequency of anything from microseconds to millions of years. In the performing arts, rhythm is the timing of events on a human scale, of musical sounds and silences, of the steps of a dance, or the meter of spoken language and poetry. Rhythm may also refer to visual presentation, as "timed movement through space" (Jirousek 1995), and a common language of pattern unites rhythm with geometry.
In a visual composition, pattern and rhythm are generally expressed by showing consistency with colors or lines. For instance, placing a red spiral at the bottom left and top right, for example, will cause the eye to move from one spiral, to the other, and then to the space in between. The repetition of elements creates movement of the viewer's eye and can, therefore, make the artwork feel active. Hilma af Klint's Svanen (The Swan) exemplifies the visual representation of rhythm using color and symmetry.
Hilma af Klint, Svanen (The Swan), 1914
Color and symmetry work together in this painting to guide the eye of the viewer in a particular visual rhythm.