The act of seeing involves a response to light

The most important and necessary element in the visual experience is tonal.

All the other visual elements are revealed to us through light, but they are secondary to the element of tone, which is, in fact light of the absence of light. What light reveals and offeres us in substance by which man fashions and devises what he recognizes and identifies in the environment, namely all the other visual elements: line, color, shape, direction, texture, scale, dimension, motion. Which elements dominate which visual statements is determined by the nature of what is being designed or, in the case of nature what exist. But when we define painting elementally as tonal, filled with shape reference and consequently direction, having texture and tonec-color, possibly scale reference and no dimension and motion except by implication, it does not even begin to define the visual potential of painting. The possible variations of a visual statement that fits neatly within that description is literally infinite. Those variations depend on the artist's subjective expression through emphasis of certain elements over others and the manipulation of those elemnes through the strategic choice of techniques. In these choices, the artist finds meaning.