Composition is one of those aspects of paint learning that will never be complete. You can never sign off and say, “Well, I learned that now on to painting”. Composition possibilities are endless and fascinating.
An art friend and I were talking composition a bit ago, specifically joking about JPI–jolts per inch. In truth not a laughing matter. In many schools of composition the punch of your composition or design takes precidence over everything else in the painting.
Any of your favorite illustrations and movie stills have that NOTAN/JPI punch and drama. The rest of the story is subordinate to that initial kick in the teeth, mainly with your values.
A design of lights and darks that frame the design and all fits within that.
This is one important school of composition.
One thing I have been experimenting with though is applying the composition concepts of Pollock, and Tobey to my figurative work. Not designing with NOTAN punch but subordinating image elements to the overall flow of the color and rhythm.
In this portrait I broke up all the architectural rigid forms, the lighting and even the figures. This same composition could have been a very crunched NOTAN design of crisp dramatic lighting and dark shadows. but i purposely broke everything up with pattern and sun dapples.