Please compare and contrast the works of art in terms of subject, visual elements, and principles of (compositional) design (for example: balance, contrast, repetition, etc.): "Kindred Spirits," Asher Brown Durand, and "Poet on a Mountaintop," Shen Zhou.

At first glance, the two paintings under discussion could not be more different. "Kindred Spirits," by Asher Brown Durand, is a lush, colorful and detailed painting of two men overlooking New York’s Kaaterskill Falls. Painted in 1849 at the request of Jonathan Sturges for the poet William Cullen Bryant, it was intended to demonstrate the love their deceased artist friend Thomas Cole had for the location, as well as depict Bryant and Cole as the eponymous kindred spirits. Not a literal representation of the area, it is rather an excellent example of the idealized landscape style in vogue at the time.
The movement of the painting is a rough spiral from the outside to the center. The eye starts not with the figures central to the painting, but rather with the lightning-like branches arcing far over their heads. Following the dark branches, it is thereby led toward the softly-jutting cliffs on the right. The cliff-face then draws the eye down to the shadowed evergreens growing out of the tumbled rocks at its base. Thanks to tonal similarities between the two dark creek banks—silhouetted rocks and shaded trees on the one side, broken shadowed branches and undergrowth in the shadow of the outcropping on the other—the eye easily jumps the stream and moves up to the illuminated outcropping on which the two figures stand. At last, following the walking stick belonging to Cole, the eye comes to rest upon the Kaaterskill Waterfall itself in the distant center of the painting.
There are two visual ”masses” in Kindred Spirits balancing the left and the right. The dark forest and illuminated rock outcrop on the left is echoed by the cliffs and hill on the right. With their grayer tonality, they provide an adequate visual counterweight to the darker, more imposing forest. At the top, the dark branches and leaves move jaggedly across the painting, reflecting the equally jagged fallen tree and dark rocks tumbling across the bottom. Indeed, with the true ”subjects” of the painting—Bryant, Cole, and the Kaaterskill clustered in the center, the forest, branches, cliff and undergrowth form almost a second frame inside the painting, unifying the entire composition into a well-balanced whole.
It is hard to imagine a starker contrast than "Poet on a Mountain Top," painted by the artist Shen Zhou. (Estimates on the date of the painting vary between 1496-1500.) With no color save the black ink upon the white paper, details are evoked by suggestive movements of the brush rather than depicted with a strict realism. The trees are groups of jagged strokes and dots implying leaves, while the mountains are mere grey washes of color looming in the background, surrounded at the base by a fog indicated by a few outlines and the lightest of grey washes. The poet of the title is an oddly disproportionate grouping of lines atop the cliff, seemingly gazing not upon the nature around him but the poem before him.
The movement of Poet is a series of downward-directed arcs. The eye begins in the middle-upper right and follows the hillside down to the grove of trees that partially screen the house in their midst. On the other side, the eye follows the climbing mountain up again, past the contemplative poet and casts itself out into space, finally arrested at the accompanying poem (itself seemingly hanging freely in space). Once finished there, the eye arcs downward again, coming up in the darker central grove and headed toward the distant mountain in the upper right. A third time the eye plunges back down, this time moving to the base of the cliff and following the fog-lines to the shadowed mountain looming in the middle-to-upper left.
Though not bounded as in Kindred Spirits, Poet on a Mountain Top is unified by means of what is absent. The empty space above is mirrored by the swirling fog below. Overall, there is the feeling of a vignette—a moment captured amid a fading emptiness. The only tiny jarring note is that of the Poet himself, strangely out of proportion as he is to his surroundings. Yet, seeing as he is the only human figure in the painting, perhaps he can be accorded a little pride of place.
Both paintings speak in different ways about the relationship of humanity to the surrounding natural world. Yet in both, it is the natural world that is overwhelmingly present, almost to the effacement of the humans standing in its midst. Though separated by hundreds of years and half the globe, each painting tells us that for the artist and the poet, the beauty and majesty of nature is the inspiration and source of all their work.