Realistically there is no limit to the possibilities. How does an artist make decisions?
The difficult part of the process is the long exploration and discovery of your own soul and living with the results.
The way we see is critical to understanding how others will read our compositions.
All artists are illusionists of one kind or another.
A painting with a message does not happen by accident. It happens when you place elements in their order of importance.
Think of the centre of interest in a painting as you would read it in a novel or see it in a movie. The crisis or climax is that point when you simply can't put the book down or wouldn't dare leave the movie, for whatever reason.