I'm with Bjørn, here! And let me state right off, I frequently find myself making, what I'm reticent to refer to as, the same aesthetic mistake. As an artist, and in a variety of media, my first rule has consistently been Rules? Who needs rules?! But affirmation is good. And, well, who the hell doesn't want their efforts to be appreciated? Besides, you asked for it -- critique, that is.
That said, here's a "trick" I often employ when judging my own work. If rendered in color, I view it in gray scale. If the image appears compositionally correct, or pleasing, in black-and-white then it might also rendered in color. As a method, I find this very helpful adjudicating the relative merits of several autumnal, or botanical, scenes when it's so easy to be dazzled by all the "pretty colors" at the expense of composition. A similar argument can be raised, more so of late, over so-called "HD", and extreme color saturation -- although none of that is effectively new to visual art. (I recently viewed some ancient, highly "HD" images discovered on a cave wall in Portugal. In a word: They sucked!) A bad image in high definition is like awful music, played loudly, in high fidelity. Over saturation is like dry meat slathered in gravy. Poor composition is like [awful] music played off pitch. (A method, incidentally, frequently employed by my country's clandestine operators to elicit information, under torture. FYI: I'm one of those people who has the peculiar affliction, causing the eyes to hurt if an image is projected too sharply against the retina. This "gift" has often helped me spot "fakes", whatever good that's been to me. Or given me cause to confess to acts of espionage I couldn't possibly have any connection with, having occurred years before my birth.)
Now consider this image, were the boat mud-brown in color or scrawled with graffiti. Is it good, or bad? I ask because I have myself taken stunningly gorgeous (if I say so) pictures of garbage thrown into bucolic, rural streams and lakes. From a technical standpoint, they were excellent, meeting every standard for composition, light and shadow, and color -- even monochrome, as per my special method of judging such things! However in any real sense, I prefer your world view! And I personally know of a number of individuals, even institutions or schools of thought, that would judge your image superior to anything I [ever] produced.
