Gone Stupid with the Details

I usually paint at night.  I often lose touch of time when I start dabbing in the paint.  I'd blow past three hours and 4 cups of coffee and think I've only been working on a canvas for 30 minutes.  It's a great way to pass the time, and a darn efficient way to escape everything else in life.  Which reminds me, I have other important things to attend to outside of art!

In any case, I was contemplating last night how to resolve two conflicting aims I was having with regards this rooftop painting.  I needed to satisfy this impulse to paint in details.  Usually, if you want to focus on something, you paint in details.  If you want the eyes to flow across briefly but not focus on an area, you just make suggestive strokes, or lighten the tone, or as they say in Photography, just bring it out of focus.  These usually are not friendly to the eyes and a viewer will instinctively move his eyes away from these areas where the brain cannot satiate it's need for hard edged details.  But as what I have said, I was going crazy over the details.

I was wondering whether cluttering everything will force the eyes to move to the foreground where things are not as cluttered as the background because of perspective - where things are of course larger and therefore may seem not as cluttered as the back.

Or then again, I can always use heavy lines and frame a small section where the eyes and mind should focus on.  

Ah yes...and there goes the plan once again.