The importance of composing within the format
In Chapter Five, we saw that young children have a strong grasp of the importance of the format. Children's consciousness of the bounding edges of the format controls the way they distribute the
- Fig. 7-3. Joan Miro, Personages with Star (1933). Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago.
forms and spaces, and young children often produce nearly flawless compositions. The composition by a six-year-old in Figure 74 compares favorably with the Spanish artist Miro's composition in Figure 7-3.
Unfortunately, as you have seen, this ability lapses as children approach adolescence, perhaps due to lateralization, increasing dominance of the language system, and the left hemisphere's penchant for recognizing, naming, and categorizing objects. Concentration on things seems to supersede the young child's more holistic or global view of the world, where everything is important, including the negative spaces of sky, ground, and air. Usually it takes years of training to convince students, in the way experienced artists are convinced, that the negative spaces, bounded by the format, require the same degree of attention and care that the positive forms require. Beginning students generally lavish all their attention on the objects, persons, or forms in their drawings, and then more or less "fill in the background." It may seem hard to believe at this moment, but if care and attention are lavished
Fig. 7-5. Albrecht Durer (1471-1528), Nude Woman with a Staff(1508).
Courtesy of The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. The negative shapes surrounding the figure are beautifully varied in size and configuration.
Fig. 7-5. Albrecht Durer (1471-1528), Nude Woman with a Staff(1508).
Courtesy of The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. The negative shapes surrounding the figure are beautifully varied in size and configuration.
Fig. 7-6. Paul Cezanne (1839—1936), The Vase of Tulips. Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago. By making the positive forms touch the edge of the format in several places, Cezanne enclosed and separated the negative shapes, which contribute as much to the interest and balance of the composition as do the positive forms.
on the negative spaces, the forms will take care of themselves. I'll be showing you specific examples of that.
The quotations by the playwright Samuel Beckett and the Zen philosopher Alan Watts (on page 123) state this concept concisely. In art, as Beckett says, nothing (in the sense of empty space) is real. And as Alan Watts says, the inside and outside are one. You saw in the last chapter that in drawing, the objects and the spaces around them fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. Every piece is important and they share edges. Together they fill up all of the area within the four edges—that is, within the format.
Look at the example of this fitting together of the spaces and shapes in the still-life painting by Paul Cezanne (Figure 7-6) and the figure drawing by Durer (Figure 7-5). Notice how varied and
Fig. 7-6. Paul Cezanne (1839—1936), The Vase of Tulips. Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago. By making the positive forms touch the edge of the format in several places, Cezanne enclosed and separated the negative shapes, which contribute as much to the interest and balance of the composition as do the positive forms.
interesting the negative spaces are. Even in the Durer, which is almost symmetrical, the negative spaces are beautifully varied. Now, back to the drawing lessons.
Summing up, then, negative spaces have two important functions:
1. Negative spaces make "difficult" drawing tasks easy—for example, areas of foreshortening or complicated forms or forms that don't "look like" what we know about them, become easy to draw by using negative space. The chair drawings in the margin and the horns of the sheep on page 116 are good examples.
2. Emphasis on negative spaces unifies your drawing and strengthens composition and—perhaps most important, improves your perceptual abilities.
I realize that it is counter-intuitive—that is, it goes against common sense—to think that focusing on the spaces around objects will improve your drawing of the objects. But this is simply another of the paradoxes of drawing and may help to explain why it is so difficult to teach oneself to draw. So many of the strategies of drawing—using negative space, for example—would never occur to anyone "in their left mind."
Our next bit of preparation is to define the "Basic Unit." What is it and how does it help with drawing?
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