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StillnessArt technique

Negative space is the empty area around and between the subjects of an image. Artists and designers treat it as part of the composition: it gives the eye somewhere to rest, sharpens outlines and can even form hidden shapes of its own.

Art technique

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A famous demonstration is the Rubin vase, devised around 1915 by the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin: the same outline can be seen as a white vase or as two dark faces in profile, but never both at once. Psychologists call this figure–ground perception: the brain's habit of splitting a scene into a subject and a background. Designers use it on purpose. The FedEx logo, designed in 1994 by Lindon Leader, hides an arrow in the white gap between the E and the x. In page and screen design the same idea is called white space: generous margins and gaps between lines make text easier to read. Japanese has the word ma for a meaningful gap or pause, used of gardens, buildings and music, where a well-placed silence does what empty space does in a picture.

Türkçe oku
Negatif alan, bir görüntüde konunun çevresinde ve nesnelerin arasında kalan boş alandır. Sanatçılar ve tasarımcılar onu kompozisyonun bir parçası sayar: Boşluk gözün dinlenmesini sağlar, çizgileri keskinleştirir, hatta kendi başına gizli biçimler oluşturabilir.

Bu fikrin en ünlü örneği, Danimarkalı psikolog Edgar Rubin'in 1915 dolaylarında tasarladığı Rubin vazosudur: Aynı çizim ya beyaz bir vazo ya da karşılıklı bakan iki koyu yüz profili olarak görülür, ama ikisi aynı anda asla görülmez. Psikologlar buna şekil-zemin algısı der; beyin bir sahneyi hep bir ana şekil ve bir arka plan olarak ayırır. Tasarımcılar bunu bilinçli olarak kullanır. Lindon Leader'ın 1994'te tasarladığı FedEx logosunda, E ile x harfleri arasındaki beyaz boşlukta bir ok gizlidir. Sayfa ve ekran tasarımında aynı kavrama beyaz alan denir; geniş kenar boşlukları ve satır araları metnin daha kolay okunmasını sağlar. Japoncada anlamlı bir aralık ya da duraklama için ma sözcüğü kullanılır; bahçeden mimariye ve müziğe uzanan bu kavramda, yerinde bir sessizlik resimdeki boşluğun işini görür.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Negative space
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In 1723 Bach became director of music for the main churches of Leipzig. The job meant a cantata, a piece for choir, soloists and orchestra, for nearly 60 Sundays and feast days a year. In his first year he composed most of them new, week after week, alongside some reworked earlier pieces.

Bach's official title was Thomaskantor, music master of St Thomas School, and he held the post from 1723 until his death in 1750. Each cantata had to suit that Sunday's Bible readings and was performed during the service at St Thomas or St Nicholas church. His first annual cycle began on 30 May 1723; alongside the new works he restaged and adapted some cantatas from his earlier post in Weimar. Music paused for most of Advent and Lent, the quiet seasons before Christmas and Easter. Senior pupils of the school sang in the choir and helped rehearse and copy out the parts by hand. His obituary, written by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel and a former pupil, speaks of five complete annual cycles. More than 200 of his cantatas survive; many others are lost.

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Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican between 1508 and 1512 standing on a tall wooden scaffold with his head tilted back, not lying down as is often imagined. The ceiling, about 35 by 14 metres, holds more than 300 figures.

Pope Julius II commissioned the ceiling. Michelangelo saw himself as a sculptor rather than a painter and accepted reluctantly; the contract was signed on 8 May 1508. He rejected the first scaffold, which hung on ropes through holes in the vault, and had a freestanding one built instead. His early biographers Giorgio Vasari and Ascanio Condivi both say he worked standing, and Vasari describes the discomfort of painting with his head bent backwards for so long. The lying-down version comes from another writer of the time, Paolo Giovio. Michelangelo is thought to have joked about the strain in a comic poem to a friend, with a sketch in the margin of a figure painting overhead. The ceiling was painted in fresco, on patches of fresh plaster laid each day, and the modern restoration mapped each of these daily sections. It was unveiled on 31 October 1512.

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In true fresco, the painter brushes pigment mixed only with water onto fresh, wet lime plaster. As the plaster dries, it reacts with the air and binds the colour into the wall itself, which is why frescoes can last for centuries.

Fresco means “fresh” in Italian. Wet lime plaster absorbs carbon dioxide from the air and slowly turns into calcium carbonate, a kind of limestone, trapping the pigment as it hardens. The plaster sets within the day, so each morning only as much fresh plaster is laid as can be painted that day. This patch is called a giornata, Italian for “a day's work”, and its faint seams often remain visible. A mistake means chipping the plaster off and starting again. Some colours, especially blues such as ultramarine, did not work in wet lime, so they were added later on dry plaster, a method called secco (“dry”); paint applied this way flakes off more easily. Among the oldest known true frescoes are Minoan wall paintings from Crete and Santorini of the second millennium BC. Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel in Padua and Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling are famous later examples.

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Chiaroscuro, Italian for “light-dark”, is the use of strong contrast between light and shadow in a picture. Shading from light to dark makes figures look rounded and solid, and a bright patch set against darkness draws the eye and adds drama.

Painters in ancient Greece already shaded their figures; the Athenian painter Apollodoros, in the 5th century BC, was remembered as a pioneer. The word itself began in Renaissance Italy for drawings on tinted paper, where artists worked up to the light with white paint and down to the dark with ink. Leonardo da Vinci used soft chiaroscuro to model faces. Around 1600 Caravaggio pushed it to extremes, lighting figures with a single hard beam against near-black backgrounds, a style called tenebrism, from Italian tenebroso, “dark”. Rembrandt, Georges de La Tour with his candlelit scenes and Joseph Wright of Derby followed in different ways. Cinema borrowed the idea: the deep shadows of the black-and-white crime films of the 1940s, known as film noir, are chiaroscuro lighting.

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Complementary colours sit opposite each other on the colour wheel, such as blue and orange, red and green, or yellow and purple. Placed side by side they make each other look more intense; mixed together as paint they cancel out into a dull grey or brown.

The effect was studied scientifically by the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, who became director of dyeing at the Gobelins tapestry works in Paris in 1824 after complaints about its colours. He found that the criticised black dye was in fact excellent; it only looked weak and reddish when surrounded by blues and purples. His 1839 book on “simultaneous contrast”, the way neighbouring colours shift each other, was widely read by painters, including the Impressionists. The eye plays a part too: stare at a red patch for half a minute, then look at a white wall, and you see a blue-green afterimage, because parts of the visual system briefly tire. Van Gogh used the effect deliberately; of The Night Café (1888) he wrote that he had tried to express terrible human passions with red and green.

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