Artistic Space: Visual Arts

Thanks largely to my mother, art was a big part of my formative years.  I grew up drawing, and was privileged to take years of self-directed art classes, which afforded me the opportunity to work in a wide variety of media.  I was never particularly remarkable with any of them, but I got to try them all.

When people think "art", probably the first place their mind goes is painting.  I was never much of a painter; I always had (and still have) a tendency to mash the brush into the canvas, a bad habit that robbed my work of subtlety.  Nevertheless, I feel I've worked with and around painting, drawing, sculpture, and other visual arts enough to converse intelligently about them, and the merits of any particular work in the genre.

In visual arts, the first and most obvious dimension of artistic space is the distinction between negative and positive space.  Traditionally, negative space is thought of as "white" space, but the truth is it can be any color, or even a mixture of colors.  Negative space is simply the unadorned background; an emptiness which surrounds the focal point or points in the positive space.  For example, if one were to paint a tree against the sky, the tree would be the positive space, and the sky, however tumultuous, could be perceived as the negative space.  How much of each to include in a particular painting or drawing depends on the emotion the artist wishes to convey.  Larger amounts of negative space can convey a sense of distance, possibility, or emptiness.  Less negative space might convey closeness, intimacy, or fullness.

Movement is another dimension of artistic space in the visual arts.  Some paintings naturally guide the eye from one point to another, while others invite you to roam freely, and still others demand you keep your gaze fixed on a single point.  Some paintings convey a sense of objects which are themselves moving.  Whether to use this concept or not, and how to use it depends on the message the artist wants to convey.

In sculpture, these same dimensions exist, but in different ways.  In sculpture, the negative space is often literal--it's the area which is not the sculpture.  And yet, sometimes it is still part of the overall artwork.  For example, Andy Goldsworthy's Holes make brilliant use of negative space:




The holes themselves are not made of anything, any yet they are undeniably part of the sculpture.
Sculpture, as you can see from the above photos, also can include a wide variety of physical materials.  When I first said "sculpture", I'll bet most of you thought of clay or marble statues.  But Goldsworthy's choice of natural materials flows from the intended message of his work.  He's a passionate environmentalist, and all of his work is a riff on the beauty of nature.

Goldsworthy in particular opens up another interesting dimension of artistic space, and that is duration.  The vast majority of Goldsworthy's works are left in their natural surroundings to decay by natural processes.  Some cease to exist a few minutes after they are created, such as his Rain Shadow series:


The art is gone the moment the rain dries up.  And that very impermanence is part of Goldsworthy's message.

Duration is a rarely-explored dimension of all art.  The only medium I know that naturally lends itself to impermanence is ice sculpture.  In most media, artists create with the hope and intention that their work will last forever.  Thanks to the dawning of the digital age, much of it will, at least in some form.  But sometimes, it might be more fitting if the work decayed or disappeared.

The point is that when you begin making deliberate decisions in unexplored dimensions of artistic space, it allows you to say more.  Once you know the artistic space is there, you can start making decisions--filling the space--and raise your own art to the next level.

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