Negative Space
In college, I majored in art history — not thinking beyond the fact that I liked to look at beautiful pictures, beautiful anything, really. I suppose I could tie this to my growing up only a few blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art — but that would be giving my choice in majors too lofty an explanation. No, I liked looking at slides projected onto a huge screen in the classroom or lecture hall. I never gave a thought to what I would do with art history after college, never had a yearning to work in a museum, a hankering to be an archivist or a curator. I simply liked to look at art. I considered majoring in English, but that was what my mother had done, and I was 19, needing to establish myself as a separate person. Majoring in art history seemed a reasonable way to proceed.
There was a studio art requirement that every art history major had to complete. This was not hard for me, because I loved drawing and printmaking and had already fulfilled that requirement several times over by the time I declared a major. It was in one of my studio art classes — Drawing and Space — that I was presented with a drawing exercise I would think about for the rest of my life.
The class was held in a well-lit L-shaped studio. In the short end of the L, there was almost always a live figure sitting in some relaxed pose for us to draw — a student who was making extra money by modeling nude for the Studio Art Department. One day, I walked into class to find not a nude model, but rather a huge conglomeration of junk tied together with rope suspended from the exposed ceiling beams above. It seemed as if the professor had lost his mind. There were chairs tied to scrap lumber, frying pans tethered to shovels, plastic table fans cradled by an old Radio Flyer red wagon. This huge sculpture of sorts hung from ceiling to floor with a couple of old black tires with rusted wheel rims at the very bottom. All the students collectively groaned as we found our way to easels or drawing tables; the thought of sketching this ugly monster of trash was overwhelming and exhausting. It passed through my mind that maybe the professor was working with another department — like sociology or American studies to give us an experience of Appalachian junkyards.
“Today we are not going to be drawing what is hanging in the studio — much to your disappointment, I know,” the professor began sarcastically. “Look at this three-dimensional masterpiece. Study it. And then do NOT draw it.”
“And then can we leave?” yelled some wisecracking guy at an easel.
“No,” said the professor with the kind of smile a sadistic prison guard might have when asked by a prisoner to be set free. “What I want you to do next is to look at the spaces between the objects. The spaces. Study the spaces.” He was almost bellowing. “Then draw only the spaces between, within and around the solid objects.”
The girl at the next table sighed. “Seriously?” she whispered.
“This is called negative space,” the professor continued. “The objects are positive space and the areas around them, the areas defining their boundaries, are called negative space.”
He began pontificating about the beauty of negative space. I took out my pencils and sat there struggling to actually see what he was talking about. I blurred my eyes and the negative spaces popped. I was blown away. There were shapes and edges I had never noticed before anywhere. I turned to look out a window at a large elm tree. Up until that moment, I had seen only branches, leaves and a trunk. Now I was working to focus on everything that was not the tree: all the areas and shapes of nothingness surrounding every boundary of the tree itself. Looking at the hanging pile of objects suspended from the classroom ceiling, I could suddenly see hundreds of slivers of air, irregular shapes of all kinds, erratic, unsymmetrical, each one different from the next. I began to draw.
Ever since that time — which was in 1968 — I have looked at the world differently. Once when I was on a plane headed for New York, we were stalled on the tarmac for an hour. I looked out the window at the shapes between the fan blades, the wedges, triangular almost, of nothingness that bordered each metallic plane part. When we landed, I noticed the space around the deplaning passengers. And in New York, when my father picked me up at LaGuardia, I blurred my eyes to see all the space that was not his body. It was like having a secret way to view the world. I learned over the years that what is not the object actually makes the object. Without the space around and in between all matter, there would be nothing at all.
This thought, this truth, has bent my mind in all kinds of directions: what is not there is essential to what is there. When I make a meal I often think about the spices and food I don’t choose to add to a dish. If I am making a salad dressing, for example, what makes it taste a certain way is what I use (lemon juice, mustard, garlic) as well as what I decide not to use (cayenne pepper, yogurt, curry powder). It is both the presence of x and the absence of y that give anything its specific identity.
This is easy to see in cutout paper snowflakes:
Or in real snowflakes:
The spaces hugging the snowflake are critical to the snowflake’s being what we know it to be.
Many corporate logos are created in such a way that negative space is the key distinguishing element of the design:
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I think there is a corollary in the way life unfolds. For example, my profession for the last 35 years has been that of a psychotherapist. I had many jobs (not one of them in art history, you might have surmised), before deciding that what I wanted to do most was work in the field of psychology. I had jobs in a couple of publishing companies; I taught blind adults how to read braille; I sold books in a bookstore; I worked in public radio. When I was in my early thirties, I used to joke that I had a multiple career disorder. I felt embarrassed when I put together my own résumé. While I can say honestly that I liked all the jobs I had, something in each experience failed to make my heart sing the way I needed it to.
My career is made up of not only by what I chose to do, but also by the jobs I left. This is not the same thing as Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” It is not merely that I chose one path versus another. The track I followed was shaped by all the elements of the ones I chose not to follow. When I sit with a patient, I know I am defined not only by my education and training in psychology, but also by the specific experiences I have had in other lines of work. I bring to the task at hand the hundreds of discernments I made to choose this profession over others.
Everything is made up of positive and negative space: the houses we do or don’t inhabit, the region of the country we choose to live in over others, the people we have married — or not married. When my son was in high school, he chose to play football. He is a naturally trim and lean person and in order to be a linebacker he had to bulk up. He ate more during those years than I had seen anyone eat previously. His thin neck morphed into a large, thick platform for his head and helmet. He has always liked athletics, and by the time he graduated from high school he had to face the fact that his natural body type was made more for tennis than college football. So he stopped forcing himself to eat large quantities of food; his neck returned to its natural shape; and he pivoted toward the tennis court. He became an excellent tennis player and still enjoys it to this day. During his early competitive matches, I could see, almost like a ghostly presence, the moves of a linebacker. Of course, as the years went on, his movements became more refined, more controlled. But his unlearned football moves are critical to how he plays tennis.
Most likely my art professor in college is deceased. And the studio in which that three-dimensional mishmash of junk hung has probably been torn down or at least remodeled. I wonder if I would now have the deep appreciation for all that did not happen in my life, for the professions I did not pursue, for places I chose not to live, had I not taken the required class Drawing and Space in college. Although I love literature and writing, and of course, psychology, I’m glad to have not majored in those areas — and to have not gone to the college my parents wanted me to attend — and to have chosen to not live my adult life in New York City.
It was in a cabin in the woods of northern Minnesota this summer that I started thinking about negative space. Alone with only the sounds of wind in the trees and occasional rain on the roof, I spent five days reading, writing, walking and thinking. I had discovered this place during the pandemic and vowed to myself the gift of time there every end of summer, if at all possible. To me, solitude in a forest is the most peaceful and soothing kind of time away. This place is neither on one of Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes (though there is one nearby), nor is it a part of any organized recreation area (though there are plenty of hiking and biking trails in the area). One day, after a long nap on the screened porch of the cabin, I opened my eyes and looked out toward the trees. Everything was blurry without my glasses and all I could really make out were the spaces between the tree branches. A Proustian freight train carried me back to my college’s studio art classroom and the hanging sculpture of junk. It occurred to me then that this time away in the woods was negative space, outlining, surrounding and giving shape to the life I would soon return to. I knew that when I got home I would need to write about it.