Negative Spaces

[This article was first published in Young, J. “Negative Spaces,” The Journal of Creative Behavior Volume 16, Number 4 1982 and later included as a chapter in my book,  Therapeutic Awareness and Creative Expression.  I find it still has relevance.]

NEGATIVE SPACES

   “Nothing is more real than nothing.” In that cryptic statement Samuel Becket focused this chapter: to explore the reality of nothing. The negative space is the nothing that surrounds all somethings.

WHAT IS NEGATIVE SPACE?

            In art, it is the empty area around objects. Take, for example, a simple drawing of a house on a lawn with a tree in front and the sky behind: The shape formed by the house and the tree together would be the positive area, and the remaining shape of the lawn and the sky surrounding them would be the negative area. The former is the figure; the latter the ground.

            To the artist it is the shape of the space which is important. The shapes fit within an overall framework called the format. When one is drawing, the format is the area of the paper. Part of the shape of the negative space comes from the edges of the paper. The edges form one border of the negative shape and the objects the other, Not only may the negative space surround the object, it also may penetrate it, as, for instance, holes between the branches of a tree may reveal the sky. Henry Moore, the sculptor, says a hole can have as much “shape meaning” as a solid mass.

            When the negative spaces are in proportion to themselves, to the positive spaces and the picture as a whole, the picture works. When the negative space is too large or not large enough, the picture seems out of balance. When the negative shapes are too much alike, i.e., all the same size or all the same configuration, the picture becomes boring, even though the drawing of the objects within may be well done.

            Being aware of negative spaces is important to any artist. An interior decorator, for instance, paints a picture with the objects chosen to go into a room. It can work or not work. In considering what pictures to hang on the wall, designers must keep in mind more than color harmony or style, they must also think about the relationships between the spaces.

                They first determine the format, and begin by considering the furniture, the windows, and the doors which alter the shape of the framework in which to hang the pictures. Within that format they arrange the pictures. It is more than just getting them centered within this framework; it is also a matter of creating an interesting negative space–especially when they want to hang two or more pictures. They regard not only the space between the pictures and the framework, but also the area between the pictures. When these spaces balance, the pictures balance.

 EXPLORING THE NEGATIVE SPACES

             Considering the negative spaces is vital in other areas. Therapists must attend to them to help a person lead a more creative life. If they only focus on the problem areas discussed by the patient, they will lose sight of the picture as a whole.

             A patient asked me to come into the hospital because he couldn’t sleep. If I stayed just with the sleep problem which he wanted to do, I may have given him a sedative as many hurried practitioners might be prone to do. But then I asked why he wanted to go into the hospital for a sleep disturbance. He told me he wanted to go into the hospital because when he did not sleep, he thought about drinking. I could have responded by encouraging him to go back on Antabuse. But when I explored why he wanted to drink, he told me he was so sexually frustrated, he was going to  get drunk to develop enough courage to seek help from a prostitute. But then I asked why his sex life with his wife was unsatisfactory, and I got into his anger at her refusals and his fear of retaliation by his stepsons should he rape her as he fantasied doing. And that was only the beginning.

            With patience, the negative spaces opened up into “positive” problem areas. They will if you don’t ignore them. Hence, experienced therapists find it is as important to be as aware of what the patient does not say as of what he does. (Silences make the music as much as the notes do.) The patient’s unconscious is what is potentially available if he has the courage to make it so. But if he only notices the status quo, the “positive” space in front of him, he loses opportunities to understand himself and to grow. He forgoes the possibilities the exploration of the negative spaces provide. Only when the patient knows what he is dealing with realistically, can he make use of that knowledge to bring his life into balance and harmony.

            Drug addicts who get “spaced out” have a negative space that fills their universe. In their altered state of consciousness they cannot tune into what exists in the real world. (Some drug-heads might argue with me about which is the “real” world, but be it as it may, when they come to me, they want to be able to function better in this world.) When they are spaced out, the relationships between the positive and negative space become obliterated. The outline between them is hard to find. Boundaries are fluid. Everything lacks focus. That, in fact, is often why they take the drugs. Getting “high” helps them avoid focusing on anything real. My patient who wanted to get drunk to pursue the prostitute wanted to decommission his conscience and his fear of his wife and step-sons and his own rage.

WHY WE AVOID THE NEGATIVE SPACES

            He avoided his negative space; most persons do. But why? One reason is that gaining the negative space is hard work. Sometimes the therapist has to work with the patient’s defenses for many months before the patient can achieve insight, as Michelangelo had to chip away marble for a long time to free his David.

            But even when one is not dealing with negative spaces such as marble or a patient’s defenses, getting to the negative spaces requires work. For example, when vacuum pumps remove gas molecules from bulbs to light our cities, to freeze-dry foods, to melt reactive metals such as titanium, to coat thin films on lenses to reduce reflection, it requires high pressures, high rotary speeds, cold temperatures–much energy.

             Generally we tend to ignore or to avoid the negative space. The term “negative” perhaps suggests why. We don’t call it “alternative’ space. Negative suggests adversive consequences. At some level of our awareness negative space is like most voids: just as “nature abhores a vacuum,” we do too. Not only does the therapist have to work with the patient’s defenses which the patient uses to avoid anxiety, he also has to work with his own defenses which he uses to avoid the anxiety of facing the patient’s anxiety. Both at some level would prefer to avoid the work that gaining the negative spaces requires, The patient would rather deal with what is familiar, even if his way of operating isn’t working, than to struggle with his anxieties to get to the source of his difficulties. He would prefer to have the doctor do it for him–prescribe medications or hospitalize him. The therapist might prefer the quicker approach, but knows it deprives the patient of the potential to grow.

            Most of us fear the negative space. It is not empty–we would only prefer to think it is. Why? Because unknown possibility frightens us especially when we get too far away from the positive space that defines us. Like being cut off from a life support system dangling in space, we fear leaving the space ship to float forever in nothingness…or in an unfamiliar somethingness.

            Negative space implies the contingency in which we lead our lives. It suggests the ultimate uncertainty. As Brugental points out, we are anxious about existing.(l) We can never know enough to protect ourselves with absolute certainty from danger. We know we must act, but we can’t predict the final consequences of our actions. We are responsible for our choices without having guides that are finally reliable. We are ultimately alone in an overpopulated world. And death, non-being, is the only certainty. It is the ultimate negative space.

FACING THE NEGATIVE SPACE

But when we face the negative space, we get a truer picture of the positive space. When the public official in the classic Japanese film Ikiru faced his death, he began to live. Most of his life he just pushed papers, never paying attention to what crossed his desk–until he discovered one day that he had cancer and only a short time to live. He discontinued his deathly existence as a bureaucratic functionary to take up the cause of a small community that wanted a park. He took risks. What did he have to lose? Cutting through red tape, facing opposition, he established the playground. He gained a truer perspective on his life when he faced death.

Betty Edwards finds that artists draw better when they observe from the view-point of the negative space.(2) She shows that by outlining the negative space, you get a more accurate picture of the positive space. Beginners who focus on the object lose sight of the borders of the paper throwing their picture out of balance. They become so lost in the details, they lose perspective–like the bureaucrat shuffling papers. When the artist draws the positive space only in relationship to itself, he distorts the drawing as a whole.

            Long ago, Archimedes found it more accurate to work with the negative space. When asked to determine whether a crown was real gold or fake without destroying the object, he had to find the volume of the crown. But how to do it accurately? The crown had many curves and unusual shapes. How could he calculate all the tiny irregular volumes that together made up the crown? One day when taking his bath he noticed the water rise as he got into the tub. He had a brilliant idea: “Consider the negative space.” Of course he did not say that. He said, “Eureka.” But he did shift from considering the positive space, the shape of the crown, to regarding the negative space, in this case the volume of water displaced if the crown were immersed in water. He could measure that amount and knowing the specific weights of water and gold, he could then mathematically determine whether the crown was gold or fake.

             Edwards maintains the distortion occurring when one focuses on the positive space is due to overuse of left hemisphere brain function, i.e., its tendency to use words and symbols instead of non-symbolic direct observation. Rather than looking at the object, we name it, and draw the symbol for it instead of its true outline. Symbols abbreviate. They save time by stereotyping. They relate things by finding similarities rather than differences. The realistic artist, however, wants to display uniqueness, that is, how this person or thing differs from every other one. He wants to reveal the model as he or she is. Because the right hemisphere orients spatially rather than with word-symbols, it is useful for this kind of drawing.

            To get away from the word-symbol mode to representing directly, Edwards suggests that beginners inactivate their left hemisphere by drawing areas they gave no name for. The negative space is the unnamed space. When you name a space, you shift from the right mode to the left.  That is why she advises that even in the interiors of objects, you draw the relative negative space. You draw the outline of the area under the nose, rather than the nose itself. (3)

            Naming has always been a way to convert negative space into positive space. The play The Appletree by Shedon Harnick and Jerry Bock delightfully portrays Adam and Eve gaining dominion over the plants and animals by naming them, and over each other by being the one “who names.”(4) Poets gain mastery of their feelings by writing them down on paper. Patients seem reassured when given a label for their symptoms or a causal explanation of the source of their difficulties) even when their reality has not actually changed. Names give a handle on experience; they simplify; they create positive space.

THE USEFULNESS OF THE NEGATIVE SPACE

                    But names, labels, and words have their limits. While wordless spaces remain fluid, symbols fix. Legislatures write laws to cover all possible circumstances, but reality can’t be so fixed. Hence, courts re-interpret the law converting more negative space into positive space. Yet, too much law stifles possibility. Negative space is vital to creative justice. Just as Christ, from the Christian point of view, overcame the legalism of Jewish law to restore the guidelines of the covenant between God and man, so laws need a chance to breathe.

            Every successful creation needs space. The creator often requires incubation periods: He needs time to pause and consider, time to reflect, time to ignore altogether, time to sleep on it. He must be able to get away from fixed considerations. Plugging away is necessary, but not plugging is too.

             Drawing from the positive space alone causes trouble. When we, for example, outline the sexes from the single view point of the male, we fail to sketch them both accurately. Ancient Chinese philosophers thought the yin and the yang fundamental to all being. The yin, the negative, the feminine combined with the yang, the positive, the masculine to produce all which exists. So too, men and women are complements of one another, but to draw one exclusively in terms of the other is to do a disservice to both. Within each individual, in fact, there are masculine and feminine sides, but Freud, at the turn of the century, saw women as “not men.” It took later psychologists to show that there was more to women’s psychology then “penis envy.” After all, men unconsciously envy women their wombs as much as women envy men their penises. Both sexes need to be defined uniquely. Paradoxically, when women have been drawn as themselves, not as “wo-men,” wife of the man, men have become liberated, too. Freeing one space frees the other.

            In the past men and women have held their complimentary aspect out of awareness. Women blocked their aggressiveness and independence; men blocked their passivity, receptivity, and nurturance. Historically, to repress awareness of these aspects of themselves, men have physically dominated women, for they exposed their negative space.

SEXUAL AND AGGRESSIVE ANXIETIES

            Men have long been in awe of women. It is more than little boys seeing no penis in little girls–it is more than “castration anxiety.” It is the awe infants have for their mothers. It is fear of their negative spaces. It is the unconscious fear of being swallowed up by them. And it is awe of the biological creativity their negative spaces implies.

            Profound creativity means deeply entering the negative space–not only in the sexual sense. Charles Darwin, though he had the idea of evolution by natural selection in 1838, held off until 1858 to publish his results. Though consciously he claimed that he postponed it because he needed more data to confirm his hypothesis, he knew the kind of reception the publication would get. He would have held off longer, but Alfred Russel Wallace, who had come to similar conclusions, forced him into presenting his information.

            When he published The Origin  of  the Species in 1859, he antagonized two groups: the established scientists and the religious orthodoxy.(5) He brought down the wrath of Richard Owen who then enjoyed the reputation as the leading English biologist (the then current “expert”) and the fury of holders of orthodox religious beliefs. The theory of evolution discredited the literal account of the Genesis story of the creation, and the idea of natural selection tore into the belief in the divine intervention in the creation of plants and animals. Darwin knew the danger of creating in the negative space, but he had the courage to face it, despite his fears.

            Creativity enhances our understanding of the old; it also overcomes it. The new succeeds the old. Innovating implies aggression. The negative space not only defines the positive space, (as for example, Hemingway’s big fish displayed the determination and courage of the old man), it can destroy it too, as the fish nearly did the old man.(6)

            Creating is tearing down as well as building up. Because destruction sometimes generates guilt, many are inhibited about creating. Their negative spaces are filled with ambivalence about aggression. Consider our country’s ambivalence about profits: the capitalist system espouses their value, but large companies are afraid to show them. Though they want profits for their stockholders, they fear the response of big government. It paradoxically punishes those who make profits and supports those who don’t. Why? In our negative spaces there is guilt about aggression.

            It even affects our foreign policy. We were blocked when we saw the Russians invade Afganistan. Besides realistic reasons of having an inadequate force in the middle east to do anything about it, there were unconscious reasons. We have been like the Russians. Though quite remote, we too are unconsciously guilty about similar murders that took place in the childhood of our nation when we stole the Indian’s lands to aggressively expand our frontiers and create a larger United States.  [This blocked situation has greatly changed since 911]

 INTEGRATING THE POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE SPACES

            It may be a virtue to develop an accurate drawing using the negative space and the right hemisphere, but it is hardly creative at the mature level. Rather, it demonstrates a high level of observational skills. Accurate representation may be the aim of the beginning art student, and often is for even the most non-object artist early in his training, but it does not, in and of itself, lead to sophisticated creativity. Picasso, for example, initially drew realistically. But as he moved into maturity, he used his imagination to integrate his work on many levels.

            Drawing the negative space alone will not lead to creativity. Consider Archebald MacLeash’s essay reprinted in the Atlantic: He, in the late 1940s made a prediction of how the world situation would be considered retrospectively in 1980. He maintained then that we were defining our foreign policy as “containing” Russian expansionism. At that time he predicted that by reacting blindly to every offensive move the Russians made, we would support the wrong regimes.(7) On the other hand, if we developed our own positive space supporting freedom for the individual wherever, we may have encouraged some groups who later successfully rebelled against rightist totalitarian regimes. Doing the exact opposite gains no more freedom than the teenager obtains when he opposes every position his parents hold. The counter-conformist is as limited and uncreative as the conformist.

             Art may imitate nature, but it is more than a matter of reflecting physical objects in the environment. Art may reflect emotion, or conflict, or abstract qualities; creative art reflects the self. Symbolic qualities are as important as physical attributes. The mature artist considers all these dimensions. The aesthetic richness of art is in the multidimensional considerations that artist displays for use to discover and enjoy.

            As a child develops artistically, Edwards points out, he first draws imaginatively. His pictures integrate feelings with action. He expresses meaning. He uses symbols. When he is about ten-years-old, he want to draw it “like it is.”  Forgoing his imagination, he tries to show the world as it is.(8) After all he is going to have to live in it.

         But also he, as he gets older, must go beyond that world to create a new world. If he is fortunate, he recaptures his earlier imagination and combines it with his greater observational skills to synthesize at a mature level.

Sophisticated creativity integrates the positive and negative spaces, reality and imagination, the left and- right hemisphere functions. Other parts of the brain are involved, too, such as the limbic system which seems to have to do with emotions, motivations: aggression, loves and fears. There are many different kinds of negative spaces to be considered in the creative process.

SUMMARY

• The negative space has a reality of its own; it is not nothing.
• We need to balance the negative spaces with themselves and with the positive spaces, as well as balance the positive spaces with themselves.
• Negative spaces become problems when we ignore them.
• Listen to the “sounds of silence” to explore the negative spaces to open up new possibilities.
• Although avoiding the negative spaces leads to trouble, we keep from them for important reasons: ignorance, laziness, fear, and guilt.
• Working with the negative space helps us to understand the positive space better.
• Though names give some power over the negative spaces, they also constrict.
• We need the negative spaces to breathe. Back off.
• Facing the negative spaces means confronting sexual and aggressive anxieties.
• The creative person integrates the negative spaces and positive spaces into a rich, multidimensional expression.

 REFERENCES

1.    Brugenthal, J.F.T. The search for authenticity. New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1965.

2.     Edwards, B. Drawing on the right side of your brain. Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1979.

3.     Edwards, B. Drawing on the right side of your brain.

4.     Harnick, S. & Bock, J. The appletree. New York: Random House, 1967.

5.     Darwin, C. The origin of the species. London: John Murray, 1859.

6.     Hemingway, E. The old man and the sea. New York: Random House, 1967.

7.     MacLeash, A. A conquest to America. Atlantic, 1980 (March, 35.

8.     Edwards, B. Drawing on the right side of your brain.