My 30 Day GUT friends, you are doing GREAT.
I am so impressed with all of you. YOU INSPIRE ME. We are a virtuous circle of creative learning and inspiration. Let’s never stop.
Alright, yesterday we focused on what isn’t there: negative space. The space around the subject. Today, we switch to the positive space. The positive space is the space/shapes of the subject of our drawing.
You can’t have positive space without the negative, and vice versa. Take for example this classic positive/negative space mind-game: Is it a chalice OR two faces?
Answer = BOTH. With a little bit of practice, our brains can start to see both at the same time. Holding both the positive and the negative at the same time — that’s the goal in life, right? Lucky artists, we get to practice that through drawing.
Before we draw some positive space, I thought I’d give us a quick jolt of inspiration. Let’s look at how the artists below simplify the spaces in their artwork to focus on positive space. Major eye candy.
Ellsworth Kelly
You’ve seen his line drawings of plants before, but look what happens when he focuses on the positive space/shapes instead of the edges. Ooooo. Ahhhhh.
David Hockney
"I believe that the very process of looking can make a thing beautiful."
- David Hockney
David Hockey is one of the most prolific artists working today, and also one of my most favorite artists, period. Born in the UK, he moved to California at 27. He said, “As we flew in over Los Angeles I looked down to see blue swimming pools all over, and I realized that a swimming pool in England would have been a luxury, whereas here they are not, because of the climate.” Hockney started painting pools the same year he arrived in LA.
Here is his first pool painting:
He continued to paint pool after pool. Just eight years after arriving in LA he painted one of his most famous works: Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). The painting went on to sell for the most any painting has ever fetched at auction: a whopping $90,000,000. (Thank goodness he had a window seat on that first flight, right??)
Here’s another that really focuses on shapes and positive and negative space:
The pool functions as the negative space, the splash as the positive. Diving board? Positive! The building and palm trees above? Positive! Sky? You tell me.
Hockney uses lines, too. But in the painting above his lines help create larger shapes and spaces. He is a master at seeing and interpreting what he sees in fresh, unexpected ways — ways that always feel so friendly and familiar.
Giorgio Morandi
“Even in as simple a subject, a great painter can achieve a majesty of vision”
- Giorgio Morandi
Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) spent most of his life painting simple, everyday objects. Namely bottles. His goal? To paint them in such a way that they became less of a functional object, and more of an abstract collection of shapes. Here are some examples, starting with one that calls back to yesterday’s negative space lesson.
And in this one, the focus is more on the POSITIVE SPACE.
Spend some time looking closely at Morandi’s paintings and you can almost let go of the bottle-ness of them. You start to see them as forms made of light and color. As artists, we try to approach everything with our “art eyes” — letting go of our assumptions and seeing what is really in front of us, instead of just rushing past what we think and expect to see.
Two very different painters, both playing with positive and negative space.
Alright now it’s our turn.
Time to draw some positive space.
