Positive and negative spaces are an important role in determining the overall composition of an art work.
Through this research point, I am trying to find out some useful ideas to improve my objects’ rationale composition.
First I am going to look at a range of artist working today and see how they incorporate positive and negative spaces in their work.
Gary Hume
Hume is a painter, printmaker and draughtsman and his earlier work the most well know are his doors. He depicts everyday subjects using high-gloss industrial paints. Later Hume abandoned doors and turned to paintings in household gloss paint on aluminium panels. Then in 2005 Hume revisited his door pictures, this time anthropomorphising the doors with lovers’ titles.
I liked this one. There are only three dramatically simplified plate colours. The man is seen with a pose which has the black hands putting the palms together/ zen gesture and Hume drew a bright blue silhouette then a green background.
Noma Bar
Bar is an Israeli illustrator and he used very clever ways with negative spaces to create thought provoking illustrations.
At last I have looked the artist Patrick Caulfield‘s work.
Caulfield used sharp edges as the table’s shape and the legs of table and colourful blocks as the abundant flowers.
This bunch of black and white flowers are strongly showing the direction of the light.
The objects in this still life are colourful blocks and they are positive. The blue background is the negative space. There is a gap between these two types of objects and it looks like the numbers are split 2:3. However the left side(2 objects) has a big red vase so the actual size of the objects looks balanced and they look to have equal weigh, this is very interesting.
Reference
http://thevirtualinstructor.com/positive-and-negative-space.html