#32: Go Negative
Inhabit (and Draw) the Negative Space.
Instructions
Find a “challenging” thing to draw that has many parts—a hand, a chair, etc.
Take a moment to notice the space around the object—above, below, and to the sides.
Try to draw those shapes—the “negative space”—instead of the object itself.
Be prepared for your drawing to “not be good”!
Remember: you are completely altering the way you look and draw!
It’s the Notes I’m NOT Playing, Man
Talking about perception has the feeling of that old saying that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” So often the words fail us and turn into lyrical jazz—or as Jeff Bridges said “biodigital jazz, man”. Side note, if you want a good laugh about jazz, you can’t top the Paul F. Tompkins bit on his album Impersonal. For the record, I mostly LIKE jazz.
Where was I? Oh yes, looking at stuff. One of the biggest hangups people can have with drawing is the sense that “it doesn’t look right”, and that’s usually when people stop drawing. But it’s not entirely our fault, and this judging mindset may even be worsening. One of my favorite writers, Jenny Odell, describes it in her short book “Inhabiting the Negative Space”:
“(Pauline Oliveros) said, ‘In general, our cultural training dominantly promotes active manipulation of the external environment through analysis and judgment, and tends to devalue the receptive mode which consists of observation and intuition.’—This is something about it that, once you start to pay attention to it, you will begin to notice everywhere. Especially now. There’s this leaning-forward-and-grasping quality to everything, where the option to simply observe without judgment never even presents itself. It’s not just that we are constantly presented with information, but you’re expected to have a take even as you are consuming it”
In a more mundane example, someone recently posted on Twitter:
Drawing Around the Distraction (and Frustration)
Countering this tendency requires both a slowing down and a shifting—both very hard but very doable. One easy way is to shift to drawing the negative space of an object — so instead of trying to draw every finger on a hand, drawing the shapes of the space between the fingers. Odell explains (emphasis added by me):
“I would never be able to get away from my preconceptions about what an arm or a leg looks like, but the shape formed by its negative space would always be unfamiliar to me, and therefore I would be forced to look more closely. I think I know what an arm looks like, but I don’t know what this arm looks like, from this angle under this light at this exact moment. And again, this is tied to humility—in this case, the idea that I know nothing about it, that I am starting from zero.“
For example — you could see these trees and grass as objects and try to capture the shape of them, or you could decide to focus on the space around them:
This looking into what’s not the object is a concept common to plenty of other writers and philosophers. There’s a very common Zen saying that “emptiness is form, form is emptiness.” (https://chicagomeditation.org/form-is-emptiness/) In some other Buddhist traditions, this “emptiness” can also be defined simply as a lack of something (to be “empty of”), like feeling full as being empty of hunger, or feeling okay being an emptiness of anger. I know, very “what’s the sound of one hand clapping?”
This act of pausing and reframing our idea of objects vs. space is counter to much of the current thinking and patterns (remember those glorious few hours when Instagram went down?). Odell writes (emphasis mine):
“On all sides, she, you, and I are surrounded by established pathways, established disciplines, and established ways of making and looking at things. We are also hemmed in by the sense of urgency I mentioned earlier and a future that many times feels foreclosed, whether it’s by the pandemic, climate change, or something else. — In my experience, especially right now, the world will not provide you with an invitation to start from zero, to drop your armor and your assumptions and try to see it all as if for the first time. You have to provide that opportunity for yourself. And trust that in any given moment, it is more possible than you think. You can even come to a point where you can create that opportunity for others. To see spaces differently is already to imagine different ways of moving through them. To see things differently is to imagine new uses for them.”
So give it a shot! It’s a really interesting way to explore the world, and a really fun (and frustrating!) way to draw. And seriously, go buy that booklet.
And Music!
In that short book Odell references this super-weird ambient music piece by Pauline Oliveros called “Deep Listening”. But if you want a more funky inspiration, check out the Beastie Boys “Namaste” and enjoy the lyric at the end (spoiler, I guess?) of “Dark is not the opposite of light, it’s the absence of it.”. I have a whole story about that album, but that’s a different newsletter.
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