Negative Space in Art: When Emptiness Becomes the Subject

Negative space is the empty area around and between the things in a picture, and in good art it has a shape the artist designed as carefully as the subject. It can be bare paper, a plain wall or the gap between two letters. Its clearest case is Hasegawa Tōhaku's Pine Trees, a pair of Japanese folding screens from the late sixteenth century where the untouched paper is the fog.

Artists call the objects positive space and the emptiness around them negative space, and the eye keeps trading one for the other. In Tōhaku's screens a few ink pines stand in paper that has been left alone, and the paper reads as mist and distance. The blank is not a gap in the picture. It is the fog, and it does the work of the landscape.

Pine Trees by Hasegawa Tōhaku: one six-panel screen of the pair, ink pines emerging from mist — Hasegawa Tōhaku, Pine Trees, late sixteenth century. Tokyo National Museum, Japan.

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It is tempting to say Tōhaku planned that emptiness down to the last inch. The screens do not prove it. The Google Arts and Culture entry for the pair points to irregular paper joints and mismatched paper widths, and suggests the screens might have been a preparatory work.

So the most admired void in Japanese painting may have begun as a draft. Whether Tōhaku meant it as a finished picture, nobody has shown, and Japan lists the screens as a National Treasure all the same.

That leaves a harder question about every gap in every picture: was it designed, or did it simply happen? Whistler painted his mother in 1871 against a nearly bare wall and called the result an arrangement. A designer in 1994 found an arrow hiding in the space between two letters. The three do not answer the question the same way.

What does ma mean in Japanese art?

Ensō by Daidō Bunka: the character for heart and mind drawn as a single brushed circle — Daidō Bunka, The Character for "Heart/Mind" as an Ensō, first half of the eighteenth century. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Ma is the Japanese word for a gap, a space, a pause, and in painting it names emptiness that carries weight…

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