One morning I was talking with a friend about some philosophical ideas and their practical implications. In response to something she said, I remembered the idea of negative space (in art). I told her that, even as we were conversing, I could look out my window and see the blue heavens behind the now-naked tree branches and how that beautiful cobalt sky just filled up the places where the leaves had been.
That entire day, as I worked, my eyes repeatedly wandered back outside to study the azure shapes framed by the light gray boughs.
I am reminded of a creative project I did over and over and over again as a small child. As early as age three or four, I would sit cross-legged on the floor at a low coffee table in our family room. With my 64-pack of Crayolas opened in front of me, I would pluck the black (or sometimes gold, or silver, or brown) crayon and draw a random, squiggling pattern all over the blank 8 ½ x 11 sheet. Then I would take the rest of the colors and fill in the negative spaces…all the blank white places that resided in between the outlines. I spent hours on each one of these colorings. My brain went quiet and my daydreaming self woke up; there was true abidance, true presence in the moment, the color I was using, my pressing need to transform the white inner spaces to vividity.
Increasingly, I made the project harder for myself. Sometimes I would set a limit on the number of colors I could use to fill in the negative space. Other times I would make the rule that no color could touch another of similar hue.
Always: no color could touch itself in an adjacent shape.
Forever in my childhood and youth: each empty space had to be filled with a color other than white.
A few times I limited myself to colors I never used in my daily drawings because I didn’t like them. Over time I made sure to create tinier and tinier spaces to color in. Occasionally I would close my eyes as I ran the outlining crayon across the page, over and over, under, around…
Even as an older girl of ten or eleven, I remember doing more “grown up” versions of this painted mosaic form. Unfortunately, by then my rigidity was setting in and I had less appreciation for the random…my colorful “abstracts” became more uniform, turning carefree swirls into ruler-tidy boxes or compass-assisted circles. My need for structure and my mistaken belief that orderliness equaled adulthood, led me down a path of tighter, more precise, less interesting color configurations.
Now I understand how the spaces “in between” are so rich and beautiful, just as they are. I see how the blue-seeming sky that colors in the spaces between bare limbs is the true gift of cold wintertime. I get how
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the transitions,
the lulls between activities,
the single empty thought just before falling asleep,
the microslice of an instant between my exhalation and my inhalation,
the great NotKnowingness amidst a sparsely populated foreground of what I think I know
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are all those white spaces between the darker outlines. It is what is contained in that negative space (even before a color I can see inhabits that area) that really compels me.
I believe this is the same passion my morning-chat friend has.
There is ultimate beauty…and great power…in the negative spaces of our lives. May we embrace them in all their ungroundedness.
All blog images created and/or photographed by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted.
