What's With The Negativity?

or, why this is a chair

Today’s topic is negative space drawing, which is a technique where the artist draws the spaces around an object or figure, rather than the object itself. It involves focusing on the areas where the object or figure is not present, and using those shapes to define the object or figure.

Once we name something (a chair, a tree, or a mug) we implant an image of a symbol of that thing in our brains. When we try to draw an object, we tend to draw the symbol rather than what our eyes are actually seeing, because our Big Smart Brains dismiss what our eyes are looking at and say, “oh, I know what that is; it’s a house and a house looks like this:”