Negative Space Quotes

Have you ever heard sculptors say that they don’t actually sculpt an object; they sculpt away everything that isn’t the object?

The space between the dish and the pitcher, that I paint also.

For me, the best rock is not what you play - it's what you're not playing.

One thing living in Japan did for me was to make me feel that what is left out of a work of art is as important as, if not more important than, what is put in.

Is negative space the space you don't like, or the space that is not there? And if it's not there how can you tell?

The hole connects one side to the other, making it immediately more three-dimensional. A hole can itself have as much shape-meaning as a solid mass.

I don't think there is anything wrong with white space. I don't think it's a problem to have a blank wall.

I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.

Greek architecture taught me that the column is where the light is not, and the space between is where the light is. It is a matter of no-light, light, no-light, light. A column and a column brings light between them. To make a column which grows out of the wall and which makes its own rhythm of no-light, light, no-light, light: that is the marvel of the artist.

A part of all art is to make silence speak. The things left out in painting, the note withheld in music, the void in architecture - all are as necessary and as active as the utterance itself.

You know, when people look at a tree, they look at the leaves; they don't look at the spaces between the leaves. They're focused on the tree. I think there's an awareness of spaces or it wouldn't look like a tree to them.

I've always been intrigued by cutout silhouettes. They are so intriguing, so poetic-the shadow of a soul. They tell everything about a character and they are open to be filled with one's own imagination.

I really believe in empty spaces, although, as an artist, I make a lot of junk. Empty space is never-wasted space. Wasted space is any space that has art in it. An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have but that he, for some reason, thinks it would be a good idea to give them.

Paintings are seldom guilty and often framed for crimes they did not commit. Some cover holes-holes in walls, holes in lives. Some make holes-in wallets, holes in hearts...in negative space.

Oftentimes, when we think of 3D, we think of things coming out of the screen, but actually, you've got this zero, this negative space, what they call the negative space, which is the scene, what's being filmed in the positive space of the audience. As you can have things come out, you can have all of this depth.

Thirty spokes meet in the hub. Where a wheel isn't is where it's useful. Hollowed out, clay makes a pot. Where the pots not is where it's useful. Cut doors and windows to make a room. Where the room isn't, there's room for you. So the profit in what is, is in the use of what isn't.

Less is more, in prose as in architecture.

I've worked out of a series of no's. No to exquisite light, no to apparent compositions, no to the seduction of poses or narrative. And all these no's force me to the yes. I have a white background. I have the person I'm interested in and the thing that happens between us.

You come to the photograph as an aesthetic object with no context... Then you step in and read the text and then out again to revisit the image in a completely different way. I'm interested in that space between text and image. The piece becomes the negative space between the two.

And after drawing comes composition. A well-composed painting is half done

Empty space is never-wasted space. Wasted space is any space that has art in it.

But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.

People sometimes think I take a white canvas and paint a black sign on it,but this is not true.I paint the white as well as the black and the white is just as important.

Anything written or printed under a print or picture takes the attention from it and, if it is very black or white in any marked degree, will utterly destroy its beauty.