Ink,
Did you Google the subject of 'negative space'? That ought to give you enough to think about until the snow flies. Interesting topic which is very important in all the design world. Should be an interesting discussion.

It is VERY hot where I am, and has been for a few months. Hot and very dry. We're having the worst drought in a long time and no landscape is looking real good around here.

I don't know if the definition for negative space differs from the art world to the landscape world, but in painting, NS refers to what you said -- the background, or the areas on the canvas that aren't occupied by objects. I think that applies to 3-D art as well -- NS in a sculpture would be the areas (holes for lack of a better word) in the sculpture unoccupied by clay, bronze, etc. Same thing in graphic design. The NS shapes or defines the positive space, or "cuts into" it as your friend described. In my world, liberal use of NS is a good thing, and striking the right balance of both makes for a pleasing result. My own personal style is to skew the balance, and actually use more NS than PS.

I imagine NS in landscaping could be large expanses of lawn, bodies of water, or even certain hardscapes like a rock wall, a fence, or anything that appears "unoccupied" as opposed to the occupied area of plants and garden beds.

I am totally in a negative space at the moment.
It's too hot.
We are behind on several of our projects.
My clients are cranky and in some cases unreasonable in their requests and expectations.

It is totally a 'negative space' to be in at the moment and I am having a hard time seeing some positve space in the very near future.

Not even Jose Cuervo can fill the negative space in my glass to make it a positve.

work sucks.

Mais non Michelle this is not like you. Did you know that Elvis had a twin, he pushed in front of me at the liquor store only today, when that sob left the building there was luckily some left for us.
Did you know that Elvis was a frustrated artist.
Do you know what big Italian shoes are a sign of?
I called back to a job today to take some pictures and I was reminded of your cactus in a pot post a whlle back.
Derviss is not a negative, au contraire.

I taught summer art classes to grade-school kids aeons ago. I wanted to teach them about negative space. The Queen Anne's lace was in bloom--

So I cut them each a square of Black construction paper. I placed a QAL Flower head (oK--I know most of what we call the flower part of the QAL bloom isn't really FLOWER--but you know what I mean)on the black square. I gave them 6B pencils and a square of WHITE paper--

And I had them draw the flower head by shading ONLY the black areas. (One could also do this with air-popped popcorn.)

They ALL got the idea.

I thought that up all by myself, and am rather proud of it.

Mich--I hear you. Everyone at the GC is VERY cranky. I'm just keeping my head down and plowing through. Heat generated DRAMA irritates me!

melanie

Nice to know that you chill your beer, Tony. Good move.

Negative space seems to be something that some people want to do without. For instance (English major I was not), some want to fill their entire yards with plants - no lawn, no mulch, no open space, just plants. Then they wonder why it does not look good, although all of the plants look great.

William Alexander, of "Magic of Oil Painting" fame used to constantly say "you have to have dark in order to have light". That is all you need to understand to know what negative space is.

Mais oui, Ink. Tout le monde peut etre negatif, quelquefois. (ie. Everyone can be negative sometimes.) Okay. Now, can the same element become either a positive or a negative space, depending on what it relates to?

Ie. suppose you have a driveway and sidewalk that cuts through a lawn, and both the sidewalk and another part of the lawn also borders flowerbeds. I would expect the flowerbeds to be positive, since they are more busy; but the driveway and lawn are both kind of uniform and flat. Can they both be negative, even though they are side-by-side? Or does the driveway become positive? Or the lawn? Or both, depending on what you are comparing them to? (This is where I always get confused.)

Sharon

I think the driveway, sidewalk and lawn would all be NS, even though they are different surfaces, but that would be open for debate. Sometimes the background of a painting has 3 different color schemes, yet they are all unoccupied space, and together they shape the subject.

Mich, good luck with your workload.

A little joke to cheer up Miss Derviss: A Naked man wrapped in celophane burst into a Psychiatrist's office demanding to see the Doctor. Trying to gain some control over the situation, the nurse escorted him to another room and went to fetch the Doctor. Shortly afterwards the Doctor entered the room and asked the man what was causing him to be so distraught. The man said" Doctor, Doctor. Do you think I'm crazy?" to which the Doctor replied "Yes, Sir, I can see your nuts."

da da dum ...

Positive space is what "is". Negative space is what "is not". A walk meandering through a perennial bed would be negative space. A walk through a lawn is positive space. It is all relative and a matter of perception. It just matters how it acts in relation to what is around it.

If the walk meanering through a perennial bed were decorated in some way....like with blue tiles or something, would it still be negative space? Or is it just a plain walk that would be considered negative space? What if it is a fancy walk through a plain border...say boxwood or something...is it still negative?

It all bepends on your frame of mind. Which "is" and which is "left over"?

This is why I think all of the elements (lawn, walk, drive) should be considered negative space. The concept of spatial interplay is in my view, advanced. To those who design regularly it is second nature, but to those who don't, it can become confusing.

If you look at the whole yard as the painting, and the plants as the subject of the painting, then anything else is negative space. So it's easier to look at it and say "wow, I've got quite a bit of positive (occupied) space here -- I need to add some relief, negative (unoccupied) space (a walkway, a wall, etc.)

Do you remember those silhouettes where you look at it one way and you see a person and you look at it the other way you see a vase. One is the negative space of the other. There are two points I think. 1 you should be aware of the design elements of both view points because both contribute significantly to the overall affect, this might be useful in considering theing like balance 2 sometimes it is easier or more practical to see if you have actually achieved the design you are attemping by seeing if the negative space comes out correct. for example it would be easier to measure or plot the land around a waterfall than the waterfall itself.

In the laboratory safety world, we frequently talk about "negative pressure". All pressure is positive (a complete vacuum has zero absolute pressure), but negative pressure is lower relative to the pressure in an adjacent area. Relative pressure determines which way the air will move (works for meteorologists, too).

This echoes the points made earlier. A space can appear negative or positive, depending on the visual strength of its surroundings.

Bruce

I have been mowing lawns for so long and designing and installing so few new landscapes in relative isolation from a design community that when these kinds of conversations get started I lack the vocabulary to say much. grandblvd's last post sparked me. The biggest negative space in any landscape is the AIR. Whatever is not ground, plant or stucture. How does that guide my design?

For me every choice made in a design must be checked against how the human body moves through the landscape. Is it comfortable, easy, logical and practical? Does the landscape flow into and out of the house well? How does it work for cars, mowers and wheelbarrows? What about meter readers, utility workers and company? What about house maintenance like painting ect? Can I walk completely around the property or is there only one entrance and exit? These are just some things to consider. Then there's that view thing again through the air from the living room sofa.

Now matter how grand, lush or expensive a landscape, if the human body feels oppressed moving through it then it will become as a whole a negative space to be in. Keeping in mind the movement of the human body through the negative space in a landscape helps make for better design.

ilima

You don't have to go out of your way to use positive and negative space in your design. It is just one of many things. They are interesting to learn about and have in your tool box. Use the tools that you want to or need to. These are interesting things to learn about.

You can see that many people have not been taught about this or studied it. It is a difficult, yet simple concept. It is, however, taught as a very clear concept that is not open to a lot of interpretation. It is not taught as someone's opinion of what these are (no gray area), it either is negative or it is positive.

The ebb and flow of negative space has been demonstrated magnificently in our back yard this summer.

After the roof of our old shed began caving in, we hired a guy to knock it down and cart it away. He got part way through only to discover a wasps' nest, which resulted in his hasty evacuation (creating a form of negative space). When he was finished, we discovered a large hole underneath the former shed floor in which something had apparently been living. I filled in that negative space, then created more by trimming encroaching brush on the site, which is destined to be occupied this week by a new shed, whose interior negative space will rapidly be filled by stuff currently piled in the garage, creating new negative space there which will make it possible for me to open the car door without bonking into the lawnmower (a definite negative).

Wheels within wheels...

I grabbed this picture of Sissinghurst because it had such nice negative space. The sky is negative space. The building is a very heavy volume, the paths of cut grass act as a sort of negative space to the plantings. When you then look at the individual beds, the trees of the orchard, and the evergreen shrub provide positive space, and the background of bulb foliage becomes the negative space to their outlines.

{{gwi:45255}}

Here is a link that might be useful: Sissinghurst Orchard

This is a somewhat old thread, but maybe there are some new people hanging around that would like to comment on this subject. I think it's interesting (and confusing).
Maybe I'm a little dyslexic. I have trouble grasping where the "walls" are and where the "rooms" are in landscape design. I have a very large yard. If the grassy areas are narrow, they become a path. If they're wider, they become a positive space and my gardens become an outline. ??? If I make my gardens larger and put a path through them, but I still have a large grassy area around them, will it look out of proportion - like I have two positive spaces? Do I need some sort of outline (walls).

This IS an interesting and often puzzling topic and one that bears resurrecting. And if one doesn't have much experience with a design/composition vocabulary, it is hard to visualize these concepts.

The idea of positive/negative space aligns closely with masses and voids. Objects/masses are positive: the lack of objects or mass - background/voids/empty spaces - are negative. Despite some of the interpretations noted above, the concept has little to do with any emotional response engendered by the composition (except very tangentially) but is rather a way of developing a pleasingly balanced spatial composition. Too much of either doesn't work, specially the smaller the composition you are working with. Masses (positives) become overwhelming, oppressive and cluttered if not adequately offset with voids (negatives). Conversely, wide open spaces (voids) allows the eye to wander unfettered, often creating a sense of exposure and distance, unless grounded by a substantial mass. You need a balance between the two.

christie, these concepts do have a bearing on defining landscape 'rooms' but a bit indirectly. If you look at a landscape 'room', you should have a 'floor' (the ground plane - lawn, paving, groundcovers, etc.) and 'walls' (fence, hedge, shrub border, row of trees, the side of a structure or other vertical elements). And unless one has some sort of overhead structure, the 'ceiling' is most often going to be the sky, but sometimes can take the form of a high tree canopy.

In your example above, the lawn or grassy area will generally be interpreted as a void or negative space complimented by the mass of the planting beds with their assortment of trees and shrubs - the positive space. Size of these respective elements has no bearing on how they are intrepreted - positive will always be positive and negative will always be negative - but if one or the other is far out of balance, the composition will be visually (and possibly emotionally) unsettling. If you have a large yard as you indicate and maintain an expansive lawn area, then you need sufficient weight in the mass of the planted areas to offset that. A wide lawn bordered by narrow little beds planted with herbaceous perennials will look out of balance. Conversely, if you have a very small lawn area, then less mass is needed in the planted portions or you balance with a flat paved terrace or patio or an area of low groundcovers.

The attached link has a pretty good illustration of the relationship between positive and negative space. Keep in mind that this relationship in a 2-dimensional design context like photography, graphic design or painting is somewhat easier to grasp than in a 3-dimensional context like landscape design or architecture, where the positives are masses that have volume and weight and one actually experiences the space by walking through it rather than just looking at it.

Here is a link that might be useful: positive/negative space