Figure and Ground

In the Gestalt theory of perception this is known as the figure/ground 
relationship. This theory asserts, in brief, that no figure is ever perceived
 except in relation to a background. Alan Watts

Nathan Oliveira, Spring Nude, oil on canvas

I’ll often pick as the topic for a workshop that I’m teaching something I myself want to learn more about. This is true of my upcoming Figure and Ground class.

Though like most painters I work with this concept in an intuitive way, it’s been fascinating to take a deeper dive into the history, meaning, and application of “figure and ground.”

Susan Abbott, Wonder Road: Marigold Sellers and Shadows, oil on paper

I’m discovering that figure and ground is both a simple and a complex idea. The simple part is that we humans need to make sense of the chaos of shapes that surround us in this world, and one way we do that is to differentiate between the stuff we’re interested in (the figure) and everything else that’s cluttering up the scene (the ground.)

This idea was articulated in the 1920’s as part of Gestalt Theory. Gestalt means “whole” and it embraces the belief that the whole is always greater than its parts. That makes a lot of sense to artists, as we’re always struggling with seeing the whole, the complete picture, and not just the details.

Pierre Bonnard, Le Toilette, oil on canvas

Another Gestalt principle is that our brain organizes stimulation by focusing on one thing at a time: either the object or the background. We do that because we have a hard time processing too much visual information simultaneously.

Interestingly, when we make the more abstract shape the “real” thing—like the faces rather than the vase in the famous example below—a different part of our brain is used than when we focus on only the object.

Painters know all about this flip between perceiving the “stuff’ and the “non-stuff.” The non-stuff, or as we call it, “negative space,” is a the most important tool we have to accurately see and draw.

Rubin’s Vase, optical illusion

Little children intuitively emphasize both figure and ground in their art work. Their imaginations are so engaged with the piece of paper they’re drawing on that it becomes a world unto itself, where every area of the composition is equally important.

That phase ends when kids get older and become more focused on cataloguing the things they’re interested—whether that be dogs, airplanes, or, in my case at age 10, ballet dancers.

Young child’s drawing using a “negative space” background and teenager’s drawing focused on the figure.

As beginning painters we are usually all about the “stuff.” Until we learn to see negative space we tend to concentrate on the figure and forget the ground.

As more advanced students in life drawing class, we continue to focus on the figure and pay no attention to the environment around the model. By having that laser vision we learn about anatomy, and how to contour and shade.

Susan Abbott, Life Drawing, graphite stick on paper

But soon enough if we continue painting we’ll start working with both the figure and ground, and come to understand how interrelated they are. We’ll begin to develop a style in our work that emphasizes either the “stuff” or the “non-stuff”—or attempts to balance the two.

If you were a painter working during the Renaissance, or for centuries after, your paintings would definitely have been about the figure and not the ground. Painters then were skilled at using light, dark, proportion, and edges to highlight their subjects and make the background recede.

Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew (detail), oil

All that changed in the 1900’s when “figure and ground” underwent a revolution.

Suddenly, under the influence of many factors converging at once—art from other cultures, political upheavals, technological innovations like the camera and portable paint tubes, and changes in how painters made their living as independent agents rather than being supported by church and state—the ground began to overwhelm the figure.

Edouard Vuillard, Interior with Work Table, oil

All bets were off in painting composition. Figures were camouflaged, flattened, cropped, distorted, and rendered in every color under the sun. Painters deliberately made the ground as strong an element as the figure, and sometimes more so, to remind us that in art, design can be as important as realistic depiction.

Maurice Denis spoke for many artists in the rule-breaking early 1900’s when he said, Remember that a painting—before it is a horse, a nude, or some anecdote—is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.

Maurice Denis, September Evening, oil

If painters were excited by this new freedom to subvert the primacy of the figure, viewers could be confused by the results. They wondered what they should be looking at and even what the point of the painting was. They were accustomed to seeing objects set apart from the background, not hidden within it.

A painting that balances figure and ground demands much more from us, and uses parts of our brain that we aren’t used to exercising—just as the “face/vase” optical illusion does. This is especially true in our Western culture, where there is little tolerance for ambiguity.

George Braque, Still Life with Clarinet, oil

Contemporary painting continues to explore “figure and ground” possibilities, sometimes emphasizing a monumental shape in a composition, sometimes creating an all-over pattern with no dominant shape at all, and sometimes striking a balance.

Artists like Sol LeWitt or Richard Diebenkorn explore this tension, seesawing back and forth in approaches so that the struggle between the two becomes part of the content of their work.

Sol Lewitt, Wall Paintings

More traditional realist painters use pictorial devices like strong light and shadow and a toning down of color to simplify backgrounds, harkening back to “pre-revolutionary” compositional approaches. These artists make the ground less important in the narrative, and in doing so simplify the visual story down to one that’s only about the the figure.

Daniel Graves, Spanish Sculptor, oil

All this thinking about the meaning of figure and ground has me excited to experiment in my studio with some different ways of composing my paintings—and also has me looking forward to seeing what new approaches my students come up with.