Figure or Ground?

 In art, the figure of a design is always the object your eye will see first.  It can be a form, shape, silhouette, or the object.  It is always the first thing you see because it will be the most interesting part of the piece of art. A picture will always have positive and negative space, and the figure is always the positive space.  The negative space, or ground will always be surrounding the figure.  Although finding the figure in a piece of art seems obvious, there can be more than one figure in an art work.

This brings me to the ground of an art work.  The ground can be the surrounding area or the background of a design.  This is everything else besides the figure(s) in the art work.  Again the ground is the negative space of the picture.  As mentioned previously, there can be more than one figure in the piece.  This can mean that the figure and ground can switch.  In a famous picture of a vase made of two heads, the figure can be the heads making the ground be the vase and vice-versa.

This example brings me to show how important the figure and ground are.  They are inseparable and always work together.  Both must look interesting to bring energy to a piece of art.  Having knowledge of these terms will help us and other understand art.  It will give us a reason for why we place things where we did and why we left so much negative space.  This is a way I will use it in my own work.  I will be more conscious of how the positive and negative space interact with each other.


I decided to have the positive and negative spaces place with each other in one of my "poet's kitchen" tiles.  The x's are the first thing seen, but the ground is seen through it creating more shapes to look at.  The figure and ground are both interesting and are inseparable.  It's balanced because the amount of figure and ground is very closely related.