I spent this Mother’s
Day weekend in Seattle with my lovely daughter, Ceinwen. We flew up to visit my
mom and to see a show at the Francine Seders Gallery—a stunning series of
drawings by my dear artist friend, Fred Birchman. (Please check out his show at
http://www.sedersgallery.com) We also
spent some time exploring Seattle.
One of the
standards I use to measure an urban landscape by is the amount of public art—to me
it says so much about the soul of a city. Seattle has a lot. Especially
impressive is SAM’s (Seattle Art Museum’s) Olympic Sculpture Park, an open and living
green, nine-acre transformed industrial site on the Seattle waterfront
overlooking the Olympic Mountains and the Puget Sound.
It was a gorgeous,
warm, sunny afternoon as we wandered through the sculpted space of this urban
park. We strolled past Mark di Suvero’s Bunyon’s Chess—wood pilings suspended
between steel to interact with the wind.
We peeked over
the wall at Claes Oldenburg’s Typewriter Eraser—a humorous piece inspired by an
object antiquated to anyone under forty.
We moved through,
moved around, undulated between Richard Serra’s Wake, a landscape of steel forms
reminiscent of both waves and of ships’ hulls; it’s the viewer’s own movement
that gives the mammoth sculpture motion.
We stopped and
gazed at Alexander Calder’s The Eagle, 6 tons of painted steel, and talked about
how the negative space—the shapes of sky and grass and buildings seen between
the limbs of orange steel, are just as important, just as evocative as the
sculpture itself and how the positive actually sculpts the negative space
around it.
Which got me
thinking about negative space. Sculptors, painters, printmakers, draftsmen,
(draftspersons?), even dancers, understand the vital importance of negative
space. We writers don’t always think of it in those terms, but I think it is essential
to remember that what isn’t there can be just as important as what is there.
Think about dialogue and how tension is created by what is not said. (It’s a
good tool to keep handy in your writer’s tool box!)
But beyond
technique, we need to leave space for readers to move through, room for readers
to make a story their own. Too many details can take up this space and actually
deprive the reader the pleasure of filling in what has meaning for them.
Elision in a piece of writing is the shared space between writer and reader,
where the reader brings his or her own experience to the page.
Another way to think about it: whether we paint, sculpt, dance, write or sing, the space between the form is where we breathe. So take a deep breath...
Take Good Care,
Sharry
Ah, yes. Breathing!
ReplyDeleteGorgeous pictures!