Curator & Collector

Slightly altered image of negative spaces taken from
Looking at Indian Art of the Northwest Coast

The negative space in northwest coast art is as important as the positive space. Stewart explains the presence of the negative shapes: crescents, circles, Ts, and Ys, as follows:

In the northern art style particularly, the form lines curve, connect, and flow continuously, and where a heavy line meets a curved one, a simple device is used to avoid a thick, clumsy look. The artist adds a negative shape in the form of a crescent, a T or a Y at the junction…. Where two heavy lines meet, or in any other area where the mass of colour is unbroken, the negative relief may be a circle. One authority has described the negative circle as a crescent which has “fallen in on itself” (p. 11).

The image shown above, a detail of a larger image that appears in Stewart’s book, shows each shape. The white space is conventionally-termed the “negative” space, and the crescents, circles, Ts and Ys all happen, fortuitously enough, to be present here. Stewart sums up the importance of the negative shapes thus:

The precision of two-dimensional art can be appreciated by realizing that to alter or incorrectly render the line of a positive component is to impare the shape of the negative.

The reader nows knows the basic formal elements of the aboriginal art of the northwest coast: ovoids, U-forms, split U-forms, and S-forms; these are created from thick form lines, usually black. Red is added in some cases as a secondary colour. White spaces are created by the negative space between the black form lines; these may take the forms of crescents, circles, T- and Y-shapes.

I will not summarize Stewart’s excellent treatment of facial elements, including eyes, eyebrows, noses, etc., but the next and probably final post in this series on the formal elements of northwest coast art will look–very, very briefly–at the animal features that are conventionally used as identifying characteristics by the aboriginal artists of the northwest coast. Following this, I will examine from a formal perspective three of the artworks of my favourite artist, Roy Henry Vickers: a very traditional work, a transitional one, and a work that is after the transitional phase.