The Japanese Concept Of Ma

Dave, thanks for sharing this concept. It answers a lot of questions for me. I've always been intrigued by negative space, since the time my eyes were opened to it in a tutorial years ago. And , Ma affirms what I intuitively knew, and, that negative space is positively alive and meaningful.too. It helps me create my abstracts.

Vivian,

You are lucky. For whatever reasons, I have always taken personal negative space, emotional, thought wise, or working wise as bad.

I have always enjoyed a complexity in how I work negative space in my art OTOH.

Dave

Dave - I like that! I didn't know Ma. Somewhere I along the line I learned that what isn't there, the emptiness, is as important as what is there. Maybe some design class, but it had no name. So cool to attach a name to the concept!

Valarie,

It truly is a life lesson to me. I learned proportion based on negative space, but not value.

Dave

I kind of see it as in decorating a room, the eye needs a place to rest to define what else is there. Did that make sense?

Valarie,

It makes perfect sense. Much can be achieved that way.

Dave

I didn't know about the concept of Ma.

If you fill the spaces between beats with noise, rhythm disappears.

Cheryl,

We were taught in a college music class that the Classical period had "light between the notes".

Dave

Ohhh, yessss, so true, Dave.....I could always hear the resonance more so at the piano, could actually feel/see them on the violin.....all that space! So...full of colour...

Vivian,

On that note, I am off to bed.

Dave