Space is substance. Cézanne painted and modelled space. Giacometti sculpted by "taking the fat off space". Mallarmé conceived poems with absences as well as words. Ralph Richardson asserted that acting lay in pauses... Isaac Stern described music as "that little bit between each note - silences which give the form"... The Japanese have a word (ma) for this interval which gives shape to the whole. In the West we have neither word nor term. A serious omission.

Ma is a Japanese reading of a Sino-Japanese character, which is often used to refer to what is claimed to be a specific Japanese concept of negative space. In modern interpretations of traditional Japanese arts and culture, ma is taken to refer to an artistic interpretation of an empty space, often holding as much importance as the rest of an artwork and focusing the viewer on the intention of negative space in an art piece.

It’s not only the things themselves that matter, but the relationships between those things.

Consider dining: it’s not the individual foods alone, but how you put them together – their proportions, sequences, contrasts, and complements relative to each other.

Or consider legos: don’t look at merely the blocks themselves, but how they fit together. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

This reminds me of something I read from [Ken Kocienda’s book Creative Selection] where he mentions Google’s (in)famous testing of forty-plus shades of blue for link color. Ken cites this example to highlight the narrow nature of an approach that quantifies the performance an individual element in isolation vs. considering the element itself and its place in a larger whole.

...This is all to say that what resonated with me in Andrew’s article is the idea of alternating between perspectives—seeing the trees and the forest—and developing a refined sense of judgment that allows you to find balances between things such that they produce a pleasing and integrated whole.

In other words, don’t merely design things. Design the relationships between things.

As I drew my first still-life, my instructor noticed I focused on perfecting a section of the composition before approaching other areas of the scene. She pointed out how the drawing would become out of proportion if I continued.

...I worked and reworked the drawing, visually connecting the parts of the composition until it matched the scene.

About half-way through my drawing, I realized I had detached myself from what the objects depicted. The vase was no longer a vase; the bench was no longer a bench; the flowers were no longer flowers. The elements of the scene were all one, a single composition of reflected light, shadows, and darkness.

The approach I learned that day stuck with me for the rest of my life. I apply it in my art and design as well as how I think, write, and make sense of things.

It taught me to step back to see the whole and appreciate its connections before digging into the details.

Our concern is the interaction of color; that is, seeingwhat happens between colors.

We are able to hear a single tone.But we almost never (that is, without special devices) see a single colorunconnected and unrelated to other colors.Colors present themselves in continuous flux, constantly related tochanging neighbors and changing conditions.

As a consequence, this proves for the reading of colorwhat Kandinsky often demanded for the reading of art:what counts is not the what but the how.