FIGURE GROUND, A TRANSPARENT DEFINITION

Webster’s defines figure ground as follows:

a property of perception in which there is a tendency to see parts of a visual field as solid, well-defined objects standing out against a less distinct background.

Solid, well defined objects which stand out from the background.  If this is not a description of how we are taught to draw, then I can’t think of a better one.  By accepted definition, if your drawing does not do this, then it is a bad drawing.

It is interesting that figure ground is actually a psychological term and it is used to describe psychological processes. Yet it is most always applied to visual perception.

So here we have the psychological figure ground definition, which is structured basically as a technique of survival. Our ability to separate the figure (as in food) from the ground (as in the ground) is a very fundamental perceptual and survival process. When crossing the street, if we can’t pick out the car from the background, we are going to get run over.

And of course figure ground is central to representational renaissance art. A great representational painting has the figures, be they people, plants, buildings, exquisitely rendered on the (back)ground. We are taught to emulate this methodic understanding in our drawings.

So has this highly evolved process been a force which has shaped our accepted drawing cultural tendencies? Is this one of the primary reasons that we have made it a cultural mandate to draw representationally? Are we evolutionally disposed to draw representationally?

As we saw in the Large Glass, Duchamp’s primary interest was to eliminate the figure ground duality. Degas, also as we saw, was an early experimenter with the dissolution of figure ground.

Our conflation of figure ground in Transparent Drawing puts us in good company. The figure ground needs to be dissolved.  Indeed it seems that we are on the right pathway.

So let us draw.