Welcome to
The Painting Lesson
by Linda Carson
big black pig studio
98 King St. N., Waterloo Ontario Canada
www.bigblackpig.com
Background, Foreground & Midground
Paintings have geographical bearings. We can describe where, within the space of the painting, we want to look. Left or right? Top or bottom? But we also feel, when we view a picture, that some areas of the image are closer to us, and some areas are farther away. A painting creates a three-dimensional pictorial space with perceptible depth.
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For example: The sheep and the fence are closer to us than the misty foothills. How is that done? See linear and aerial perspective. |
Because the sheep and the fence appear closer to us, we say they're in the foreground of the image. The foothills appear far away, so they're in the background. Midground, as you probably guessed, is how we describe parts of the image that appear to be deeper than the foreground but not so deep as the background.
Background/foreground is more than a way of describing depth perception in realistic pictures. Even in abstract images, we get a feeling that some of the image is near (foreground) and some is far (background).
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For example: The square swatches of coloured grays are in the foreground, while the stormy gray swirls appear to be in the background. |
Painters work hard to push and pull different areas of the painting into and out of the background. Why? Sometimes we want to portray a realistic three-dimensional space. But we always want to place the emphasis where we think it belongs, to catch the viewer's eye, and to lead them on a tour of the image: left and right, up and down, in and out.
Painters also decide just how deep the pictorial space will be. That is, painters decide how far away that background will seem to be.
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For example: This tangled grove of green poles seems to exist in a deep pictorial space. The broad poles on the left and right edges are in the foreground. The other poles recede deeper and deeper into a distant background. |
These example paintings also feature deep pictorial space:
Renaissance painting was all about depicting deep realistic pictorial space. In contrast, Cubism was all about creating a shallow faceted pictorial space barely deeper than the picture frame.
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For example: This geometric pattern appears to sit entirely on the plane of the panel of the painting, in the foreground. There's almost no sense of a background at all. This image has a very shallow pictorial space. |
These example paintings also feature shallow pictorial space:
Back to the main lesson?Art & Text (C) Linda Carson 2002
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