THE PICTORIAL FIELD

  The pictorial field, also called the format, the picture plane or just the field, is the first form in a painting. It is a shape that pre-exists the image the artist paints and one which is always there contributing to the structure and expression of the finished image. It is traditionally a simple, geometrical form such as a rectangle, circle (tondo in Italian,) an oval or sometimes a triangle. These forms are probably favored because their simple regularity does not call too much attention to itself, allowing the picture to speak without interference from its support. In the 1960's, some artists, working in the styles of minimalism and color field painting, began to experiment with the picture's format. These artists tended to work abstractly. They were interested in the way the shapes they painted on the canvas could relate to the shape of the canvas itself. The so-called "shaped canvases" they produced took many forms and resulted in an exciting expansion of the possibilities of the pictorial field. Frank Stella, most often associated with the art movement called Minimalism, was perhaps the most adventuresome painter of this group in exploring a wide range of shapes for his paintings.

The Pictorial Field: Illusion or Object?
  Starting in the Renaissance, when oil painting began, the artist's goal generally was to deny the flatness of the pictorial field on which he or she painted. Through the use of such devices as relatively smooth painting techniques, (which did not emphasize the material surface of paint on the canvas,) perspective, foreshortening and so on, the artist strove to create a picture which was like a window into a world created through illusion. The viewer was to look through the surface to the fictive space beyond-room, still life, landscape, etc.
  In the 19th century in Europe, a dramatic change began slowly to evolve in the artists' conception of the relationship of the image to the field. This was most clearly formulated at the time by Maurice Denis who wrote, "Remember that a picture-before being a war horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote-is essentially a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order." This formulation insists on the material reality of the picture. The viewer looks at the surface not through it. Even though there may be an image of a landscape, the thickness of paint, the artist's marks on the surface, the type of color used and the nature of the space developed compel us never to forget that the painting is a thing-an object-not a window into another world. Interestingly, both camps believed they were being true to reality. The earlier painters tried to reproduce the reality of the visible world as a volumetric space conjured up on the canvas through illusionistic painting techniques. The modern painters wanted to be true to the material reality of their paintings, to acknowledge that they were working on a flat, opaque surface upon which they brushed color.
  The base upon which the painting is created, the pictorial field we have been discussing, has some visible properties-height, width, texture and color. It also has some invisible but still important felt characteristics such as a center and central axes. It is around the central vertical axis of the field that forms are balanced, so we now turn to a consideration of this important compositional property.

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