Farther on, a rectangular mirror cut into radiating triangles creates tension between the shattered reflections and a negative shape like a cartoon burst.
She longs for a dog, but alas, her parents appear (only once) as negative shapes doing a fraught and final dance of NO.
"What it's all about is the interrelationship of the negative shape – the figure-ground relationship, the shapes between characters and within characters," Parker explained in Gary Hustwit's 2007 documentary, Helvetica.
The day after he had roughly cut out the image, he found its "negative shape" — the paper that he had cut away — in the trash.
Or, as André put it, "There's a hexagon pattern of negative shapes that are subtracted from the material from one side, and then there's the same pattern, subtracted from the material from the other side.
His hair is a flow of golden clouds, his head a pile of ruins; his hands and legs are formed by the negative shapes around an Art Nouveau fountain that is closest to the viewer.
The two best pieces, facing each other in a smaller gallery, are more spatially complex: each engages a wall with positive and negative shapes that use both the front and the back of the striped paper.
He seems to have been fascinated by one of the most marvellous properties of Japanese sumi-e painting, the direct application of brushed forms to rice paper or silk so that the white ground itself supplies the light in the image, not so much negative shape or absence as a positive whiteness burning through the black or dark grey shapes.
With techniques learned from the Russian-born sculptor Ossip Zadkine in New York in the 1940's, Ms. Catlett builds form through the juxtaposition of positive and negative shapes, basing her pieces on identifiable subjects and then distorting and exaggerating them for expressive emphasis, as in her new voluptuous bronze "Nude Torso".
In "Colors," one side of each spread has a raised cardboard picture — of a green leaf, in one case, on a white ground, while on the opposite side, the leaf shape is carved out of the page, leaving a white negative shape on a glossy green page.
However, a negative shape factor, corresponding to a Type II GEVD, is physically unrealistic, and should be avoided for long-term wind speed predictions.
