Dow's line drawing of the same house, tall tree and bushes in three frames: a tall narrow upright, a near-square, and a wider upright. In the tall frame the tree runs off the top edge, with empty ground below.

Concept · Foundations

Format and the Picture Plane

Format is the shape of the picture: horizontal, vertical, square or round. The picture plane is its flat surface.

Dow redrew one house and tree in three formats; in the tallest, the tree towers. Every picture is both a view into space and a flat pattern on a surface.

  • Pattern "is often in conflict with pictorial space," says Steven Zucker of Smarthistory.
  • In a 2014 talk, curator Simon Kelly suggested painters in the late 1800s moved from picture-as-window to picture-as-surface.

See

Image: Project Gutenberg · Public domain

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