Depth of Field--A Concentration of Wandering: Smack Dab in the Imagination by Dia Calhoun

Every artist wants to guide the viewer’s perception. What comes forward? What recedes? Both are needed to create depth. What action or image first “hooks” the reader? Then, what—backstory, subtext, complication, keeps them going deeper?

The “field,” which can be thought of as the tension created between opposites, is where movement and change happen. Imagine a black and white sumi-e painting. In the foreground, a waterfall pours down a cliff into a wooded valley. In the soft background looms the suggestion of a snowy mountain lost in fog. Here the opposites are ice—or frozen water—and flowing water. The gap that is left to the imagination is the water’s transformative journey between the two images. The snow melts, gathers into trickles and streams that gather force over distance and finally plunge down the cliff into the valley. The gap is the field where imagination fills in the story. The tension between the opposites of ice and flowing water creates a concentration of wandering (I first heard Dr. Connie Zweig, a depth psychologist, use that phrase). I think that phrase is also a wonderful way to express how the artistic imagination works.