Notan

The Japanese word for contrasting values in art is Notan (濃淡), which translates to “light-dark harmony” or “light-dark balance”.Notan is a design concept and practice that involves simplifying an image into its basic shapes of light and dark to study the compositional energy, balance, and the relationship between positive and negative space.  Here are a few of my pieces put into Notan to study this design feature.