Horror Vacui

Check out this painting:

This is The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. It’s really three paintings—a triptych—and it has to be one of the coolest works of art ever. Notice how there’s pretty much no empty space anywhere to be seen?

The desire to fill every space with detail is something I often did naturally as a kid, probably getting lost in the process of drawing itself. My lovely high school art teacher, Jackie Chalfant, would encourage me not to do this, but to look at the totality of the piece, not to get lost in the minutiae, and to consider the open space as its own form.

She was the first to give me a name for this phenomenon: horror vacui.

Over the ensuing lifetime, I’ve come to appreciate this concept for its own sake. Horror vacui is fascinating.

My favorite comic book artists from the late 80s and early 90s used this concept. Once we were aware of it, my art-nerd friends and I would constantly make fun of Todd McFarlane’s inability to allow any square centimet…