picture plane

American  

noun

1. the plane of a painting, drawing, or the like, that is in the extreme foreground of a picture, is coextensive with but not the same as the material surface of the work, is the point of visual contact between the viewer and the picture, and is conceived as a major structural element in the production of abstract or illusionistic forms.

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Etymology

Origin of picture plane

First recorded in 1790–1800

Example Sentences

They seem to be lowering Christ’s corpse, which is thrust forward from the picture plane, onto the altar below the painting.

From The Wall Street Journal • Mar. 27, 2026

Taylor pumps life into the static picture plane, which creates a visual friction that can make the figures he chooses riveting to see.

From Los Angeles Times • Dec. 8, 2022

Color photographs from 1996 — flat, frontal, emphasizing the two dimensions of the picture plane — show the gated and graffiti-tagged facades of rundown buildings in downtown L.A.’s garment district.

From Los Angeles Times • Oct. 31, 2022

Those slices turned absence — the fissure of nothingness left by the knife — into new kinds of paint, swelling lines of darkness arcing across the picture plane.

From Washington Post • Jun. 28, 2022

Moreover, pictorial space must work across the picture plane, as well as behind it.

From "History of Art, Volume 1" by H.W. Janson