"Visual field" calls up the idea of a camera viewfinder, a rectangular format, but the visual field is all around us.
I like poet Charles Olson's "composition by field", which applies his sense of new American painting to the linear convention of poetry. Painting is no longer just the depiction of a subject but an organization of the overall space before us.
The Impressionists broke up the enclosed contours of objects. The Bauhaus School developed the grid as a field for invention, and Hans Hofmann opened up the field to rhythmic improvisation, to the emergence of new configurations.
Henri Matisse, Red Studio, 1910