ACTS OF RESISTANCE

In the November 2019 print issue of ArchitectureBoston, Nalina Moses structures a great defense and call to arms regarding what, in these pages, we call drawing. The article can be found online here.

“Architects lost a fundamental physicality, and architects lost a fundamental authority. Those practitioners who continue to work by hand offer eloquent resistance.”

I love the term resistance. Resistance is what the Transparent Drawing Manifesto works to realize. The other key word in the above passage is authority. I equate authority with authenticity. And authenticity with design provenance.

“A hand drawing…is an immediate, unfiltered transmission from the mind and, sometimes, the unconscious. No other person could have seen or rendered it in just this way.”

“A hand drawing is limitless in possibility. The empty sheet makes no assumptions and imposes no rules.

These two quotes, taken together, are great statements of resistance. The transformative power of a pencil and a piece of paper offer the fewest rules, algorithmic or otherwise. The tokens that we mark on the paper are a mind transfer. The fewest limitations provide the widest pathway to mind expression and expansion. There is no machine buffer between the person and the knowledge.

These thoughts and perceptions are coalescing around analogue drawing. They are becoming the mantra and are unifying into a coherent, proactive and culturally shared definition.

Keep up the resistance!

This is the link to the website of Architecture Boston, where there are many interesting and thoughtful articles.

1. Moses, Nalina. “Strokes of Genius.” ArchitectureBoston. November 2019. Print. All quotes are on page 77.

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Peace to all at this time of cyclic renewal. Continued thanks to all who apply their time to review my work and then write comments on Linkedin: your input is invaluable. The site reached a milestone the other day when there were 250 page views. While that is laughably low for just about any other blog, that is a lot for Transparent Drawing. The book, I am told, is now at the proofreaders.

For the Automatic Form drawing at the top, I used this image of stair treads that I took in Greece. I first knowledged the treads as overlapping with a pencil. I then used a conte pencil to denote the imperfections. I then responded to these two sets of marks with a transformation of water soluble felt tip so as to make openings. An ink wash, and then a few more lines and tones in orange to move to form.