ANTI-ILLUSIONIST TESSELLATION

Picasso painted from photographs.  His use of photographs was:

“…a productive to-and-fro between a photo that reduces real volumes to their flat coordinates and a pictorial reinterpretation of that photographic record into anti-illusionist tessellation.”  p85

 Apparently, Picasso drew and painted from photographs to a large degree.  In Baldassari, direct comparisons are shown between a photo that Picasso took and the resultant drawing or painting.  And indeed it turns out there is great similarity between the composition of the photo and their resultant painting.  He took a photo.  Then he used that photo as a basis for geometric structure for his painting or drawing.  One looked more or less like the other.  What does this mean for us here at Transparent Drawing?

Point one.   If anyone ever tells you that you should not draw from photos, you can simply say, oh yeah?  Well, Picasso did it.  That should shut them up.

Point two.  Drawing from photographs is just as Baldassari says.  It is a productive exchange between the photos and your pencil on the paper.  When they say “pictorial reinterpretation”, I had expected them to say pictorial representation.  Their use of reinterpretation is exactly what we do.  We don’t copy.  We synthesize.  We don’t use the same projection as the photo. We interpret.

Point three.  Our drawing is anti-illusionist.  No further explanation needed on that.

I had to look up tessellation, which in one dictionary means the arrangement of shapes that fit together closely, most often with repeating patterns.  So tessellation does not apply to us, as we go far beyond the simple arrangement of shapes into repeating patterns.

As we have discussed before, within our culturally accepted repressive artistic mindset, drawing from photographs is verboten. The prevailing cultural ethos is that drawing from photographs is, somehow, cheating.  So of course it comes as a revelation to learn how integral photography was to Picasso’s creative process.  A brief primer on the Transparent Drawing drawing from photographs can be found here.

In these pages, we have learned that photography was a crucial part of LeCorbusier’s work process.  And now we can add another modernist hero to this list.  I have every confidence this list will grow.

1.  Baldassari, Anne. Picasso and Photography, The Dark Mirror. Flammarion. Paris. 1997.