SKETCHING AT THE MET
I saw two people sketching at the MET’s David Hockney show. In most museum shows that I see, it is rare to see someone with a sketchbook. Yet these two people were drawing from...
Author: Kurt
SPACETIME ANALYSIS 1
A few pages ago, we introduced The Four Spacetimes as a way of understanding how Transparent Drawing fits into the history of Western Culture. So let’s apply The Four Spacetimes to the drawing...
THE GREEK PERSPECTIVE
By all accounts, the Greeks were the first civilization to draw and paint their pictures according to the basic rules of liner perspective. Although we are typically taught that Representational Spacetime started in Florence,...
THE FOUR SPACETIMES
Drawing is a statement of time and space. To draw representationally, for example, there is a tacit acceptance that we will summarize one instant in time with a linear spatial construct. To Draw Like...
FORM GENERATION FROM CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE
I generated the drawing above from the drawing below. With a 0.5 mm felt tip, I did a volumetric projection of the flying buttress image. I ended up taking liberties with the geometry. Yet...
EGYPTIAN SPACETIME
What was it like for the Greeks to look back at the art of their predecessors, the Egyptians? “We must never forget that we look at Egyptian art with the mental set we have...
OBVIOUS FUTILITY
Lockhard writing in 1974: “The attempt to try to show all the aspects and qualities of any designed space or object in any single view is obviously futile.” p138. Futile? This is Lockhard writing...
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.” ...
TIME OF SEEING
Transparent Drawing cannot exist without time. To understand completely a three dimensional form, a viewer must have, at minimum, at least two viewing points. The forms and objects that we are drawing are, for...
MICHANGELO AT THE MET
We saw the Michangelo drawing show at the MET. Turns out, he did not draw transparently. No surprise, really, given that he was the pinnacle of the Renaissance. The show forcefully demonstrates the seductive...
DIGITAL INTEGRATION
Can an analogue drawing be part of a digital workflow? Is an analogue drawing that becomes part of a digital workflow, still analogue? Do we need a new term that defines an analogue drawing...
REPRESENTATION AND MEANING
Buddhist theory or practice tells us that at the root of things, forms are empty. That is to say, as one proceeds toward enlightenment, we work to separate the meaning, or content, from form. ...
BROKEN SECRETS
Selfridges department store in Birmingham, England, is iconic. The building is softly undulating. The facade is comprised of aluminum discs that reflect the ambient light. I ran across this article in The Birmingham Daily...
HEIZER TRANSPARENCY
I ran across a series of etchings by Michael Heizer. When I first saw them, my thought was, well, this is at least moving toward transparency. There is an overlapping of shapes. And it...
HEROIC LINES
An image found on the web. A few heroic lines on the paper. A quick wash or two. A resolved, unique and authentic form. That really is at the heart of Transparent Drawing. A...
THE SECRET PHOTOGRAPHER
That should never be part of the title of a book about Le Corbusier. But nevertheless, there it is. The full title, Le Corbusier, The Secret Photographer, was published in 2013. In 2012 at...
THE ORGANISM AND THE OBJECT
The basis of all architecture is drawing. “Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and...
ONE LINE ONE WASH
I think I have achieved enlightenment. My drawing was done with one wash, and one line. The pencil went once to the paper and drew the line. The brush went once to the paper...
DRAW FOR TRUTH
We draw what is right, not what seems right. We draw for truth. Panofsky tells us that there were three components of subjectivity which were codified in the Renaissance representational mindset: subjective emotions, foreshortening,...
KNOWLEDGE AND DATA
Tom Gruber is head of advanced development for Siri at Apple. He has been at the vanguard of AI (Artificial Intelligence) from the very first. And he has specifically been interested in speech recognition...
REPRESENTATION AND WESTERN CONQUEST
The perspective, as it blossomed forth in the Renaissance, worked with newfound rational thinking. Suddenly the world could be explained with the idealized constructs of math, science, logic and the linear perspective. With...
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