COMBINATORY CREATIVITY
Let’s imagine a fantasy class which gives equal weight to science and art. The design concepts behind Starry Night by van Gogh are just as important as the molecular arrangement of sulphur. The prime...
Author: Kurt
LIGHT AND DEATH
People who have had near death experiences typically describe the experience as a passage into light. I could not help thinking about this as we experienced James Turrell’s Perfectly Clear (1991) at Mass MOCA....
THE SHOCK OF THE OLD
When I see an architect’s office, I can’t resist looking in the window. And I always see analogue drawings scattered across desktops. There are usually computer generated representational color images on the walls. But...
ABSTRACTION AND REPRESENTATION
Transparent Drawing is not abstract. Yet most people, when presented with Transparent Drawing, describe it as abstract. For most of us, the drawing either looks real or it does not. And if it does...
OIL PAINT, THE MEDIUM
The problem with oil paint, the medium, is that it is opaque. “The special qualities of oil painting lent themselves to a special system of conventions for representing the visible. The sum total of...
ACRYLIC INK
The drawing above was done using acrylic ink rather than watercolors. Turns out, acrylic ink behaves nearly identically to watercolors. It applies easily with the same watercolor brush that you normally use. The washes...
BEHIND OPAQUE WALLS
Jung admonishes us to see behind opaque walls. The last chapter of Carl Jung’s book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, includes this passage: “…for me the “dividing walls” are transparent. That is my peculiarity. Others find...
HOUSE DRESS
All of this drawing of Kawakubo’s garments got me thinking about form and space. Form as in something interesting and unique to look at. Space as a volume for a human. One of the...
ALL THE DESIGN DISCIPLINES
Transparent Drawing is for all the design disciplines. Industrial Design? We have touched on it at the page Industrial Designers Do It Better. And then recently, I covered the Olivetti Valentine typewriter: see Sotsass...
KAWAKOONING
Did DeKooning ever design a dress? Not that we know of. Yet one of his favorite inspirations was the feminine form. Think of the Women series. Did Kawakubo ever depict the feminine form, as...
PROFANE REPRESENTATION
Let’s say you are an artist in the Middle Ages. In that guise, you did not want your drawings or paintings to look representational. Instead, you deliberately constructed your images in a non linear...
WHAT MONDRIAN KNEW
Any time the great poet Charles Wright uses the word transparent, we take notice. “As Mondrian knew, Art is the image of an image of an image, More vacant, more transparent With each repeat...
MUSEUM SKETCHERS
Possibly you have heard of the organization Urban Sketchers. Urban Sketchers do what the title suggests; they sketch in urban settings. And they do it in a group. So there is a social component...
SOTTSASS AT MET BREURER
The Sottsass exhibition at the Met Breurer shows some of the inspiration of the designer’s work. The exhibition made a specific point of showing some of the exact things that Sottsass was looking at...
MCLUHAN AND TRANSPARENCY
WhenMarshall McLuhan uses the word transparency, we take note. In the passage below, they give us the following description at what happened at the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance: “The rebirth...
CREATION STORY
We are not taught the story of creation. As I have said before in these pages, when we are taught about famous buildings, is it a flashcard mentality. We are taught to recognize the...
KAWAKUBO – ABSTRACT EXCELLENCE
I can’t stop drawing Kawakubo. Since I saw the Comme des Garcons exhibit at the Met, I have made a Kawakubo inspired Transparent Drawing every day. The more that I look at the photos...
TRANSPARENT PHOTOGRAPHY
In an article in Psychological Science, as reported in the Times, researchers found that taking photos serves to increase your memory of the experience. The studies found that taking photos increases your engagement with...
KAWAKUBO AT THE MET
We just saw the Comme des Garcons show at the MET. I am surprised by my emotional response to the show and how inspiring it is. This is a 20 year retrospective of Rei...
YOU’VE GOT TO START SOMEWHERE
Picasso said, that when drawing, “You have to start somewhere. You can always erase reality later on.” That is a powerful thought, given that it applies to our continued search for the means and...
PRACTICE AND THE COMPUTER
The computer pushes some people away from the practice of architecture. This thought evolved via a Facebook conversation with two Transparent Drawing followers. It had never occurred to me that the computer might turn...
TRANSPARENT CUBISM
Historians have divided Cubism into two segments. Analytic and Synthetic. Analytic Cubism happened at the beginning of the movement, including the years 1908-1912. The concepts of Analytic Cubism are central to Transparent Drawing. “It...
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