THE CHAPEL OF ST. IGNATIOUS
We visited Vancouver and Seattle last week. We absolutely love to hit a city and then immediately start exploring it. And many times we don’t have a specific itinerary of places to visit and...
Author: Kurt
MATHEMATICAL DESIGN
Mathematics provides an interesting reflection on some of our favorite themes; knowledge, learning, abstraction, etc. Mathematics’ principal function is to problem solve. We use math if we need to know the area of a...
ELEMENTAL SHAPES
The square. The circle. The sphere. All are what we call elemental shapes, or elemental building blocks. Yet the primacy of these shapes and forms is merely our cultural construct. We are attracted to...
THE FOURTH DIMENSION
To this point, we have concerned ourselves with drawing in three dimensions. We have discussed some of the limitations of the linear renaissance perspective system. And believe it or not, another limitation of the...
APPROXIMATIONS
Ideas require mental images. If you don’t have the former, you don’t have the latter. But what are these ideas in our mind? How exact are they? How real are they? They are best...
DRAWING TO SAVE THE WORLD
We have shown that thinking requires mental images. Images contain thought and visual facts. Therefore our drawings are hugely important. They are a testament to a logical and rigorous construction. If we consider that...
CARPENTER CENTER UNDERSTANDING
We made a pilgrimage to Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center in Cambridge, MA recently. This might have been the third time that I was there. School had not started yet so we were able to...
DATA PROCESSING
Don’t draw like a camera. A camera merely records perceptual data. A camera records the surface data. Then at some distant point in time, the processing of that data occurs. Or is supposed to...
VISUAL SUPERIORITY
Have you ever thought about how lucky you are to be able to utilize and operate within the world of visual shapes, rather than rely instead on verbal language? The immense richness of our...
POWER TO THE PENCIL
With our focus on the power of the analogue pencil in these pages, it was amazing to see the protests in France use the pencil as a symbol for the murders at Charlie Hebdo....
ANCIENT OPERATING SYSTEM
Let’s face it. The operating system for Transparent Drawing is ancient. After all, we are talking about nothing more than a pencil and a piece of paper with some watercolor tones. So how long...
TERMS OF SERVICE
I read that everyone likes lists online as they are easier to read and then are more likely to be forwarded (hint). So I offer to you this short list of terms and definitions...
FUTURISM AND MOVEMENT
“What can you find in an old picture except the painful contortions of the artist trying to break uncrossable barriers which obstruct the full expression of his dream?” This quote is taken from the...
BERLIN PHILHARMONIE
Hans Scharoun was one of my early heroes. Here was a modernist, yet one who embraced organic geometries and responsive enclosures. I do believe that it was Scharoun’s organic pieces, most notably the Berlin...
BEWARE OF THE MANIFOLDNESS
Over the centuries, we have developed nearly a cultural fear of the visual. A couple of links to past posts here and here for a bit more background. And if you don’t believe any...
PRESENTING ARCHITECTURE
It was nice to be invited by Robert Becker over at Presenting Architecture to list Transparent Drawing at his site. Presenting Architecture is a compendium of the work of those who, well, present architecture....
REAL WORLD 2
Everyone understands Transparent Drawing. At least if someone doesn’t, they have had the great courtesy to not tell me. A few months ago, I posted Real World Transparent Drawings. These are drawings that I...
PICASSO AND THE CHICKEN
Have you heard the one about Picasso and the Chicken? If so, feel free to stop reading this and find something better to read. Our tangential introduction of slow learning does bring to mind...
SLOW LEARNING
If you have persevered thru any of Transparent Drawing, one of the sub themes that I continue to harp on is our culturally divergent approach between logical thinking and visual thinking. Quick links to...
STRUCTURAL ESSENCE
Productive thinking. This is what we all want to do. We want to be as productive as we can when we problem solve. For the greatest productivity, we need to be thinking about the...
PALIMPSEST
Nothing is hidden in a palimpsest. Palimpsest typically applies to written pages. Some of the most famous examples are of an 800 year old Codex in which the same parchment was reused after previous...
Recent Comments