THOUGHTFORM
The Tibetin Buddhist practice of thoughtform provides an interesting parallel to our pathway. This is the Tantra practice of the visualization of a fully realized assembly. The assembly that results is typically what we...
Category: HISTORY
ESPRIT JOUFFRET
Esprit Jouffret’s Elementary Treatise on the Geometry of Four Dimensions, published in 1903, was an act of great heroics. In the book, he drew hypercubes and polyhedra, all in an effort to draw in...
DOROTHEA ROCKBURNE
Dorothea Rockburne liked to draw. And many of them had layers of transparency. Her principal interest was mathematics. So most of her works have a geometric precision which relates to fundamental properties of arcs,...
THE UNVISIBLE
Suzuki tells us that the foundation of Zen Buddhism is the concept of the unconscious. “Spatially, it is called ‘formless’, against all that can be subsumed under form; temporarily, it is ‘non-abiding’, as it...
LIFE IS NOT LIKE AN OIL PAINTING
“Life delineates itself on the canvas called time; and time never repeats: once gone, forever gone, and so is an act: once done, it is never undone. Life is a sumiye-painting, which must be...
CHRISTIANITY AND THE LINEAR PERSPECTIVE
Without Christianity, would the linear perspective have been invented / discovered? The interior of the great basilicas were, when you either drew or painted them, automatically in perspective. Did the confluence of Christianity and...
CARICATURE
Caricature is a class of drawing that we have not addressed. Yet the fundamental concepts and technique apply 100% to Transparent Drawing. Hockney summarizes it nicely when he states, describing the mode of Frans...
SECOND DOOR OF LIBERATION
In Buddhism, the Second Door of Liberation is signlessness / animata. As we defined in the previous Sign Page, sign means an appearance of an object that is in our perception. An object that...
PLATO’S PREDICTION
The linear perspective was invented by the Greeks. Simultaneously, illusionist depiction had it’s first critic, Plato. In a previous page, Plato On Perspective, we took a first look at Plato’s objection to representational 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,...
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...
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.” ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
VANISHING POINT, A SHORT HISTORY
A few pages ago, we made clear that for the Byzantines, in the Middle Ages, the vanishing point was within the viewer. See The Vanishing Point Is Within You. If we look at art...
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