THE VANISHING POINT IS WITHIN YOU
In the Renaissance, the vanishing point was placed on the surface of the painting, or inside the painting, if you will. The space of the painting then continued outward so as to include the...
Category: HISTORY
EVILS OF SUPERFICIALITY
Oppenheimer: “This is a world in which each of us, knowing his limitations, knowing the evils of superficiality, will have to cling to what is close to him, to what he knows, to what...
CHILD’S VIEW
As humans, we first understand the world without words. “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.” There is nothing like a John Berger quote to get the blood...
NEO-CONCRETE
Architecture or drawing can be understood only thru the filter of a viewer’s subjectivity. This is a core belief of a Brazilian group of artists working in the late 1950s. They called themselves Grupo...
SPACE NOT SPACE
Space is a word that we all use when talking about art, or composition, or layout, etc. We toss it around as if we know what we are talking about. But the word space...
MODERNIST FORM GIVERS
A couple of pages ago, we established that the basic goal of modernism is to reveal the unseen. We know that the 20th C modernists rejected the mimetic representational renaissance picture plane construct. Crucially,...
OTRA FIGURACION
Evoke without mimetic representation. Transcend the abstract / figuration binary. Employ expression and reject decoration. These three principals summarize the Otra Figuración movement (or another figuration). This was a group of four artists, operating...
THE TRAJECTORY OF ART
The entire trajectory of modernism, it turns out, is nothing more than revealing what cannot be seen. “One of the greatest innovations in twentieth-century drawings involves the degree to which they make visible things...
THE WHOLE SPACE
Can you think about space without thinking about form? That is to ask, can space be defined without enclosure and boundaries? Barnett Newman, an important abstract expressionist artist working in the mid 50’s, gave...
RAPHAEL’S PANTHEON
Raphael, the great Renaissance artist, made a famous drawing of the Pantheon. The drawing is most notable for it’s inaccuracy. “…when Raphael drew the interior of the Pantheon, he didn’t produce “the reality one...
NEW MEASUREMENT GROUP
Artists have been pushing back against ideological cultural imperatives since forever. An interesting example is three Chinese artists who called themselves the New Measurement Group. In an attempt to push back against cultural ideological...
DEPICTACTION
Let’s attack another binary, representation (or depiction) vs abstraction. The representation / abstraction binary has informed our thinking in these pages since the beginning. This was first broached on the page LETTER TO HELEN....
SCIENTIFIC ICONS
Mike makes a really good point. In his reply to The Pencil Marks On The Paper, he states that engineering graphs give a more complete and intuitive understanding than the mathematical characters which produce...
WAR ON LANGUAGE
Maybe it is just me, but it seems that everywhere I read, very negative things are said about language. I have recorded some of these examples in these pages. It is becoming clear that...
IT’S NOT ON A PLINTH
The Barcelona Pavilion is not on a raised plinth. I mentioned this on the previous page. Yet architects are taught and indoctrinated that indeed the building is on a raised plinth. To add veracity...
NATIONAL TURBULENCE AND UTOPIA
As mentioned before, I am reading Erik Reece’s Utopia Drive. If you missed it, here is a link to the page ARTLESS ART, which brings a Shaker sensibility to what we do here at...
CHUANG-TSU AND THE CRAB
We heard the story of Picasso and the Chicken. We closed that page with the proviso that we didn’t know if it was true or not. So I wanted to record a similar version...
FRAGONARD AT THE MET
We just saw the drawing show, Fragonard Drawing Triumphant, at the Met. From the text on the wall as you enter the show, “Drawing was a natural medium for Jean Honore’ Fragonard (1732-1808). It...
NATIONAL WORDS
Wouldn’t it be great if National Decisions could be made based on drawings rather than words? Can you imagine having strong opinions about a set of sketches, rather than a set of words? Or...
WHO WOULD HAVE LIKED TRANSPARENT DRAWING?
Corb, for one. He of course considered himself a painter first. And his daily painting was a basic exercise in composition, completion, balance, form, etc. Admittedly his paintings were opaque. Yet I think he...
REPRESENTATIONAL TRUTH
“This is the entire history of Western painting, right here. The struggle to represent things accurately. And then, when we develop a language for rigorously rendering 3D shapes in two-dimensional space, what do we...
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