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...
Category: HISTORY
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
LOGIC OF IMAGES
“I am inclined to believe that the logic of images is the prime mover of constructive imagination.” This quote is taken from Arnheim, who is quoting Ribot. When we have a concept or thought...
SURREALIST VISUAL FACTS
The Surrealists formed between the wars in Paris. They found suspect our cultural over reliance on words. Some previous thoughts on the literary dichotomy here. The Surrealist and subsequent Dada movements were founded to...
EARLY EXPLORERS
As I read the far more scholarly and researched texts of others, it is always exciting to realize that early explorers have tread this pathway before us. Although they have not given us the...
GREEK DICHOTOMY
Our culture puts logical discourse ahead of visual discourse. This predilection started with the Greeks: the early Greek thinkers essentially disparaged sensory experience. Instead they encouraged the rigorous application of words and numbers. In...
LINEAR PERSPECTIVE – THE CRITICS
The development of the perspective should be seen as a natural component of the rational development of the human mind. Certainly the development of the perspective can be understood given our propensity for mathmatization...
BRAINLESS MASS ANTS
The Mould Manifesto by the painter Hunderwasser is hugely entertaining and inspirational. In his manifesto, he decries the use of straight lines in architecture. And what painter uses straight lines? Think of almost any...
FULL CIRCLE TRANSPARENCY
Thomas French, one of our far flung correspondents, sent an interesting and related note. This regards the PBS series Time Scanners. So that engineers may understand in greater depth the structural integrity of the...
TRANSPARENT BLOCKS – PRODUCT REVIEW
“The maple-wood blocks…are in my fingers to this day.” This is the famous quote by Frank Lloyd Wright touting his kindergarten experiences with the maple block sets that were ubiquitous then. And we have...
ONE POINT VS TWO POINT PERSPECTIVE
Is there a big difference between a one point and two point perspective? Before answering that, it is important to understand that at the beginning of the Renaissance, the only perspective that they were...
BUCKY FULLER
Buckminster Fuller is a supreme systems thinker. He argued from day one that to understand the part, you have to understand the whole. Early in his education, he rebelled against the manner in which...
MILITARY AXONOMETRIC
The use of parallel line drawing first came into wide use for the design of military fortresses. In light of the general invasionary tendencies in the 15th and 16th centuries, impregnability was foremost on...
STEREOMETRIC TRANSPARENCY
The stereometric method is what I would call a transparent approach to the forming of objects. Gabo created a piece titled Two Cubes (Demonstrating the Stereometric Method.) In this piece, one cube expresses the...
FORM AND ENCLOSURE = FORCLOSURE
The duality of the interior and the exterior has bedeviled Architects from just about day 1. As we have seen elsewhere in this study, LeCorbusier tried to solve this dilemma by urging us to...
THE BAUHAUS
The Bauhaus is another school of design thinking that we need to be aware of. Walter Gropius took control of the school in 1919 and gave it the name Staatliches Bauhaus, or what we...
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