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. And it continues to set the boundaries of our transparent drawing trajectory.

“A firm distinction between depiction (or representation) and abstraction might exist in critical, analytical thought but not in acts of seeing.” p29.

This is taken from Richard Schiff’s, Ellsworth Kelly, New York Drawings 1954-1962. We have advocated the simplicity of Ellsworth Kelly’s works before. See ELLSWORTH KELLY PLANT DRAWINGS, for example.

While there is  a cultural disposition to categorize work on a piece of paper as either a depiction or an abstraction, Transparent Drawing gives us a holistic approach in which to combine these binary definitions.  TD gives us a way of seeing, thinking and drawing that is between.  Transparent Drawing is a combination of the two.

The act of seeing cannot be narrowed down to merely representation or abstraction.  We have defined the act of seeing as something that has a very wide bandwidth.  We saw, for example, DO WE SEE IN PICTURES, where Steen Eiler Rasmussen tells us that seeing is not a two dimensional activity.  What they are saying is that we see in at least a wide 2D manner.

Another passage from Schiff:

“Form as feeling.  Kelly’s work closes the gap between depictive representation and depictive abstraction, a false dichotomy, even though much of the critical literature of the later twentieth century insisted on maintaining it.  p30.

False dichotomy.  False binary.  Schiff is saying that Kelly’s work bridges that dichotomy.  And indeed that may be so.

It makes me wonder what would have happened if Ellsworth Kelly had given us transparent depictactions.  (Get it?  You combine depictive and abstraction and you get depictaction.)   In my drawing above, I did a simple projection of Kelly’s drawing titled Two Black Forms.

1.  Schiff, Richard.  Ellsworth Kelly New York Drawings 1954-1962.  Prestel. London.