ELIMINATE THE VANISHING POINT

You want to Draw Like a Byzantine?  Eliminate the vanishing point.

Have you ever thought about the cultural hegemony of the act of placing the vanishing point on your paper? There you are, drawing so as to solve a problem. You draw to think.

And then, plink. You place a vanishing point, or two, or even three, on your paper. And once you place the point(s), suddenly your entire drawing mindset changes.

With the vanishing point on the paper, suddenly now all lines need to radiate out from the point. Suddenly, you click into nearly autonomous drawing mode, as you find yourself now working to “make it look right.”

Once you place the point, you have stopped thinking. Radiating lines out from the vanishing point is not thinking. You are instantly back in a Ching mindset, drawing to make it look like it should, rather than how it could.  You instantly shift into representational drawing mindset, rather than a problem solving mindset.  The simple placement of that point on your paper puts you into a mode of drawing that supports a cultural trope.

You want to draw like a Byzantine?  Then eliminate the vanishing point.  Let’s never, ever, place it on your paper.  Think this is possible?

One way to look at this is that we are replacing the vanishing point with transparency.  Rather than be limited with the organizing theory of the Cartesian grid, we instead have the organizing and thinking power of transparency.

Is this elimination of the vanishing point a new thought?  You really would not think it would be.  Yet when you type “eliminate the vanishing point” into  dataspace, the top hits are things like deleting extra vanishing point grids in Photoshop and the like.  You would think that drawing without vanishing points would be a whole drawing movement.  But apparently that is not the case.

Looking for something to do?  Start a project focusing solely on the elimination of the vanishing point. Postulate an entire methodology around drawing without a vanishing point.

Never allow yourself to place that one seemingly innocent dot on your paper again?  I’m not sure I can do it.  For instance, that would mean that I would have to eliminate the famous Transparent Drawing Choisey One Point.  Aurghhhhh.  The anguish!