IF SOL LEWITT DREW HOLISTIC FORMS

My first encounter with the wall drawings of Sol Lewitt was at Mass MoCA. That was something like 10 years ago. And I have only now realized something fundamental about Lewitt’s drawings: they are representational.

Figure 2 is of a wall drawing at Mass MoCA. There is an overall grid of points. And then the lines, generally, connect those points. I’m sure that some have written that the dashed lines imply something behind. But you will have to agree, these lines are on a plane, and that they don’t resolve form. And I invite you to Google Image search “Sol Lewitt Drawings“, so as to confirm their representational orientation.

So what if Lewitt would have been interested in the holistic resolution of form? What if, instead of the drawing 146A, he had actually completed the forms that are only beginning to be suggested? How do you draw like Sol Lewitt, and achieve holistic forms? These questions came to me as I was working on the drawing at the top.

I first created a grid, or what I prefer to call an armature, by drawing this form, (Fig 4.) about 10 times, on the paper. I used a more or less regular offsetting, which created a tesselation (more on that later). I then connected the same points with the gesture of a straight line and then a curved line: just like LeWitt would have done. (See Fig 3 for the first overlay.) I did the straight / curved overlay 4 times, each using a different media. The lines were overlaid over the underlying form the same for each.

What resulted is, I believe, a drawing that is in the spirit of LeWitt (Fig 1). And it actually resolves form. The lines connect and overlap in unexpected ways. I don’t know about you, but I can see all sorts of holistic forms in the drawing. For example, the thumbnail sketch (Fig 5) shows a Drawing From Drawing: I found these forms in the drawing at the top.

So I think this takes things another step forward. Why be content to just connect the dots on the paper without moving toward form? Why just connect the dots like Lewitt did? Now that you know that you can resolve form, how can you not?