IMPROVISATION

If you look at a painting in a certain way, you can begin to see the space.

At first blush, a look at this DeKooning painting, titled Gansevoort Street, you might think that it is the typical arrangement of flat forms on a flat canvas.  One of the most amazing features of a painting such as this is the masterful way in which the surface of the painting has been divided.  The improvisational quality of DeKooning’s eye shows that the entire surface is charged.  The entire two dimensional painting of flat shapes across the entire surface is uniformly interesting.

When form generating from a painting like this, the basic geometry of the painting forms the armature from which the three dimensional transparent space can be sculpted.  And the all over quality of the painting can be brought to our papers.

One form generation approach that works is to draw the principal forms of the painting across the paper.  The principal forms can be seen in the painting as the blackest lines.  It is ok to draw them flatly, just as DeKooning would have distributed the principal geometry across his canvas.

After this basic geometry is established, which really is only a few dark lines across the paper, projections can be made;  see the page Painting Dimensionalization.    And from these projections, the space starts to form.  The forms that shape the space start to become perceptable.

Without too much effort, an interior space starts to gel on your paper.  And it is a space that you would not have been able to generate on your own.  And it is a space that maintains the all over quality of the original geometry of the DeKooning painting.

Another fun dynamic is that with this process, you really don’t know where you are going to end up.  Your ongoing decision making as you respond to the lines that are already on your paper means that this is an open process.  And you are improvising on the paper just as DeKooning was improvising on his canvas.  It is just that you are making your improvisational responses transparently and in three dimensions.

As before, see Form Generation, An Example, is the space that I drew above coherent?  No.  Is it something that could be readily used as a resolved architectural form?  No.  But as we then draw from drawing, I was able to use what I learned in the above drawing to produce the resolved forms in the drawing below.  I would not have been able to generate the forms in the bottom drawing if I had not made the drawing at the top.

And, yes, this is a resolved form, with a high Design Quotient, that could inform a built solution.