NOTHING BUT FORMS

Over the course of your daily life, you do nothing but manipulate and engage with forms.    Your computer, toothbrush, automobile, pasta pot, and hopefully the pencil that you draw with are a sampling of these forms. 

When I glance up from where I am working, which is in my kitchen, this is a snapshot of what I see.  In this photo there are nothing but forms.    The stool, rolling cart, covered mixer, range, range hood, cabinets, instant pot, floor/walls of the container I am in, etc., all are forms.

Look up from the screen and look around you.  Everything that you see is a form.  Each of them has been designed by another human.  And they have been either mass produced or crafted.  There is a good chance that the forms that you are seeing are ones that you have selected and purchased. 

You might say, well, so what?  Of course there are forms around me.  And my answer is that we have been conditioned to take these forms for granted.  That is, we are not culturally conditioned to perceive these forms as distinct, holistic entities.  We are culturally conditioned to perceive them representationally, in Representational Spacetime. 

I’m not, of course, the first to say this.  Wölfflin, in 1915, for one, said the same thing.  A representational, or painterly mode of perception surrenders to mere visual appearance.  

Take a moment to imagine in your mind, as fully as you can, the holistic form of the building that you are now in.  Or, imagine with this same mindset the type of transportation vehicle that you used today.  I don’t mean picture it.  I mean imagine you in these containers, with the container all around you.  Develop a mental image of your position within the volume.  Imagine all of the walls of the container that surround you.  The mental image that you get is holistic form.  And this is the purest conception of form that you will have.  

This awareness is your transparent mindset, and it should engender a slightly new perceptual feeling.  Enrichment of this set of mind is what Transparent Drawing does for you.  You increase your capacity for holistic ascertainment of forms. 

1. Wölfflin, Heinrich.  Principals of Art History.  Dover Publications, Inc.