ONE RULE

There is only One Rule to Transparent Drawing. Every line or tone that you put on your paper must be a component of a holistic form. If what you want to do on your paper does not knowledge form, then you violate the One Rule. That’s it. Everything else is wide open, fair game and open source.

The drawing above follows this rule. Every line and tone is part of holistic form knowledge. The Source Image is the photo below, that I took on the USS Eisenhower. The drawing is the beginning of what I will call Vibrational Form Generation, which will be a new Mode. I started by knowledging the form from the photo. Then, as if the parts were vibrating, I moved the various parts of the form around with various media: colored pencil, painted lines without tones, etc. The ochre color band improvises on the vibrational armature and then moves toward a new holistic form. Everything that I did on the paper, was in service of either Form Analysis or Form Generation.

This is what separates Transparent Drawing from everything else. And this distinction came to mind when I was looking over, on the web, the Drawing Center’s latest show, 100 Drawings From Now. I invite you to do the same. And when you do, you might agree with me that, I will go out on a limb and say, ALL of the works do not qualify as Transparent Drawings. And that is because none of them resolve form.

Now, these days, nobody likes any sort of exclusive declaration like this. Still, most of the drawings are what we call either representational or abstract. There are a few that suggest holistic form. So if you do a drawing that resolves form, but you don’t mean to, are you Transparent Drawing?

With a Transparent Drawing mindset, when I look at the drawings in the show, I see nothing but flatness. Nothing but lines and mostly opaque tones arranged as shapes on a piece of paper. And with all of that worldwide talent, then I’m sure we would all be dumbfounded by what these people could do with Transparent Drawing.