ORIGINS OF TRANSPARENT DRAWING

This drawing is 35 years old.

It seems that I started drawing transparently way before I started Transparent Drawing.
I was looking thru old 35 mm slides the other day, and I came across drawings that I generated as part of my architectural thesis.  And low and behold, these drawings are transparent.  This was, of course, 35 years ago.

This drawing was done with a Rapidograph pen.  I was surprised to learn that they still make and sell them,  given the high performance felt tip pens that are out there now.

Rapidographs, as we all remember, had a tendency to dry out and clog.  Just to keep a set of 4 or 6 pens trouble free was an art in itself.  I never did much drafting with a Rapidograph on mylar, which I know some offices used.  That super black line on the very translucent mylar certainly produced a high contrast print with low background noise.

I made this drawing on vellum.  I’m not sure what I was looking at or inspired by when I drew the line geometry.  I know that I was interested in the creation of a single point three dimensional image.  This was a straight ahead single point perspective projection.  And because of the overlapping of the lines, I was going for a transparency, without really knowing it.

The color tones are from a translucent self stick film that was available. For the life of me, I can’t remember what the product was called.  It was like Pantone in that it came in a range of colors.  At that time, there was no internet so whatever supplies that we used, we bought at the school’s bookstore.  Yet is was translucent and self stick.  So you would simply cut out the shape, remove the paper backing, and then adhere it to the paper.

I think I was primarily interested in drawing non stylistically.  That is to say, I was not out to copy anybody’s technique or methods.  I was also interested in sui generis form generation.  It was almost as if the pen was generating lines and thus the suggestion of a form automatically.  Automatic form generation.  Nearly like automatic writing.  Or like Mark Tobey’s white writing.

So I guess it is safe to say that thru these decades, I have kept this theory close to heart.  A byproduct of drawing transparently is to draw beyond form.  To draw without reference to style.  To simply draw and solve problems.  To draw to create reasonable form enclosures and solutions.

It might be safe to say that I was interested in transparency without knowing why.