OSMOTIC DRAWING

Our critique of the one point perspective, it turns out, has had many supporting voices over the centuries.  One result is osmotic drawing.

Maurice Merlaeau-Ponty was intensely critical of the ‘Cartesian perspectivalist scopic regime’.  Writing around 1940, he saw it as an essential removal of our humanity.  He classified the perspectivist grid as creating disembodied subjects completely outside of our hmanity.

As Pallasmaa tells us,

“…Merleau-Ponty’s sense of sight is an embodied vision that is an incarnate part of the ‘flesh of the world.’  Our body is both an object among objects and that which sees and touches them.  Merleau-Ponty saw an osmotic relation between the self and the world – they interpenetrate and mutually define each other – and he emphasized the simultaneity and interaction of the senses.”  (The Eyes of the Skin, p 20)

I just love this.  Osmotic relationships.  Interpenetrate.  Mutual definition.  These are all operative terms for Transparent Drawing.

And I really like the word osmotic.  I had never thought of Transparent Drawing in terms of osmosis, and it will be great fun to begin to do so.