BARCELONA PAVILION
It’s underwhelming, the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies. But in a good way. It was as if the expectation of total perfection diluted the experience of perfection. How can you experience perfection when you know...
TRANSPARENT DRAWING
WATER SOLUBLE PENCILS 3
I thought this might work. I did the thumbnail above more or less absentmindedly, and noticed that the water soluble pencil soaked up the water. In a more or less non thinking manner, I...
GREAT CLIENTS
We are adept, as a profession, about describing Great Buildings. But what about Great Clients? This occurred to me as I sit here in Lisbon and make another drawing of Casa Battlo. The previous...
CROATIA GARAGE
Many times, an ordinary building can capture your attention. We are traveling this week, so I offer this simple drawing of a simple building. I snapped the photo below from my bicycle. We were...
BECOMING TRANSPARENT DRAWING
Like I’ve said before, I’m bad at social media. So when Transparent Drawing is tagged on Facebook; actually, when Gail White, who is a poet, writes a short poem titled Becoming Transparent Drawing, I...
NATIONAL TURBULENCE AND UTOPIA
As mentioned before, I am reading Erik Reece’s Utopia Drive. If you missed it, here is a link to the page ARTLESS ART, which brings a Shaker sensibility to what we do here at...
WATER SOLUBLE PENS 1
Some pens are water soluble. In our continuing exploration into drawing instruments that are water soluble (see WATER SOLUBLE PENCILS, for example,) how about water soluble pens? Most felt tip and ball point pens...
DRAW IN WATER
How wet is wet? Very. On the page WATER SOLUBLE PENCILS 2, we introduced the concept of drawing on a wet piece of paper. And I am finding that the wetter the paper, the...
CHUANG-TSU AND THE CRAB
We heard the story of Picasso and the Chicken. We closed that page with the proviso that we didn’t know if it was true or not. So I wanted to record a similar version...
WATER SOLUBLE PENCILS 2
These pencils are great. Per the previous WATER SOLUBLE PENCILS page, I did what I said I was going to do. In the drawing at the top, I first wetted the paper completely. And...
WATER SOLUBLE PENCILS
I tried out a water soluble pencil this morning. I didn’t know they existed. I was looking thru the Dick Blick pages, and then realized something like this was made. So I ordered a...
WORDLESS ART
“Architecture seems to be confined to drawings and hope. Can this essentially wordless art – that is, this art that lies just beyond the reach of words – negotiate the barriers of its present...
POETIC IMMORTALS
On a recent excursion thru the Metropolitan Museum, I came upon these ink drawings, shown below, of famous Japanese poets. The drawings were done by Sakai Hoitsu (1761-1828) and are titled The 36 Poetic...
FRAGONARD AT THE MET
We just saw the drawing show, Fragonard Drawing Triumphant, at the Met. From the text on the wall as you enter the show, “Drawing was a natural medium for Jean Honore’ Fragonard (1732-1808). It...
NATIONAL WORDS
Wouldn’t it be great if National Decisions could be made based on drawings rather than words? Can you imagine having strong opinions about a set of sketches, rather than a set of words? Or...
PAINTING DIMENSIONALIZATION
These pages have taken many directions. Yet one that I keep coming back to is using the oil paintings of Le Corbusier and Picasso as generators for my Transparent Drawings. Let’s call this painting...
FORTIFIED CHURCHES
Here is a new building type, fortified churches. When in Croatia, we came upon this incredible example in Vrboska on the island of Hvar. The name of the church is St. Mary of Mercy. ...
I FANTASIZE
I’ve been doing this for about three years now. Three years seems like nothing. Like they say, it is never work when you enjoy what you do. And it never feels like work to...
CUBIST TRANSPARENCY
It still seems amazing to me that the Cubists did not work transparently. we have touched on this concept some time ago, see the link to the page titled NO TRANSPARENT PAINTING. The opacity...
WHO WOULD HAVE LIKED TRANSPARENT DRAWING?
Corb, for one. He of course considered himself a painter first. And his daily painting was a basic exercise in composition, completion, balance, form, etc. Admittedly his paintings were opaque. Yet I think he...
REPRESENTATIONAL TRUTH
“This is the entire history of Western painting, right here. The struggle to represent things accurately. And then, when we develop a language for rigorously rendering 3D shapes in two-dimensional space, what do we...
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