We launch this manifesto of tumbling and incendiary sight, this manifesto through which today we set up Transparent Drawing, because we want to deliver problem solvers from their gangrene of representation, perspective construction, and...
Laslo Maholy-Nagy was a transparent thinker. This revelation came thru loud and clear at the current Guggenheim show, Moholy-Nagy: Future Present, in NYC. When you think of Maholy-Nagy, you generally think of Constructivist work. ...
We have adopted the word enclosure to describe the objects that we design and draw. Let’s substitute shell for enclosure and see if we derive any further understanding. That is to say, imagine any...
Is there a scientific method? This is the question that James Blachowicz asks in their New York Times article. In these pages, we have been questioning the scientific method. For background, see SCIENTIFIC METHOD...
The photographs that we take and the drawings that we make are a form of memory. They are a form of witnessing and seeing. The things that we see; a form, a detail, a...
Graphite and diamond are both forms of pure carbon. The graphite that we use in our pencils and the diamond that we wear on our fingers is the same stuff. It is just that...
I look at a lot of art when I am making my drawings. Artists that I have found inspirational are Amy Sillman, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, and Picasso, to name a few. I thought...
I had never heard of Stuart Davis. That is, until Schjaldahl’s 20 June New Yorker article made the introduction. Davis was an early modernist painter who completely believed in his artistic mission. He also...
Three views of an ordinary building. I was leafing thru Form Function and Design by Jacques Grillo. On page 108, he includes three views of an ordinary building. And two of the three views...
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...
We are away for a few days, so I thought a travel related post of an ordinary grain facility would be fun. While driving thru the hinterlands of Washington State some months ago, a...
Money. Money is the talisman of our self-regard. We carefully monitor the quantity as a way to shape our actions. It is a fundamental societal currency. It is a proxy for gauging societal achievement....
Has the eye become a fixed, monocular construct? Is the eye truly locked into the Renaissance perspective dimensional grids? Of course not. We move our bodies thru our world on a daily basis. If...
The simultaneous multiple viewpoints represented by Cubism informs our work. For example, this statement from an early French cubist painter in 1912 essentially describes the transparent drawing method; “I see and represent an object,...
The arc of technology is detachment. Each technological breakthrough has come at the expense of our bodily involvement with the world. The more advanced the technology, the greater our physical removal. Name any technological...
Grammar and syntax are the problem. A few pages ago, we outlined the trajectory of human communication, starting with the oral tradition, moving thru the pictorial tradition, and we left off when we started...
Paper. We worship it. It is what we draw on. How is it made? About 95% of the paper that we draw on comes from trees. At the heart of it, the papermaking process...
In the beginning, it was oral. The vessel of cultural knowledge, in the beginning, was oracular; humans communicating with each other with sounds that come from their mouths. The traditions and history of cultures...
Carlos Scarpa has always been a hero. So it was with great interest when I came across this passage in Harry Mallgrave’s The Architect’s Brain; Neuroscience, Creativity and Architecture. This quote is attributed to...
In the 23 May 2016 issue of The New Yorker, Julie Belcove writes about a new architectural exhibition that is being constructed in the Guggenheim. The artist is Kader Attia, and he has set...
In The Republic, it is nice to hear that Plato was skeptical of the linear perspective. Writing in 380 BC, he states in Book X: “Thus (through perspective) every sort of confusion is revealed...
Drawings used to be vessels of knowledge. Yet the trajectory of vision has led to detachment. Instead of a body centered experience, the distancing, as we have seen, promotes the nihilistic attitude that pervades...
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