RETURN TO DRAWING

The web pages titled Return to Drawing caught my attention. It is a beautiful expose on analogue drawing. Rick and Cindy Black, Architects in Austin, are the authors.

Their approach to drawing can be categorized by what I can only call classical. RTD documents how they take architecture students thru Europe, and draw the great Renaissance buildings. Please click thru to their page, link above, and then scroll down: do this now.

Our program brief for the Europe trip stated, ‘We would like you to draw the light in Piazza San Marco. Just remember that you are not making a drawing to sell to other tourists.’ Think of buildings as projective casts, not picturesque forms and figures.

Rick and Cindy Black

You will see students drawing in lush classical settings. There are great gestural drawings, with a dash of watercolor, or a thumbnail of pastel, which are richly evocative. Everything is in Representational Spacetime. Human beings drawing with a pencil and a piece of paper! Drawings of things as they look. This is what drawing should be! Right?

So I wanted to use RTD as a point of departure for Transparent Drawing. By contrast, what is advocated in these pages is:
-don’t sit in front of a building and draw it if you can help it
-take photos instead, with the TD Photography Method
-draw from those photos, with far greater efficiency, later
-hone your Sensory Memory of the piece and place
-draw the entire building as a holistic entity
-explore new pathways, with drawing, to Form Generation

What should be in your mind at this point is two approaches. What is lost, and what is gained? If you want to knowledge a piece for how it looks, there is no question that the superior way to do that is to sit in front of it and draw it. Your eye will capture details and impressions that the camera won’t. From the real, absolute form, you generate truth to the best of your ability. You denote how a form looks, in one instant of time. You do your absolute best to inform how it looks.

The Transparent Drawing method does away with most of that. With our absolute focus on holistic, resolved form, and the pathways to that form, we reject the classical approach. Here, the only way we can draw is with time. Our inclusion of time into the form yields holistic knowledge.

And both approaches are 100% analogue. We both believe in the transformative power of a pencil and a piece of paper. We both use analogue drawing in our architectural practice. We both practice what we preach. And we are both working to demonstrate the immense validity, relevance and superiority of analogue drawing as a pathway to knowledge.