EGYPTIAN SPACETIME
What was it like for the Greeks to look back at the art of their predecessors, the Egyptians? “We must never forget that we look at Egyptian art with the mental set we have...
Tagged: TRANSPARENT DRAWING
OBVIOUS FUTILITY
Lockhard writing in 1974: “The attempt to try to show all the aspects and qualities of any designed space or object in any single view is obviously futile.” p138. Futile? This is Lockhard writing...
ANTI-ILLUSIONIST TESSELLATION
Picasso painted from photographs. His use of photographs was: “…a productive to-and-fro between a photo that reduces real volumes to their flat coordinates and a pictorial reinterpretation of that photographic record into anti-illusionist tessellation.” ...
TIME OF SEEING
Transparent Drawing cannot exist without time. To understand completely a three dimensional form, a viewer must have, at minimum, at least two viewing points. The forms and objects that we are drawing are, for...
MICHANGELO AT THE MET
We saw the Michangelo drawing show at the MET. Turns out, he did not draw transparently. No surprise, really, given that he was the pinnacle of the Renaissance. The show forcefully demonstrates the seductive...
DIGITAL INTEGRATION
Can an analogue drawing be part of a digital workflow? Is an analogue drawing that becomes part of a digital workflow, still analogue? Do we need a new term that defines an analogue drawing...
REPRESENTATION AND MEANING
Buddhist theory or practice tells us that at the root of things, forms are empty. That is to say, as one proceeds toward enlightenment, we work to separate the meaning, or content, from form. ...
BROKEN SECRETS
Selfridges department store in Birmingham, England, is iconic. The building is softly undulating. The facade is comprised of aluminum discs that reflect the ambient light. I ran across this article in The Birmingham Daily...
HEIZER TRANSPARENCY
I ran across a series of etchings by Michael Heizer. When I first saw them, my thought was, well, this is at least moving toward transparency. There is an overlapping of shapes. And it...
HEROIC LINES
An image found on the web. A few heroic lines on the paper. A quick wash or two. A resolved, unique and authentic form. That really is at the heart of Transparent Drawing. A...
THE SECRET PHOTOGRAPHER
That should never be part of the title of a book about Le Corbusier. But nevertheless, there it is. The full title, Le Corbusier, The Secret Photographer, was published in 2013. In 2012 at...
THE ORGANISM AND THE OBJECT
The basis of all architecture is drawing. “Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and...
ONE LINE ONE WASH
I think I have achieved enlightenment. My drawing was done with one wash, and one line. The pencil went once to the paper and drew the line. The brush went once to the paper...
DRAW FOR TRUTH
We draw what is right, not what seems right. We draw for truth. Panofsky tells us that there were three components of subjectivity which were codified in the Renaissance representational mindset: subjective emotions, foreshortening,...
KNOWLEDGE AND DATA
Tom Gruber is head of advanced development for Siri at Apple. He has been at the vanguard of AI (Artificial Intelligence) from the very first. And he has specifically been interested in speech recognition...
REPRESENTATION AND WESTERN CONQUEST
The perspective, as it blossomed forth in the Renaissance, worked with newfound rational thinking. Suddenly the world could be explained with the idealized constructs of math, science, logic and the linear perspective. With...
COMBINATORY CREATIVITY
Let’s imagine a fantasy class which gives equal weight to science and art. The design concepts behind Starry Night by van Gogh are just as important as the molecular arrangement of sulphur. The prime...
LIGHT AND DEATH
People who have had near death experiences typically describe the experience as a passage into light. I could not help thinking about this as we experienced James Turrell’s Perfectly Clear (1991) at Mass MOCA....
THE SHOCK OF THE OLD
When I see an architect’s office, I can’t resist looking in the window. And I always see analogue drawings scattered across desktops. There are usually computer generated representational color images on the walls. But...
ABSTRACTION AND REPRESENTATION
Transparent Drawing is not abstract. Yet most people, when presented with Transparent Drawing, describe it as abstract. For most of us, the drawing either looks real or it does not. And if it does...
OIL PAINT, THE MEDIUM
The problem with oil paint, the medium, is that it is opaque. “The special qualities of oil painting lent themselves to a special system of conventions for representing the visible. The sum total of...
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