ACRYLIC INK
The drawing above was done using acrylic ink rather than watercolors. Turns out, acrylic ink behaves nearly identically to watercolors. It applies easily with the same watercolor brush that you normally use. The washes...
Tagged: TRANSPARENT DRAWING
BEHIND OPAQUE WALLS
Jung admonishes us to see behind opaque walls. The last chapter of Carl Jung’s book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, includes this passage: “…for me the “dividing walls” are transparent. That is my peculiarity. Others find...
HOUSE DRESS
All of this drawing of Kawakubo’s garments got me thinking about form and space. Form as in something interesting and unique to look at. Space as a volume for a human. One of the...
ALL THE DESIGN DISCIPLINES
Transparent Drawing is for all the design disciplines. Industrial Design? We have touched on it at the page Industrial Designers Do It Better. And then recently, I covered the Olivetti Valentine typewriter: see Sotsass...
KAWAKOONING
Did DeKooning ever design a dress? Not that we know of. Yet one of his favorite inspirations was the feminine form. Think of the Women series. Did Kawakubo ever depict the feminine form, as...
PROFANE REPRESENTATION
Let’s say you are an artist in the Middle Ages. In that guise, you did not want your drawings or paintings to look representational. Instead, you deliberately constructed your images in a non linear...
WHAT MONDRIAN KNEW
Any time the great poet Charles Wright uses the word transparent, we take notice. “As Mondrian knew, Art is the image of an image of an image, More vacant, more transparent With each repeat...
MUSEUM SKETCHERS
Possibly you have heard of the organization Urban Sketchers. Urban Sketchers do what the title suggests; they sketch in urban settings. And they do it in a group. So there is a social component...
MCLUHAN AND TRANSPARENCY
WhenMarshall McLuhan uses the word transparency, we take note. In the passage below, they give us the following description at what happened at the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance: “The rebirth...
KAWAKUBO – ABSTRACT EXCELLENCE
I can’t stop drawing Kawakubo. Since I saw the Comme des Garcons exhibit at the Met, I have made a Kawakubo inspired Transparent Drawing every day. The more that I look at the photos...
TRANSPARENT PHOTOGRAPHY
In an article in Psychological Science, as reported in the Times, researchers found that taking photos serves to increase your memory of the experience. The studies found that taking photos increases your engagement with...
KAWAKUBO AT THE MET
We just saw the Comme des Garcons show at the MET. I am surprised by my emotional response to the show and how inspiring it is. This is a 20 year retrospective of Rei...
YOU’VE GOT TO START SOMEWHERE
Picasso said, that when drawing, “You have to start somewhere. You can always erase reality later on.” That is a powerful thought, given that it applies to our continued search for the means and...
PRACTICE AND THE COMPUTER
The computer pushes some people away from the practice of architecture. This thought evolved via a Facebook conversation with two Transparent Drawing followers. It had never occurred to me that the computer might turn...
TRANSPARENT CUBISM
Historians have divided Cubism into two segments. Analytic and Synthetic. Analytic Cubism happened at the beginning of the movement, including the years 1908-1912. The concepts of Analytic Cubism are central to Transparent Drawing. “It...
DRAWING LIGHT
In Morocco, it is all about the light. We saw a couple of my attempts to respond to the Moroccan light with the drawings at the page Representational Transparency and Ordinary Building – Morocco. When light...
DRAW LIKE A BYZANTINE
A new phrase, Draw Like a Byzantine, has crept into these pages without any warning. Let’s try to formalize the meaning of this phrase so as to bring it into our lexicon. To Draw...
ELIMINATE THE VANISHING POINT
You want to Draw Like a Byzantine? Eliminate the vanishing point. Have you ever thought about the cultural hegemony of the act of placing the vanishing point on your paper? There you are, drawing...
VANISHING POINT, A SHORT HISTORY
A few pages ago, we made clear that for the Byzantines, in the Middle Ages, the vanishing point was within the viewer. See The Vanishing Point Is Within You. If we look at art...
ORDINARY BUILDING – MOROCCO
It is the light. The constantly changing light. And the blueness of the sky. In Morocco, I found myself spending a lot of time looking directly up. And one reason was the courtyards. Every...
THE VANISHING POINT IS WITHIN YOU
In the Renaissance, the vanishing point was placed on the surface of the painting, or inside the painting, if you will. The space of the painting then continued outward so as to include the...
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