THEMATIC DRAWING – HOUSE DRESS

As I have developed and evolved Transparent Drawing, I have generated thousands of drawings. Most of the drawings that I do end up being thematic. One of the themes that I always enjoy is what I have defined as House Dress.

House Dress was introduced some months ago. The basic idea is that in most every gable roof house that is built, the spatial volume within the gable is never harvested for human life. So you take that wasted volume and proceed to make volumetric additions and subtractions, inspired by various sources, to a simple gable box form. The result is a new and unimagined form.

The image above is a thematic layout of twelve House Dress drawings. I have begun to realize that there is a layer of knowledge when your transparent drawings are assembled by theme. Plus, it is fun. I have developed many themes over the years, all of which result in unimagined forms. Some of these include 36 Poetic Immortals, Kawakubo, Guide Vane Assembly, LeCorbusier paintings, etc. These are simply my themes: yours without a doubt will be completely different. And as you draw along, your themes will evolve, morph and combine into other themes.

A thematic set of drawings relate to each other when basic rules are followed. For the House Dress theme, I always start by drawing a simple, transparent, gable box. And then I apply knowledge that I gained from another drawing, to see how that knowledge might transform the gable box. That is to say, when I learn something from drawing, say, a Kawakubo piece, I then apply that knowledge to the simple gable box. Another way to describe it is I load my imagination with knowledge from one drawing, and then I unload that knowledge onto a House Dress.

So, for example, in the thematic drawings at the top of this page, look at the top left red drawing. That was drawn with knowledge from the drawing at the left, which is of a Kawakubo dress, knowledged from this photo I took at the MET. I simply did my best to apply the additive and curving forms that I learned from this drawing to the simple gable box.

And all the rest of the drawings were done in the same manner. I applied the knowledge from one source drawing to a House Dress. Other knowledge sources included above are the Selfridges Department Store, the sculpture of Henry Moore, Voroni Diagrams, etc.

When you are looking thru drawings that you did years ago, notations of source, mode, and type prove invaluable. For me at least, these notes are absolutely key to understand what I was looking at, what I was thinking, what I was inspired by. And, these notations help you to later on establish thematic knowledge.