TRANSPARENT THUMBNAILS

I like social media better than I used to. Because of the interesting discussion that has sprung up on a small corner of LinkedIn, as I mentioned earlier, I am starting to see a cause and effect. It is absolutely great that we share this passion for the analogue drawing and that social media can facilitate our discussion.

Three contributors to the LinkedIn discussion broached the subject of the thumbnail drawing. I really had forgotten about this term. Yet as each of you said, the thumbnail indeed occupies an emotional spot in our hearts. There is the satisfaction of being able to summarize a design on the back of a napkin or on the inside face of a matchbook. Or, as John de Klerk states, make a drawing “literally the size of your thumbnail.” And when you can do that, your design certainly is strong given that it can be understood with just a few lines.

Henri Achten, Associate Professor in Prague, writes, “Because of the size limitation, a thumbnail sketch well-done eliminates everything that is not necessary and exposes the essential components of the depicted thing (representational) or concept (transparent).”

If you do a Google Image search for “thumbnail drawings”, you will see that nearly every example that shows up is representational. At least to my mind, this only confirms our cultural predilection for representation. Which really is no surprise. Yet you would think that when you are drawing with the very keen sense of intuition that a thumbnail requires, that we would by reflex simply let go of our representational tendencies. But we don’t.

Do you think it is possible that we can draw, at least in our thumbnails, between the representational and the concept? Might it be that our classic division of representation and concept is holding us back? Can a thumbnail drawing work very hard to demonstrate a unification of representational and concept so that is it both neither and both?

This discussion caused me to look thru my drawings to try to find the most thumbnailist one that I could. I came up with the one at the top of the page. Maybe it is my own conditioning over the years, but I found it difficult to apply the tag of thumbnail to any of my drawings. I guess that is because as we discussed above, our traditional understanding of thumbnails is not transparent.

So I propose that we introduce the concept of Transparent Thumbnails. Even as you draw the simplest drawing possible of your parti, make it transparent. Or see if you have a thumbnail that you might already have drawn with transparency. Or try to find drawings by others that might be between representation and concept. And then I suggest that we share them with each other.

We’ll let Henri close this post with his very eloquent musing. “The important thing here is that it “goes through your brain and hands” in order to produce it – you have to put vision, thought, and sensitivity to it in order to make it – it is not an automatic process like pointing a camera and clicking on the release button. It forces you to stay with the subject for at least the time it takes to produce it, and thus creates a bond between the person who is drawing and the object that is being drawn.” Can we all say Amen together?

All of Mr. Achten’s quotes used with his permission.