WOMAN KNOWLEDGE

De Kooning’s drawing, Seated Woman, is iconic. All of de Kooning’s work is. And I finally found the courage to try to knowledge this famous drawing.

Herewith, I think we need to start a project called Redrawing The Masters. What we do is similar to the attempt on this page: take an iconic masterwork and draw it as a search for knowledge of form.

For as we can see, de Kooning was 98% in Representational Spacetime. Despite all of the fracturing and implied movement, this drawing is still working representationally.

For my attempt, I used de Kooning’s gestures as geometry. All of the lines that I drew were with water soluble pencils and pens. And as I applied tones for form resolution, those tones were provided by dissolving the lines with the wet brush. The purple tone was a watercolor tone.

And what do you know! There is in fact form! It’s almost a gestural form. My drawing takes the very small step toward a much fuller knowledge set of Seated Woman. For me, to even approach the figure was as if to cross a barrier. This is a very small first step on an incredibly long and rich pathway.

De Kooning has been approached many times, in many ways, in these pages. A few of the many incorporations:
-we used Pink Angles as a form generator
-we synthesized a De Kooning geometry with Kawakubo’s forms
-we used a de Kooning drawing as a portal to line and form
-we searched for space in a de Kooning painting

And this is not our first attempt at applying knowledge of form to a work that is 100% within Representational Spacetime, or, as we now call it, Redrawing The Masters. See Transparent Landscape, in which we knowledged a Brugel representation.