YOU HAVE TO START SOMEWHERE

I like to look at the basic geometries of Le Corbusier’s paintings for inspiration for my drawings. The image above was loosely structured around this painting, titled Icone 3, by Corb. When you find an artist that you like, and this can be any artist in any medium, you develop a comfortable knowledge of their work. If you can continue to find inspiration from an artist, you get to know their signature moves better. Each drawing that you do puts you more in touch with their inspirations.

Much of his inspiration was the human form. Although that is not exactly evident in this example, there is a humanistic organicism to his painting.  There should be no surprise here given his invention in the modular method of proportion. The human form was a generator for much of the basic geometry of his paintings. And the human form was a generator for how you interact with his buildings.

I hope you are seeing a pattern here. Corb just did not generate his geometry from scratch, which at first glance, you might think is the case. Instead, he used a generator. Which is not much different from our use of the geometry of his paintings for our drawings.

And while you can accurately say that my drawing really looks nothing like his painting, my answer is that is great.  I was probably looking at a smaller section of his work and did my drawing based on that.

As I have said before, the genesis of our concepts and how we go about generating these concepts is not addressed in the vast majorities of our education. Or another way to say this is, how can we strengthen our abilities to use that which inspires us?

The only way I know is thru practice. A simple three dimensional transparent drawing generated from the flat geometry of an artist that we love is very powerful. You have to start somewhere. From this basic two dimensional composition can spring a fun and personal three dimensional drawing. And the more that we do exactly this, the more our design capacities are augmented.