ROCKPORT GRANITE

We are away this week. So I prepared this travel related page ahead of time.

When you travel, you don’t have to limit yourselves to drawing buildings. I took me years to realize this.  Once a year we spend a beach week in Rockport, MA. Rockport is known for its’ granite formations. Granite was quarried from this area and shipped all over the country.

We have been going to Rockport for years. And I always found the granite formations visually interesting and beautiful. One of my favorite things to do is walk along the rocky coast. The granite is usually of a reddish / orange color.There is a wonderful organic geometry to this granite. Yet for years all I could do was sort of look at it. It never made sense to simply draw what I could see.

It has been only in the past two or so years that I have engaged with the granite thru transparent drawing. My method with regard to these rocks is to take interesting photos of the formations. I take pictures of segments that for whatever reason I find somehow attractive.

When I draw the formations from my photos later, of course I can only see one side of the rocks. So I now like to use the basic geometry that I can see. And then I like to project back from this geometry. Thus I am able to make a drawing that is transparent by imagining the surfaces that I cannot see.

In this manner I am able to engage with the wonderful natural geometry. And I am not reduced to simply drawing the rock surfaces that I can see. We know how boring and relatively useless that is.

So, the moral of the story is that in your travels, you don’t have to confine your engagement with just buildings. Like I needed to tell you that?

We all need to visually engage with whatever we find interesting. If it looks interesting, whatever it is, take pictures of it. There will be ways to use those photos to create transparent drawings later.