THE ARCHITECT SHALL DESIGN A FORM
The fundamental task of a designer is to design a form. Before any problem is solved there must be a form. Yet, designers are seen as problem solvers. A client may say, I...
Tagged: BYZANTINE SPACETIME
SIMULTANEOUS DRAWING
In Transparent Drawing, I used the words simultaneous, and simultaneously, 20 times. Drawing simultaneously is one of my central concepts. As I took these photos a few days ago in the countryside of Girona,...
THE FOUR SPACETIMES
Drawing is a statement of time and space. To draw representationally, for example, there is a tacit acceptance that we will summarize one instant in time with a linear spatial construct. To Draw Like...
EGYPTIAN SPACETIME
What was it like for the Greeks to look back at the art of their predecessors, the Egyptians? “We must never forget that we look at Egyptian art with the mental set we have...
REPRESENTATION AND WESTERN CONQUEST
The perspective, as it blossomed forth in the Renaissance, worked with newfound rational thinking. Suddenly the world could be explained with the idealized constructs of math, science, logic and the linear perspective. With...
PROFANE REPRESENTATION
Let’s say you are an artist in the Middle Ages. In that guise, you did not want your drawings or paintings to look representational. Instead, you deliberately constructed your images in a non linear...
MCLUHAN AND TRANSPARENCY
WhenMarshall McLuhan uses the word transparency, we take note. In the passage below, they give us the following description at what happened at the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance: “The rebirth...
DRAW LIKE A BYZANTINE
A new phrase, Draw Like a Byzantine, has crept into these pages without any warning. Let’s try to formalize the meaning of this phrase so as to bring it into our lexicon. To Draw...
VANISHING POINT, A SHORT HISTORY
A few pages ago, we made clear that for the Byzantines, in the Middle Ages, the vanishing point was within the viewer. See The Vanishing Point Is Within You. If we look at art...
THE VANISHING POINT IS WITHIN YOU
In the Renaissance, the vanishing point was placed on the surface of the painting, or inside the painting, if you will. The space of the painting then continued outward so as to include the...
WHERE THE NO WORDS ARE
A passage from John Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook: “Where there are no words, knowledge comes through physical acts and through the space through which those acts are made; by permitting each act the space conferred...
WRITING AND DRAWING
It is easier to draw a letter than to write a drawing.
CHUANG-TSU AND THE CRAB
We heard the story of Picasso and the Chicken. We closed that page with the proviso that we didn’t know if it was true or not. So I wanted to record a similar version...
FORTIFIED CHURCHES
Here is a new building type, fortified churches. When in Croatia, we came upon this incredible example in Vrboska on the island of Hvar. The name of the church is St. Mary of Mercy. ...
DRAWING MACHINES
Since the beginning, machines have been developed with the goal of reducing subjective human interpretation. This thought has been with us since the 17th century, and has basically been unchanged into today. And of...
TANGLED UP IN ART
I saw my Transparent Drawings on a gallery wall. There they were, nicely framed and lit. And all around them were the artworks of artists. I am very happy to have my drawings on...
SUPERFICIAL IMAGES
Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida have all argued that the dominance of vision in our culture has only served to separate ourselves from the world. While I don’t agree with this premise, I do understand...
THE PROOF IS ON THE PAPER
Visual Facts is a concept introduced here at transparent drawing. For a very brief primer on Visual Facts, this link takes you to a previous page. The word fact is, etymologically, an act or...
BYZANTINE MOSAIC
This photograph was taken from a mosaic on the ceiling of the Chora Church in Istanbul. As we have seen, the medieval artist did not have a cohesive and geometrically correct framework for their...
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