ELSWORTH KELLY AUSTIN

Ellsworth Kelly, one of our heroes, designed a building. It is called Austin, and it is a permanent installation at the Blanton Museum of Art, in Austin, TX.

What I don’t know is astounding to me. I didn’t know that Kelly designed a building. I didn’t know that said building was in Austin, which we were just in. There must be some sort of architectural angel, which inputs subconscious directions to me when we travel. The sequence of events which caused us to dock our urban bikes where we did, walk thru the University of Texas campus, detour thru the Architecture building, take a right, and then…what the hell is that minimalist structure up ahead?

The Austin link above takes you to a nice review of the building in the New York Times. It opened in 2018. The cruciform plan, the barrel vaults, the colored glass all are tokens of a church. But Kelly envisioned the piece simply as a place for contemplation / meditation / prayer, which of course are all the same.

But we have known Kelly thru his plant drawings. We have turned his plant drawings into buildings. And now an actual EK building? Can a drawing reconcile this? Can a transparent drawing move between building and plant drawing? Can TD do this work?

My drawing attempts, thru various drawing layers, to do just that. All of the lines were done with water soluble pens and pencils. The first layer conveys the building. In each subsequent layer, I tried to shift from form to leaf. I then took a brush dipped only in water to make the last lines, as the first gestures of new Form Generation. As the brush traverses the lines, a tone is picked up. I am going to call this new transparent drawing assembly (water soluble lines / wet brush to form) Clear Line.