Category: Design

The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 07

5/6/2016

Middle of Essay – Illustrated section on Basic Design, 3rd of 4 Segments
The reader may consider the current long, illustrated section to be a digression. Johannes describes courses for Basic Design in the Visual Arts suitable for both art students and those in other fields of study.
After these 4 Segments the Essay returns to more general discussion of art education and art theory. Rather than omit this section, it is included as part of the original essay.

        6. Detail and Mass:
              We grasp readily how spherical sections derived from the latitudes and longitudes
              of the globe render its form legibly and clearly. But any pattern may be altered to conform to any
              surfaces. For the most complex configurations do only three things against the perspective grids
              we can inscribe upon all forms:

The parts of shapes either parallel, incline, or curve against the grid. They are thus able to reveal how they function in the perspective situation of each form. The lines of grids can also intersect at various – indeed, unlimited – inclinations to each other, so that reasonable practicality and visual appeal determine shape as well as grid design.

6. Detail and Mass (cont’d)

My overall repeated line descriptions gave me, after considerable struggle, a single way to draw all forms. But here—by a flash of intuition – I strolled, almost at my ease, into an enabling insight for rendering all forms in all possible ways.

             Since the limits of a shape configuration are linear, suitable line elements – as my human profile
             shows – can render form as readily as solid areas.

6. Detail and Mass (cont’d)

Depth relationships can be expressed by merest hints, so that stress of visibility must rather fall upon the labors best able to reward the viewer.

6. Detail and Mass (cont’d)

This task my Boulders at the Shore below tries to carry out at the change of elements where solid ground and sky strip meet in the considerable distance. The sharpened focus upon distant sights is also a function of the eye, as well as of the camera, and familiar to photographers. But a precise consistency of the descriptive weight with every point in space – as the earlier example of my Partly Failing Intuition showed, is nearly always an impossibility.

It is not a law of light direction which rules description but the geometrically precise relationship between the parts and the whole – that is, between detail and mass. My demonstrations thus intend to pose a model or prototype of Basic Knowledge for the treatment of all objects at once massive and detailed – that is, literally everything we see. But it bears repeating here that the play of light – which we do not need for clear articulation – is an inexhaustibly rich source that we may draw upon as if it were an entire “spare imagination.

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The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 06

4/29/2016

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Middle of Essay – Illustrated section on Basic Design, 2nd of 4 Segments
The reader may consider the current long, illustrated section to be a digression. Johannes describes courses for Basic Design in the Visual Arts suitable for both art students and those in other fields of study.
After these 4 Segments the Essay returns to more general discussion of art education and art theory. Rather than omit this section, it is included as part of the original essay.

H. Two-Dimensional Design, Second Term

Volume and Space Perception: Progressive systematic learning was in the Renaissance brought to bear on every field of study, and sought to put man’s entire visible domain within the artist’s competence and reach. From that time, Western Art separated more decisively from foreign art traditions than these differ from each other.

             This once seamless continuity of learning may now be weakened, because Modern Art inclines more
              to celebrate that man is able to emote and feel instead of his ability to reason, know and understand.
             To emote and feel is no achievement – we may as well take pride in the possession of an alimentary
              canal. What I feel may gradually grow apparent; but what you and I can learn and understand together
              is the reason for this program.

        2. Abstraction: The self-understanding of Modern Art regards abstraction as its central innovation, but
              its grasp of what that really is seems very vague at best. For Modern Art has sought to tell us that
              Abstraction equals progressive Non-Representation, where the least recognizable equals the most
              abstract.

The visual arts have no monopoly upon abstraction, because abstraction illuminates with clarity very various endeavors. If I describe to you an outing with fine sights and many pleasures, I should focus on the highlights while deleting dull and trivial detail. Far from any aim of non-representation I should want to isolate the quintessence of the action and experience of my outing to show more plainly why it gave me joy.

Similarly, we can reduce to their essentials our visible surroundings and say the whole world is made up of areas of dark and light, or we may choose to see it wholly as abutting fields of color. For my aims in Basic Design II, all the world is my source, once more, for the derivation which I call Abstraction. But here the work is technically more demanding than it was before.

        3. The First Operation of Abstraction: A dog, a tree, a table and a stone differ sharply from each other
               but share a property of cubic magnitude. They each possess Height, Depth and Width – the attributes
               of Volume. Thus, Volume is a signal Derivation from the unwieldy visible abundance of the world
               and – here particularly the Abstraction of Dog, Tree, Table and Stone.

To make this abstraction visible on the level page, a favorable angle of regard has to be selected. For, if a cube shows only a single face, we see a square and not a volume. But when we rotate or tilt the cube to offer more sides than just one – preferably in asymmetric combination – its three-dimensional character is made clear.

My linear likenesses of Geometric Solids below, and the Human form shown in an earlier illustration, are literally an isolation of the sparse essentials of their three-dimensionality from all distractions and confusions that clutter our world.

Abstraction (cont’d)

4. The Second Operation of Abstraction: If you compare my outlined volumes to the picture below which my wife has named The Floating Cube, you discover the latter to be more complex and offered in a setting to strengthen the illusion of a solid body advancing from a depth of space. It is the terminal abstraction and completion of my task, derived – like all foregoing stages – from the Final Cause that posts the artist’s problem.

The Floating Cube was made to give the viewer cause to feel attracted to it. If I succeed, my augmented cube will be more beautiful than its outline predecessor, because we call a visible thing beautiful when it engages our participation through the sense of sight. We name it interesting when it engages our intellect and capacity for thought and, once more, we call it beautiful if – as music does – it engages us through the sense of hearing.

The Second Operation of Abstraction re-supplies, in orderly successive stages, the stark essentials – isolated by the first operation from all random clutter and distraction – with additions aiming to prepare them for the task of effective contact with the viewer and their role of being looked at with appreciation.

5. The Continuity of Surfaces: The experiment of my faulty intuition resulted in a final sphere illustrating an acoustic fancy in which voices of exactly regulated volume are calling to a blind man to let him hear the sphere he cannot see.

From there I learned that heavy strokes which never alter their direction, but whose changing weight creates strong contrasts at the identifying edges of solids – such as pyramids and cubes, are not suitable for articulating curvatures, but that these exact a more densely packed description of many finer strokes.

While keeping the gain of having learned to make edges visible through contrast, we may once more shift stroke-direction freely. With reduction of detail and much agile and inventive probing, we can delineate the human head and figure or a tree and every other class of form.

This study of continuous overall description – though valuable, is not indispensable. But from it follow consequences I regard as absolutely necessary learning.

The spaces where my description grows heavier and looks like shadowing need not be so considered, but can be simply seen as clues to the surface of a form. Shaded and illuminated areas have a precise geometric kinship to the surfaces they cover and are always geometric segments of the whole. It follows to suppose that geometric sections of our own design can give the same clear legibility as those that are the product of illumination. And here my intuition did not fail. With the sole exception of pits and elevations seen directly from above, light and shade may be dismissed as a descriptive tool. And what the First Semester of Design has taught about the art of arranging and composing shapes assumes now overmastering importance.

(Section on Basic Design Courses to be continued next week)

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The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 04

4/15/2016

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In the early 1990s this was given first as a speech to a class at the Lancaster County Art Association, and in briefer form afterwards on a couple of other occasions.
Some of the illustrations come from the text, others from references to physical works that Johannes brought with him, and one from live demonstration. (4th of eleven sections)

E. Practical Knowledge

Philosophical reflections may lead the artist to many profitable understandings. Practical knowledge, it is said, leads him directly toward action. But, as insight must inform us what is, and what is not, a worthwhile practice, we must not proceed unphilosophically when we enter into action, in order not to paint ourselves into a corner.

The Foundation Program: I take the closest interest in the first year of instruction at the college level. For, if that program is the product of a sharply focused mind, it can teach with unmatchable lucidity how the many labors of an artist ought to be pursued. Moreover, later – in more specialized activity – neither so crystalline a clarity nor this great variety are altogether possible.

           Though we shall look at works far surpassing a beginning education, foundation study will be
            the perspective from which we pay attention to them.

      2. The Parts of Art: To study our English tongue we were taught to parse a sentence into its
            grammatical elements and the parts of speech. We thus looked precisely at the constituents
            of language and learned how each one helps to build the whole.

           The Foundation Program has the very same assignment. It divides the body of the artist’s
            learning into the parts of Art, in order to resolve with certainty what each part really is
            and how it therefore can contribute to the entire realm.

      3. Descriptive Geometry: Classical art instruction teaches two scientific disciplines, Anatomy
            and Descriptive Geometry. The latter has longer reach and is hence the more important.
            Descriptive Geometry is the scientific study of three-dimensionality, and deals with volumes
            whose surfaces are of three types:

Volumes of the Straight Plane type – Pyramids and Cubes
Volumes whose surfaces include Curved Planes – Cones and Cylinders
Volumes whose surfaces are Double-Curved – such as Sphere and Ovoids, and also the Tire.

3) (Descriptive Geometry, cont’d)

As a first year course this study may end with the scientific consideration of perspective.

      3 . (Descriptive Geometry, cont'd)

             Since every basic study prepares the way for more advanced instruction, we should take
        note – whether or not a given art school offers it – what this advanced work ought
      to be: In Descriptive Geometry that is the combination of volumes in a study
          the Intersection of Form, and the scientific study of light, including – beyond light
            and shade – Mirror Optics and Refraction.

      4. Drawing and Observation: This includes learning the use of the pencil as a Sighting Rod
           for the exact spatial disposition of all objects and their parts. But description at its best
           is not a copy of the subject in various shades of gray.

The play of light produces a warehouse-full of shape configurations hidden from the lay observer, but equipping the artist with a repertory he could never imagine, let alone design, solely on his own. Once such observations are accustomed work, shaping can be freely altered – even dark and light reversed – for better clarity and more eloquent design.

To draw the figure, we must differentiate the subtle balance of obliques in the Living Form from the right angles that mostly rule the man-made world.

Human Anatomy is not Foundation Study. It leads ultimately to a map of muscles, lifelong in the artist’s mind, which is induced upon the skeleton but a little more inclusive than the essential minimum. The study which makes this sparse but lasting memory of a possibility has to be a great deal more elaborate and thorough.

The skeleton of animals may be a sufficient clue to the shape and placement of the basic muscle groups, since the principles of leverage remain unaltered, so that a detailed knowledge of Comparative Anatomy – though good to have – will not be indispensable for a persuasive rendering of animalic muscularity.

Comment:
Sometimes college-level students have called the above course material unnecessary for training a visual arts student -- your opinion . . . .

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The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 02

4/1/2016

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G. Perfection, Compromise and Wear

Compromise: The perfection of an artifact is not bound by a single function but by several that are traded off against each other: A pitcher permits us to transport a liquid as a solid and ought also to dispense this liquid without spillage. Its interior should be easily accessible for cleaning and its handle so positioned and so shaped that its weight is manageable and its pouring inclination easily controlled.
Wear: Even a thoroughly made thing composed of best materials is, in the end, reduced through use to its final material substances and then discarded by the owner. Wear – the deformation of an artifact through use – can be long delayed, but not entirely avoided. A favorable Pace of Wear goes with function and – as a good desired by the patron – is required for completion of the job.

H.   The Integrity and Wholeness of a Perfect Thing

        The constraints of compromise and wear are difficulties which we may dismiss once we have managed them as well as circumstance allows. But we can center ourselves so narrowly on practical utility that we are scarcely able to endure and live with our functional creations.

        Unsightliness – through irritating or distracting and thereby weakening the user – impairs the function of an object. Moreover, artifacts are not just with us when they do their work, but also at their idle periods. Thus, among their varied functions, that of giving satisfaction to the viewer who beholds them has to be included. An artifact is made completely – that is, wholly finished and in that sense perfect – when visual excellence and utility are joined.

        When a man-made thing thus embodies an optimal reply to each of the user’s sensible requirements, it will bear wholly the character of all that it is made to be. It will be itself. That is, within the constraints of its own integrity, it will be perfection, in quite a similar sense that geometric shapes also can be perfect. A circle, for example, will be perfect within the limits of its own identity, because it is unsurpassable in its character of circularity.

I.   The Excellence of Art

        Visual excellence is an attribute of all good art toward one especial function, namely, that of being seen. It is essential in both the applied as well as fine arts, and consists at least of two requirements.

Proportion: The just relationship of visual parts is an expression of proportions resulting from the artist’s power to compose by using as a guide his own attentively observed involuntary attractions and repulsions. These are not intuitions, experimentally predicting possibilities, but instinctive reflex actions, such as those which cause us to withdraw from a foul or rotten smelling food but to surrender eagerly to the appealing smell of fresh-baked bread.

           Neither are they predilections in a sense of taste by which we may be fonder of peaches than
           of grapes and prefer blonde girls to brunettes.
          Just proportionality gives to us the unimpeded visual coherence of a thing and hence its ready
           legibility.    (This should be demonstrated live.)

      2. Clarity: However, clarity is an intrinsic property of the work itself and therefore no more
           dependent upon who can look at it with understanding than is the legibility of writing to be
           judged by those who do not know their letters. For clarity inheres in the exactitude of the
           artist’s reconstruction of his purpose in visible material form. Clarity brings illumination into
           our minds and is there loved by our understanding.        Clarity does not mean an expression
           is directly understood but only that it is amenable to comprehension. However, since we
           mostly want to understand any subject we consider, we love lucidity for granting us what
           we desire.

J.   The Common Foundation

        The Basic Designs – both two and three dimensional – are a line of learning aimed at Visual Literacy pursued by students in every field of art but thereafter put to different uses. All able expression of visual literacy is valuable and deserves a place in art. But the different art disciplines do not, on that account, produce interchangeable results.

      1. Pictorial Limitation:
            I cannot put my pictures to work to pour coffee or bicycle myself downtown. But, equally, I
            cannot put the artifacts suitable for these two uses to the assignments that pictures may
            perform.

   2. Pictorial Expression:

A friend called my Little Steamer in Distress by the name of The Little Tug That Could, and thus read most precisely my intention of articulating tenacious pluckiness in the face of towering adversity. A whole drama of the elements unfolds within the limits of a private space:

2. Pictorial Expression (cont’d)

Demons over Moby Dick takes up Melville’s many times repeated phrase “the demoniac fish.” My strange beings in the sky are thus the Demon Allies helping the Demoniac Fish in his demoniac work.

2. Pictorial Expression (cont’d)

Winged Demon and Demonic Monolith are both malevolent and threatening. But the winged creature must find his victims and close his talons on them bodily, while the Demonic Monolith, his furnace eye flashing open in the late afternoon, will work an imponderable but far greater menace at long range.

              Pictorial interpretation of Literature, Fantasy and Life is beyond the reach of objects of
              utility, which are expressive chiefly of the use to which we put them, and closely limited
              therefore to an excellence of visual form and the material service desired by the patron,
              without profound interpretive intention.

        3. Artifacts in Numbers:
              The potential of an artifact is thus exhausted only if we regard it by itself. A work of
              Architecture with various details – inside as well as out – and its assembly of artifacts for
              every sort of use, especially indoors, can, overall, be far more than the sum of all these
              parts. They can give an eloquent articulation of the owners’ habits, character and will.
              Whole human lives express themselves that way. The discipline of Archaeology, from just
    such clues, endeavors to reconstruct entire cultures.

             Thus, artifacts in numbers – coherently selected and arrayed, achieve an expressive range
             that eludes them singly. For this breadth of creativity, apparently, was Architecture named
             “Queen of all the Arts” by Michelangelo.

        Artifacts can be as powerfully and as far expressive as products of the Fine Arts. But while the latter are able to achieve this purpose singly, artifacts themselves cannot.

        Yet, of the many times when a judgment of what will be better and what worse cannot be evaded, in this case we may let the question rest and strive to design better the objects of utility as well as nobler works of art. It is important only to thoroughly understand what each is all about.

K.   Two Definitions of Art

Defining the Exactions of Making: Art is a thing ably joined together by the imposition of ideas on suitable materials toward clearly stated aims of form and function. The second definition follows from the first, to tell us what form and function want to do.

       2. Defining the Purpose of the Making: Visual Art is a language for engaging the participation
             – not of our sense of hearing, but of sight – for sharing, by an apt assembly of the visual parts
             of color, form, and line, the artist’s intention, with our open eyes and receptive minds, so that
             we shall be enriched and, in the end, fulfilled.

Comment:
         You might describe an artifact which you own and love that is beautiful and expressive - a work of art in itself . . .

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The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 01

3/25/2016

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In the early 1990s this was given first as a speech to a class at the Lancaster County Art Association, and in briefer form afterwards on a couple of other occasions. Some of the illustrations come from the text, others from references to physical works that Johannes brought with him, and one from live demonstration. (FIRST of eleven sections)

I     The Artifact and the Art Object

A.   Rules for Right Making in Utility and Art
        In past times distinctions were drawn between products of the Fine Arts and humble Objects of Utility, adding to the latter ever the inferior rank. Much thinking in this century turned this around, proclaiming the well-made artifact the equal of the work of art and, in all essential ways, indistinguishable from it.
        The difficulty may not be amenable to any final settlement. There is a common good desired of them both: We want our furnishings as well as our pictures to be beautiful. But their capabilities and purposes can also differ widely; and that needs to be accounted for before this search for understanding ends. Yet, for our start it will be helpful that the ground rules for creating a good product govern equally the object of utility and one existing solely for its beauty – the Applied as well as the Fine Arts.

B.   John Benson’s Course and the Twin Purposes of All Instruction
        Undergraduates at Rhode Island School of Design in the 1950s studied during one semester a subject called Philosophy of Design. The course was taught by a great man, John Howard Benson. It was beautifully organized, and ably introduced us to a domain of intellectual concern that few artists ever get to know. Also, it fulfilled better than most others the twin purposes of all instruction:

It saved the student time, advancing our understanding far beyond what any of us could have reached on our own in whatever many years; and –
For me, it stimulated the widely-ranging labors of philosophic thought, now making possible this series of talks.

        I have in my possession only skeleton notes of this course, so that the fleshing out will be my work and its failings my responsibility. But my debt would be plain to any who have shared this excellent beginning, and deserves to be acknowledged.

C.   Ways of Delivering the Wrong Results
        When an otter lies upon its back and opens a mussel by breaking the casing with a stone, or a raptor rises to some height and drops its catch to shatter on the ground below, or again, an early hominid seized a rock to cleave with it the brain-case of his game, the deeds appear identical in their complexity of mental action. But they are most dissimilar in their cultural and, in the end, historic consequences. Man alone evolved to overcome, to an extent, the specific limits all other species failed to breach. These, however, remain the causes of inferior work at the hands of man, to the present day. They are:

Ignorance: Inadequate understanding of the problem to be solved in terms of the materials and the tools required, as well as of Technique – that is, the body of orderly procedures demanded by the job.
Lack of Good Will: If our purposes are feeble or we intend to cheat the buyer, the outcome must be flawed.
Lack of Inventive Sensibility: That is, the intelligent discernment of a promising conception, or road to choose – the failure to see beyond what our teachers have transmitted, in the sense of Leonardo’s dogma that “It is a wretched student who cannot surpass his master.”
Lack of Skill: A kinesthetic ignorance, not of the intellect, that is, but of the muscles through want of aptitude or training. Failure to govern our tools as instrumental extensions of the body, that is, of bodily dexterity and strength.

The way we fail by Ignorance, Ill Will, Want of Imagination, and Bodily Ineptitude portrays man as a being who at his best can succeed by all their opposites. That is – by his gifts of Reason, Will, Forward-Looking Vision, and Dexterity. In consequence, man recognizes . . .

D. The Worthwhile and Essential Callings of Man’s Life

Science, or Right Knowing: Assembled by the faculty of intellect, conscious realizations bound by actuality and truth, not subject to the will. I have some comments to contribute later about how knowledge must rely on will to constitute itself. But will is not involved in what is and what is not a truth.
Prudence, or Right Doing: choices made by the faculty of will. It presupposes and depends on knowledge, and we often know much better than we are behaving. We smoke, though we know it devours our lungs. Though we know fattening foods are harmful and will cause us to grow heavy, we eat them all the same. Right Doing calls upon the power of resolve to sustain an appropriately chosen path, that is, upon free will.
Art, or Right Making: It presupposes and depends upon Right Knowing as well as on the Right Resolve, but prospers by the Faculty of Intuition – what I have called Inventive Sensibility – which, forward-looking, takes us from the known to the unknown, and is thereby our means of progress.

        Of all the callings, the Arts are most clearly dependent upon skill, that is, the artist’s corporeal suitability for his work of making.

E.   The Causes of Things Made
        There are reasons, or causes, why Man-Made Things Exist

Final Cause: The beginning, as opposed to the final, form. The end for which a work is undertaken, the problem posted by the patron. The intended function of the object will therefore be a good desired by the user.
Material Cause: The substances from which a thing is made, and without which it would not exist. These are chosen always for their serviceable qualities toward the desired end.
Efficient Cause: The means by which materials are given their appropriate shape through one of the following:

The Material Means, that are the artist’s Tools
Kinesthetic Means, which are the artist’s Skills
Technical Means, which are Instrumental Actions or Techniques that are

                    the employment of the tools in their right relationship to the materials
                    and of the materials to each other.
                   Techniques are the union of the Material and Efficient Causes. Materials
      properly chosen for their purpose are shaped according to what the right
                    tools and materials can suitably be made, and want, to do for a desired end.

         4. Formal Cause: The solution of the problem and its final form are achieved in
               Stages. The Stages are reductions, that is, Abstractions derived from the
               problem posted by the patron. Stages constitute the successive images
               to which the materials must by shaped.

        [Other Causes than those cited as Antecedents of Results –from notes at end of essay:

First Cause – the self-created being and prime mover – God

Immanent Cause – originating or evolving within an entity (Spinoza)
Transient Cause – originating outside the entity affected by it (Spinoza)
Occasional Cause – a desire or resolve as remote cause (occasion) but not an immediate – such as the efficient – cause of an effect.]

F. Stages as Instrumental Intermediate Forms

Stages are thus Instrumental Intermediate Forms. Themselves deliberately simple, they clarify one step at a time the tasks to be performed, so that the greatest complications can be managed. They represent the orderly Division of the Work Path, and serve equally for the tasks of mass production and the creation of unique works in the fine arts.
Through dividing the Work Process into its appropriate sequential forms – each requiring the performance of but simple tasks – the artist is delivered from anxiety and put at rest in his own mind about the progress of the job.

Clarity of planning and simplicity of operations are the purpose of the Stages.

They represent a good desired by the artist rather than the patron.

Only to the degree that tasks have grown accustomed can the required

                  Stages be well known. But for the breaking of new ground, not only
                  knowledge, will, and skill, but also inventive sensibility, is brought to bear
                  to set the correct milestones in their places as the Work Path gradually
                  unfolds. It is here, when we must rely on our uncertain intuitions, that we
                  cannot altogether escape our own uneasiness of mind.

        3. The last of the abstractions that we call a Stage is the Final Form and
               conclusion of the worker’s effort. It represents perfection as a thing complete
               and thoroughly constructed.

               Perfection is here not an attribute divine, but must be rightly understood as a
     property of man-made things within their range of possibilities, that is, within
               the impediments or limits of the job. When the last possible duty is faithfully
               performed, perfection as achieved because we can do no more – the final
               chore and last detail.