The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 06

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 

1. 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)