Category: Basic Design

The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 08

5/13/2016

END of Middle of Essay – Illustrated section on Basic Design, last Segment
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 this last Segment the Essay returns to more general discussion of art education and art theory.

H. Two-Dimensional Design, Second Term (cont'd)

7. Motion: Blur passages of movement are observable chiefly in rapid reciprocal and rotated motion which tend to render the moving parts unreadable.

Relying on the action of the body, a runner may be described firmly and completely and yet give the impression that reminds us of great speed. But the pure form of my two spheres, despite their blurs of motion, is almost at a stand-still.

In my continuous Hill and Dale design, the valleys appear nearly as a running brook by their fragments of description. Thus I obtained a rapid sense of motion where I did not plan for it, and failed to gain it where that was my intention.

Either through shape design or the increasing weight of line, directions can be shown, as in my spinning cube, now sufficiently dissolved in structure to be capable of speed.

8. Texture:

Letting go of the sometimes inexact repeating patterns we call textures is best accomplished by an intermediate abating of its description, before it is made to vanish altogether.

A precisely legible articulation at the boundary seems more essential than any labors carried out within.

Textures are often drawn proportionately larger and number far fewer units than the original in nature. Yet there will be a sense of vaster numbers in the picture than are actually rendered, for reasons worth exploring: Twenty people on St. Peter’s square will be a dot here and a dot there and dots in a few other places. But in the confines of your living room the twenty will constitute a considerable throng and so will twenty figures, or twenty of some other repetition, within the limits of a picture.

9. Form Articulation: Basic Design II as a college course includes neither motion nor texture, but ends
with form articulation.

When direct use is made of this signal gain in conventionally drawn or painted work, it will be good to learn that a shape can blend into its neighbor and yet the blending run a firm and shapely path.

Most of all, the study of volume description here makes optimal use of the compositional experience of the First Semester and, clearly, both are wonderfully practical for good work in all the things drawn or painted later.

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The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 07

5/6/2016

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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 - 05

4/22/2016

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Middle of Essay – Illustrated section on Basic Design, divided into 4 Segments.
     The reader may consider the next 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.

II The Transmission of Knowledge (cont'd)

F. The Basic Designs

Three-Dimensional Design is not sculpture, but teaches only the control of sculptural surfaces and the proper relationship between technical action and the materials chosen for the job. It teaches also that a great simplicity can be very beautiful – not because elaborate magnificence is to be disdained – but that a handsome thing can be had at a great deal less expense. In building my own furnishings, I have used this training in simplicity with profit. But I have never taught this demanding discipline of composition whose results must give satisfaction from all angles, and I therefore hold no views about which inclusions – in what order – provide the best instruction.

Three-Dimensional Design makes possible the study of what materials want to do on account of what they are. Modern materials are a multitude that we cannot manage in a college course. But two or three simple, inexpensive ones ought to be observed very closely and precisely under the instrumental action of the student’s tool.

This principle of responsiveness to the exactions and the possibilities of a material cannot be learned from a supermarket of material substances, each considered only briefly and as swiftly once again abandoned. But a small representative selection will serve the student well when, on day in the future, he seeks to impose his creative will on substances today unknown.

             But I have never taught this demanding discipline of composition whose results must give
              satisfaction from all angles, and I therefore hold no views about which inclusions – in what
              order – provide the best instruction For Three-Dimensional Design.

     2.    Two Dimensional Design:

Art has committed, and will continue to commit, many stylish follies as wayward as spiked heels with pointed toes for ladies’ shoes – that must, in time, deform the foot – and as silly as the mini-skirt. The obsession with the whims of fashion has caused the truly pioneering revolution in the Modern Visual Arts to neglect its best achievement – and that may have cost us a great deal.

Very early in the modern movement it was recognized that a Line, a Shape, and a Field of Color have aesthetic merit in themselves and deserve to be subject of an artist’s effort and display. The study of what such autonomous pictorial elements have power to perform was never undertaken. Instead they were much used with little understanding, although at times with beautiful results. So entangled seemed each succeeding generation with the fashions of their day that the full potential of these acknowledged visual parts remains, to this day, largely unexplored, and their range unknown.

To mend that failing is a sternly structured task and, on that account, cannot likely have a welcome in modern education. But, in the intimate circle of this modest class, maybe we can try that venture.

G.   Two-Dimensional Design, First Term

        A study with the aim of constituting the enabling fundament of all the labors of the colorist and draftsman is an ambitious plan. But Basic Design will either be of basic value to the wider tasks of art or else becomes a detour and superfluous delay. Yet our beginning will be unpretending and extremely simple.
        Two-Dimensional Design, First Term, is pursued with least expensive materials and tools, but is capable of covering the widest range of visual learning.

Composition starts as shape arrangements in humble black and white, but the turn to color occurs quickly. Color compositions are first made by combining rectangular paper snippets of the most various size and color, and so eliminating the separate demands of joining complex shapes.

2. The Work in Color falls into Two Divisions:

The smaller of the two is technical, and teaches the constituents of mixtures and exactitude in using them, as well as the surprising optical behavior of color combinations when placed side by side.

The most useful of the technical assignments is the Color Change, by which a single color may so alter its appearance against different ground that we must call it different names. The Color Change alerts the artist that the material pigment content is only a sham of facts in art, while its truth is what appears to the viewer.

        3. Similarly there are visual illusions by which straight lines seem to bend and parallels both to
              spread and to converge. Thus, to correct unwanted optical effects, the work I show is always
              done freehand. For even the boundaries of solid shapes are subject to this fooling of the eye.
              Both the color and the line visual effects follow a familiar rule: If we eat a spoon of honey
              and then bite into an orange, in comparison with that sweet predecessor, the orange will
              taste sour as a lemon.

          4. My second great teacher, Josef Albers, deserves mention here. From him stem the Color
                Change and other valuable color demonstrations, as well as one signal tenet of visual
                 expression, of which the following example will give you an idea – though its specific form
                 is mine: “When you draw a profile portrait,” he might say, “give to me the person – not the
                 skull in back – but the identifying features to the front!” This means that off-theme emphasis
                 can be as damaging to pictures as it would be misleading in the spoken tongue.

Composition is often taught by curious rules: Supposedly there must be balance, focal points, but there must not be any signal element at the center. Or, it is said that the eye moves from here to there in an unending guesswork that could be settled by an electronic instrument capable of tracking down the scan path with precision. Artists proclaim they set up tensions, resulting chiefly in the destructive harm we call distraction.

The failure of such precepts shows in their wide following without a product of very much distinguished art. We should be glad that not every artist practices this kind of thing – although he may like to say he does – or we should lack good work even more than we already do.

My Pyramid below stresses by adjusted contrasts the characteristic rising edges, while diminishing the baseline margins. And so it articulates that showing visually closely parallels the lowering and rising volume of common human speech.

4. Composition rules (cont’d)

Albers’ insight proved of the greatest service. For I found a way to stretch its clarity into a basic compositional principle of just a little wider range. How this works cannot be shown to full effect with slides, and I shall therefore teach it to you live with “Paper Snippets,” before this series ends.

5. My composition course is a melding of two minds, Albers’ and mine.

Much of the work is done in colored paper, to furnish the most experience in the quickest time.

But some problems are designed for paint, notably a task beginning with a splash and splatter party on large sheets. Out of all these messes, small areas are selected, enlarged, and re-composed. The student learns here careful observation, and starts to grasp his personal limits. For, when he is encouraged to devise any shapes and colors to his liking, he is not even capable of wanting – that is, imagining – the shape configurations he draws upon for this assignment. It is hoped that he will thereby first begin to value the vast visual abundance of the world that surrounds him on all sides as if it were a “spare imagination.”

There are further problems in which the number of areas and colors is strictly limited; but the solution must give no impression of constraint, but only of an ample plenitude of color.

In all such work, two classes of corrective action will be carried out. What seems out of order or fragmented is brought into a coherent unity that will not be of dull sameness, but of ever changing pace. Hence, what seems characterless and slack must be more sharply differentiated, as in the frame-by-frame progression of my demonstration page: Quick, short curves alternate with longer, slower ones, corners contribute angularity, while the thick and thin of line, as well as intervals and solid shapes appear.

        5. More on Composition rules (cont’d)

            The viewer re-compounds the unity of a design by his own sustained attention to it. A
             coherence without character – that is, without each part contributing its own unmistakable
             identity – will suffer, despite its blameless unity, a twofold damage of distraction. One will be
             the boredom of the viewer and the other, in any exhibition, the powerful attraction of
             competing better works.

        Any person – perhaps not himself an artist but seeking practical experience to help him look at art with a sharper vision – might profit from this First Semester of Design. For its manageable, rather simple, technical demands recommend the course not only to beginners but also to the amateur and layman. But the reach of this course unfolds fully only in the second term.

NOTE:
(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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Johannes Writes

The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 08

The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 07

The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 06

The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 05

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

The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 04

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

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Johannes Writes

The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 08

The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 07

The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 06

The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 05

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

The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 04

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

Categories

Archives

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

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