The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 05

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

1. 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.

1. 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)