The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 07

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.