The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 08

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.