Category Archives: Seeing

Mt. Vernon Workshop

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MtVernon

I did this sketch to help publicize a one-day workshop Gail Wong and I will be offering in Mt. Vernon on Saturday, April 20th. Mt. Vernon is an enchanting small town in Skagit County north of Seattle and the Mt. Vernon Downtown Association is hosting the event.

Full disclosure: Due to constraints of time and weather I drew this scene from a digital photograph that was sent to me. I soon realized that drawing from a photo can actually be more difficult than drawing on location. In a 3D environment, we are able to perceive much more than in a 2D photograph. We can shift our gaze, if necessary, to uncover certain details or to see more clearly things that might be hidden or obscured. And we are free to interpret the 3-dimensional information before us. But in a photograph, everything is frozen, including ambiguities that have to be resolved.

Another note: The Namiki Falcon fountain pen is known for its flexible nib. While it is a joy to draw with, I rarely carry the pen for fear of losing it. But since I was in my home office, I took the opportunity to use it for this sketch. The Namiki Falcon is not inexpensive but still it is a reasonably priced introduction to fine quality fountain pens. Highly recommended.

Black-and-White

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Even though it’s a typically chilly and rainy winter in Seattle, what better time to study the branch structure of trees. For these stark, black-and-white images, I used a Tombow brush pen.

Trees1Trees2Trees3

While I could have relied on my memory or imagination to draw these, I find that the raw material provided by real-life patterns have a specificity that is more compelling than the stereotypical views that we store in our memory bank, and they are much easier to compose and interpret.

Serial Vision

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The converging lines and foreshortened shapes of a perspective drawing give it a dynamic quality. Yet, it remains a static view—a moment in time—as seen from a single point in space. To better convey movement through space, we can use a series of changing perspective views, as English architect and urban designer Gordon Cullen did when he coined the phrase Serial Vision to describe what one might see and experience as one walks through a sequence of spaces.

This is what I intended to depict when the Seattle Urban Sketchers met yesterday at Suzzallo Library on the UW campus. These drawings chronicle how one approaches the library from across Red Square, enters one of its portals, moves through the lobby and up the main staircase, and arrives in the main reading room.

Suzzallo1

Suzzallo2

Suzzallo3

Suzzallo4

Suzzallo5

Suzzallo6

Nine drawings done in two hours and twenty-five minutes.

 

Caricatures

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FDKC_Composite

A caricature is a pictorial or literary description of a person or thing that exaggerates certain distinctive characteristics to create an easily identifiable likeness. The result can be insulting or complimentary; I certainly hope these caricatures of me are the latter! These were done and graciously given to me by various individuals during presentations and workshops that I have given.

SeattleJurors

While these are definitely not intended to be caricatures, they still represent my attempt to capture the likeness of individuals, which is always an enjoyable and constant challenge. I used my iPad to draw these prospective jurors in the King County courthouse. It helped that these people were sedentary, lost in their own thoughts while waiting to be called for jury duty.

Shibuya

To draw people who are moving is much more difficult, as in this view of a rainy morning in Shibuya, Tokyo. These commuters and their umbrellas provide a sense of scale to the composition and lead the eye across the overpass while the automobile traffic flows below.

Seeing Little Things Largely

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Ginkgo

This study of the uniquely shaped leaves of the ginkgo tree, considered to be a living fossil, requires careful observation of shapes, details, and most importantly, the relationships between the two. In Lingua Franca, a column in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Geoffrey Pullum ends his essay with a quote from Otto Jespersen, a Danish linguist who specialized in the grammar of the English language:

“To anyone who finds that linguistic study is a worthless finicking with trifles, I would reply that life consists of little things; the important matter is to see them largely.”

The Power of the Line

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The line is the essence of drawing. It is a humble element, made simply by the tip of a pen or pencil as we move it across a receptive surface. Once drawn, a line chronicles the movement by which it was created. It can describe contour and shape, even texture.

More importantly, the line is able to convey to the mind’s eye three-dimensional forms in space, often not by its presence but rather by its absence—where we decide to stop a contour…and pick it up again.

These sketches of sculptures in and around Rome and Naples are prime examples of this amazing power of drawn lines to suggest what in reality is not present on the page.

South America

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We happened on this graphic of South America during our recent visit to Universidad Nacional de Córdoba in Argentina. It figuratively turned our heads upside down. We had been so accustomed to maps of the world having north oriented up and south down. This graphic shows that there are other ways of seeing our world.

This idea of (dis)orientation manifested itself in another way on our first day in Córdoba, as we walked around the historic center with map in hand. I am usually pretty good at reading maps and orienting myself in new environments but something was amiss. It took a while but I finally realized this was because I had assumed that the sun was in the southern sky. But here in Córdoba, the sun was actually illuminating the northern sides of buildings and so what I had thought was south was actually north on the street map. And even knowing this, it remained difficult to overcome a lifetime of assumptions.

Ravello and Amalfi

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The few times I had the privilege of teaching in Rome, we always scheduled a field trip to the Amalfi Coast, stopping in Cuma, Naples, and Pompeii before arriving in Amalfi and using it as a base to visit Ravello and its Villas Cimbrone and Rufolo as well as the Greek site of Paestum further down the coast.

In 2000, we were able to stay in placid Ravello at the Hotel Parsifal, a former monastery built in 1288 on the edge of town. This is a view of my corner room and terrace, which overlooked the Amalfi Coast and the Tyrrhenian Sea.

The other times we stayed at the Hotel Lidomare in the coastal town of Amalfi, just off the main piazza from which one sees this view of the Duomo. A broad stairway leads up to a striped marble and stone entrance arcade, surmounted by a pedimented facade with a mosaic tympanum. Off to the left is a Romanesque bell tower and tiled cupola typical of the area. I simply outlined the foreground and surrounding structures to contrast with the ornamentation of the cathedral.

While the drawing appears to be very detailed, this enlarged portion shows that drawing has the unique ability to suggest without having to exactly reproduce what a photograph might capture. As I wrote a few months ago, this is the magic of hand drawing—”to suggest to the mind’s eye a scene that we recognize. The whole is truly greater than the sum of the parts.”

Olympic Sculpture Park

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A few Seattle UrbanSketchers joined Washington State University students and their professors Bob, Kathleen, and Linda in a sketching session yesterday at the Olympic Sculpture Park. Here are a couple of my drawings to continue my previous post about drawing on location.

A photograph, whether viewed in print or on a computer screen, is a static, two-dimensional image that makes it easier to see shapes, patterns, and relationships. For some, this is an advantage. But it can be a hindrance if the flatness of the photograph prevents us from interpreting, composing, and editing more freely the visual and spatial relationships before us. When drawing on location, we are not required to recreate or reproduce exactly the visual information that a camera might capture. We can squint or “look askance” to see light-dark patterns better; we can shift our gaze slightly to block out visual noise or improve the drawing composition; we can deliberately underplay some of the visual information to emphasize others.

For example, the sloping ground and trees on the left and part of Wake, the large steel sculptures by Richard Serra in the foreground to the right, frame the PACCAR Pavilion beyond. So as not to lose the pavilion, I only suggested the apartment buildings in the background. This editing was easier to do on-site than if I were drawing from a photograph.

As I mentioned in the previous post, the drawing process often leads to unexpected results. I selected the spot to draw Alexander Calder’s The Eagle so that it framed the Space Needle in the distance. My intention was to draw the entire sculpture but soon after I started, I realized the image wouldn’t fit if I were to maintain reasonable proportions. So I proceeded to draw as much detail as I could and omitted the rest so that I would not lose the sculpture as a framing device.

“Art does not reproduce the visible; it renders visible.” Paul Klee

Drawing on Location

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I’m reposting something from early 2010 that is no longer on my Facebook page…

Drawing from a photograph is very much different from drawing on location, from direct observation. A photograph captures a moment in time and reflects the processing that flattens out three-dimensional data onto a two-dimensional surface. Drawing on location takes longer to execute and involves our senses, especially that of active seeing. And like a conversation, we do not know precisely where the drawing process will lead. Even though we may have an objective in mind when we begin to draw, the sketch itself takes on a life of its own as it evolves on paper and we have to be open to the possibilities the emerging image suggests.

To illustrate, here are three drawings of the Pantheon in Rome. On almost everyone’s favorites list, the Pantheon is difficult to pass by without stopping to admire it, both from within and from the Piazza della Rotonda. The drawings, done in 2000 and 2003 illustrate similar viewpoints but different approaches to the same subject portrayed in the photo.