Category Archives: Travel

Contour Drawing

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In 1995, my wife and I left the kids behind to travel to Italy, working our way from Varenna on Lake Como to Florence, Cinque Terra, Siena, San Gimignano and Assissi. We had intended to also spend some time in Rome but we found Assissi to be such a spiritually relaxing place that we decided to spend our last few days in Italy at this country house just outside the city walls.

Continuing to employ the contour drawing style I had used in Japan, I made generous use of white space to imply the foreground and draw attention to the main house beyond. Contour drawing requires working from part to part and seeing how shapes and details fit into a larger pattern. Because I was drawing with a fountain pen, I used dots to help me visualize the placement of the image on the page and to work out the roof forms before I started drawing the contours.

It is interesting that later, in teaching drawing, I advocate a more structural approach based on analysing geometric forms and their spatial relationships. As the years go by, I find myself using a combination of the two approaches, as seen in these studies of the Pantheon done a few years later.

Studies of a Japanese Folk House

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Another example of drawing from the imagination while on location. In this case, I was intrigued by the tectonic qualities of this Gassho-zukuri style house in the Hida Folk Village (Kida-no-Sato) just outside of Takayama. While walking through the interior spaces and visualizing a section cut through the structure, I drew the timber framing for the floors and the steep thatched roof and noted the way members were tied and braced. In this way, I was able to better understand and remember how material, structure, and construction came together to shape the architectural qualities of the spaces.

On the same page you can also see studies of the scale of the space created by the overhanging thatched roof along the eaves as well as sketches of types of traditional Japanese storehouses that I had observed.

These are all examples of how drawing from observation (on location) can serve as a springboard for drawing from the imagination (in design).

Drawing Conceptual Views

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On a visit to the New Territories, we stopped at this walled Tang village, featuring a hierarchical grid layout, as well as examples of traditional ancestral halls, which have similar grid layouts organized by masonry and timber structural systems—seemingly simple yet capable of such spatial richness.

When drawing from observation, we can capture not only what the eye perceives but also what the mind conceives. We can use the drawing process to think about, visualize, and explore in imagined and imaginary ways the conceptual basis for the environments we see and experience. In this case, simple plan diagrams of the structural and spatial layout along with side views of the gable-roofed portions help us first to understand, then remember, and finallly convey the three-dimensional attributes of the ancestral halls.

My Ancestral Village

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In 1993, accompanied by Dr. Ho Puay Peng of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, I took a ferry to Zhongsan Harbor and then a taxi to Nam Bin, my ancestral village near Sun Yat-Sen’s home village of Cuiheng in Guangzhou prefecture. There I met Ching Yoon In—our grandfathers were brothers who both emigrated to Hawaii. Being the older of the two, his grandfather had to return to China to take care of our common great grandfather while mine remained in Hawaii. Yoon is about the same age as me and when he told me this story, I immediately thought that if our grandfathers’ birth order were reversed, I could have been standing in his shoes and he in mine. To help me make sense of how Yoon and I were related, I drew this diagram. You can also see other small sketches of our ancestral gravesite, Yoon’s sister’s house, and a tower-house, a typical defensive structure built with overseas money in the 1920s.

Sketches from China

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After Japan, the next travel opportunity I had was at the invitation of Tunney Lee, chair of the newly founded School of Architecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Before arriving in Hong Kong in 1993, however, I made brief stops in Beijing and Nanjing. In the journal I kept for these visits, I wrote more of my day-to-day experiences, something I regretfully did not do in Japan. You can see a portion of my writing to the left of these small sketches I did as we flew into Beijing and drove into the city.

While in Beijing, one has to, of course, visit the Great Wall, the Ming Tombs, the Forbidden City, and the Temple of Heaven, all monuments of impressive scope and scale.

While thirteen of the Ming Tombs are near Beijing, one is outside Nanjing—Mingxiaoling Tomb (tomb of the founder of the Ming Dynasty). I used this small, pictorial diagram to remember the configuration of the path and the Spirit Way (Shen Dao) leading to the tomb.

In contrast to this small diagram, the expansive view often tempts us. In Hong Kong, this would be the Hong Kong Central skyline as seen from Kowloon.

Sensoji Temple

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Another drawing from my Japan sketchbook, this time of the Hozomon, a two-story gate leading to the courtyard of Sensoji Temple in the Asakusa district of Tokyo. Next to it I’ve placed a photo of Ando Hiroshige’s woodblock print, Kinryusan Temple at Asakusa, from his One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (1856). Different media but similar points of view, executed a hundred and thirty-six years apart. Hiroshige’s print is particularly interesting for his use of one-point perspective.

My First Journal

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While I encourage design students to develop the habit of maintaining a visual journal while they are in school, the first real journal I kept was while I was a visiting faculty at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1992. During the month-long stay, I set myself the goal of doing a sketch a day. The result of this effort was the publication of Sketches from Japan in 2000 by John Wiley & Sons.

Since the book is now out-of-print, I am posting the first page in the sketchbook, for which I wrote the following caption:

“This is one of the main streets of O-okayama, a few blocks from the International House where visiting faculty stay while at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Drawing this established the process for the remaining drawings in this sketchbook, starting with a significant contour or shape, sized and positioned relative to the dimensions of the page, and then filling in this frame with the contours of the smaller shapes and details. This deliberate, methodical way of working enabled me to pay attention to the pattern of the whole as well as the multitude of details I saw and experienced.”

Inspired by Paul Hogarth

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Reaching back into the past, here is a view of Cleveland, Ohio, as seen from the Flats on the banks of the Cuyahoga River, which I drew during my year’s service in VISTA in 1972. I had originally posted this image on my Facebook fan page in February, 2010, but it is now apparently missing from my wall. At the time, I was fascinated with and inspired by the work of Paul Hogarth, noted English artist and illustrator, who used his drawings and watercolors to document places and events during his many travels, a reportage style of illustration that is now being kept alive through the work of Urban Sketchers <urbansketchers.org>.

Hello world!

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Welcome to my new WordPress blog. I’m excited for the opportunity to share some of my work and thoughts on seeing, thinking, and drawing.

To begin, I am reposting a composite image of the Spanish Steps in Rome I had originally published on my facebook page last December. I drew the portion on the left when I was a student in 1965 and traveling around Europe after a summer internship in London. The right half was done when I was teaching in Rome in the Jubilee Year, 2000—a span of 35 years. Different times, different circumstances, different set of eyes, different pens.

Going forward, I intend to post about once a week, recycling sketches that I had previously posted on facebook the past two years, interspersed with current work. I’m hoping to link each post to <www.facebook.com/chingfanpage>, and so while I have comments turned off on this site, please feel free to comment on my facebook page.