no2self.net

Contrary to my Doctor’s advice, I sat in the direct sunlight to draw this a few weeks ago. I think they call that suffering for your art.

It’s the sculpture by Anthony Gormley in Birmingham’s Victoria Square. I mentioned it a while back. Whilst I was sketching this I started to think about some of his other work and a phrase I used on an entry about ‘mobile clubbing’ came to mind – implied rhythym.

More on that later when I find a source for the specific sculptures I have in mind. For the moment I’m more interested in the realisation that my drawings are a device for capturing implied rhythym. Scrutinise them too closely and you’ll find that the proportions of the individual parts are somewhat less than accurate. Be patient and wait until the last pencil stroke is finished and somehow the sum of the parts seems to equal the essence of the underlying form; a sort of Platonic ideal that keeps the whole thing together.

No. Wait. That can’t be right. I don’t believe in Platonic ideals. There’s no such thing. Aaarrrggghhhhhh!

*snap*

Anyone want a slightly damaged 4B pencil?

The first thing in painting is that the objects it represents should
appear in relief, and that the grounds surrounding them at different
distances shall appear within the vertical plane of the foreground
of the picture by means of the 3 branches of Perspective, which are:
the diminution in the distinctness of the forms of the objects, the
diminution in their magnitude; and the diminution in their colour.
And of these 3 classes of Perspective the first results from [the
structure of] the eye, while the other two are caused by the
atmosphere which intervenes between the eye and the objects seen by
it.

Quote taken from page 17 of The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci. Delivered daily by RSS thanks to Matt Webb and Project Gutenberg.

Image taken from one of my old sketchbooks.

And here’s why I’m really starting to enjoy this blogging business: the web editor

It’s been a busy week. There are a couple of entries waiting to be written, including one about the galleries I’ve been able to visit over the last few days. In the meantime, I’m posting an image instead of words.

Predictably, looking at the art work of others has made me think about my own work. Having revisited some of my old sketchbooks – driven by the guilty admission that it has been too long since I last picked up a pencil instead of a mouse – I’ve decided to post a few to remind myself whenever I look here, that I should look elsewhere too and record events with more than just words.

First up, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, as seen from seat 10, Row K on the 12th February 1998. I don’t remember what was being played that evening, but since this was back in the days of Simon Rattle, I imagine it was pretty good.

Curiously, following my recent entry about Tschumi, I note that below the sketch is a comment about pages 205 and 213 in Architecture and Disjunction – I had apparently some interest in the sections on cross programming and rejection.