Logic & Passion

Logic is both a sword and shield; 
Passion is only a sword and is likely to wound the guilty and innocent alike.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Composition part 4 - Light Spot

Image
This image (filtered for contrast and color) caught my eye a few days ago. Eakins’ painting The Gross Clinic came to mind, as did other group portraits. But…. It was nothing so important artistically, Or historically for that matter… It was simply a photo of soldiers carrying a body on a stretcher in China after a landslide (WSJ Jan 12/13).   Funny how a photograph of an activity which happens hundreds of times a day around the world became imprinted on my mind.   It is essentially an unrecognizable light spot on a dark background.   Nothing that important, but to my eye and brain it was something worth spending some time with. Portraits are the most obvious examples of the light spot grabbing your attention.   I have always liked Titian’s The Young Englishman , in part because it resembles a friend from my younger days, but also because of the scattered light spots.   It happens that Titian’s style of portrait painting became the standard for the next 400 yea...
Read more

Hand & CAD - The Wireframe Years - 1

Image
Columbus Circle, Steamboat Springs & the Queens Museum. When computers began to be used in architectural offices, they were unstable and relatively primitive. I lived through that period of frustration, elation and work-a-rounds.   This is just one of a number of posts I want to write about it – partly, just to leave a record of the work, but mainly as an example of mixing the digital with the hand. In the early 1980s 3D computer modeling was not an option in architectural offices. Just buying a computer with the requisite memory and graphics was way too expensive. But in 1985 the office in which I worked bought an early CAD computer and a very early version of AutoCad, which was used for Building Department submission drawings. Simple diagramatic drawings were created, with much computer crashing and gnashing of teeth.   The simplest 3D modeling was a faint glimmer in the recesses of that early software.    The layout above was done for the Columbus Circle Comp...
Read more

Perspective in the 50s & 60s

Image
Having just written a post about tempera rendering in the '50s and '60s, I thought I should note the other styles that were alternatives to the dominance of tempera. As I noted before, modern architecture emphasized the cold orderliness of the machine, expressed in steel, glass and concrete. At the same time, people became accustomed to full, vibrant colors in magazines, books and advertisements, and this led to the dominance of tempera in architectural renderings. Other forces were also pressing society toward uniformity, but there were equally strong winds blowing toward diversity. The most obvious “wind” was the expectation of a new viewpoint in the fine arts. As noted in my post covering 1900 to 1940, there was an ongoing dialogue between the modern and the traditional, as well as between the realistic and the abstract. This conflict has continued throughout my entire life. I started out naturally ignorant of it all, was enamored of it in college and came to an accommodati...
Read more