“Drawing is the probity of art. ...It is the expression, the interior form, the plan, the modeling. The line is drawing, that is all. Smoke itself should be expressed by a line.”
— Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
“The camera is for idlers, who use a machine to do their seeing for them. To draw oneself, to trace the lines, handle the volumes, organize the surface — all this means first to look, and then to observe and finally to discover...and it is then that the inspiration may come.”
— Le Corbusier, Creation is a Patient Search
Artist’s Statement
Le Corbusier’s Maison Domino with a nod to Laugier.
Drawing is an inquisitive activity that requires one to scrutinize subject matter and to sort out its attributes by means of sensory, intellectual, and physical processes. Both Ingres and Le Corbusier, seemingly unlikely names to place in the same sentence, recognized that the eye must be trained to see, the mind disciplined to probe the subject matter, and the hand conditioned to engage profile and contour at the end of a pencil, charcoal stick, or brush. Drawing is a life-long learning activity that requires time and willingness to encounter subject matter over long periods of time and iteratively.
The drawings in this exhibition fall into two broad categories. Referential drawings serve as personal theaters of memory by recording encounters with actual architectural, urban, and landscape artifacts. Speculative drawings are theatrical displays of the imagination, the musings about places that do not yet exist.
These two broad categories can be roughly divided into several sub-categories:
Atmospheric Drawings
executed in soft pencil, charcoal, or watercolor that attempt to capture the play of light and shadow that animate spaces and give them depth.
Sequential Gestural
drawings executed principally in pencil that attempt to capture the visual phenomena associated with moving through architectural, urban, and/or landscape spaces.
Descriptive Drawings
drawings executed in principally in pencil that are the result of prolonged observation and careful measurement using only the eye as the arbitrator of dimension.
Analytical Drawings
executed in pencil, ink, color pencil, or watercolor that attempt to provide insight into architectural, urban, and landscape form.
The decision to execute a drawing in any one of these four categories can be explained in two contexts: the rational and the intuitive. In instances where the sketches were executed in conjunction with drawing classes, the selection of character and medium was governed by the course syllabus, thus one might assert the result of a rational decision-making process. Many of these compositions were executed in conjunction with drawing classes taught in Rome for the University of Maryland School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. The drawings served as demonstration drawings, models for student drawings of similar subject matter. In other instances outside of pedagogic activities, drawing types and media resulted from intuitive judgments engaging a wide spectrum of influences including the author’s mood, type of subject matter encountered, the quality of light and shadow, availability of particular medium, and so on.
Most of the pieces in this exhibition, with one or two exceptions, were produced between 1981 and 2010. The majority of these drawings are field sketches made in situ and completed only during the time on site. Other drawings, such as the watercolor plan of Dumbarton Oaks, were produced in the studio as the result of numerous field sketches executed over the course of multiple encounters with the subject matter.
The drawings are presented in their original size, typically that of the sketchbook, watercolor block, or drawing-pad upon which they were made. The sketchbooks are intimate in scale and were never executed with the idea of public exhibition. Some of the images are taken from sketchbooks that are entirely visual journals, while others are reproduced from personal diaries. The watercolors are also modest in size in order to minimize the conspicuous intrusion of the author into any particular setting. The charcoals are necessarily larger in scale because of the nature of the medium that requires broader eye/brain/hand gestures in order to convincingly manipulate the media.
The lines of inquiry shared by the work displayed in this exhibition focus on a pedagogy of the city and the landscape. Drawing served as the principal tool for extracting, recording, and discerning the lessons of architecture often by contrasting subjective initial impressions against prolonged observation, documentation, and analysis through conventional drawing modalities.
“This scene and this contrast have stayed in my memory. If you draw the houses of Pompeii which you thought were symmetrical, because that was what your school taught you, your pencil will uncover some surprising asymmetries and some unexpected symmetries too.”
Le Corbusier, Creation is a Patient Search
Ode to Colin Rowe.