I woke early this morning excited about drawing.
I immediately grabbed a book about the architect Frank Gehry, one of my new heroes.
In the book, Gehry cites the work of the architect Le Corbusier, in particular Le Corbusier’s building, Notre Dame du Haut (a church in built in 1955 in Rochamp, France), as an inspiration. I found this building a delightful distortion of black and white forms that seem to ignore the rigid rules of symmetry. I recognize in this building the same thing I like about my new drawings – distortion.
So much of what I draw comes out of me lively and unique, like a weed sprouting branches. Then my art school training asserts itself, and I feel obligated to lop off the distorted elements and plane the object back to a more photographic image. This self-censure has been tormenting me - making my art a chore rather than a joy.
So today, I am giving myself permission to distort! Distort! Distort!
Distorting things often seems to make them appear ugly to the uninitiated eye. Something about ugliness really attracts me – maybe because it shows me where my vision is limited. It shows me where I am blind.
Many things only seem ugly at first glance then yield great unique beauty. This is magic. I love to find beauty in ugly things. This is a central theme in my art. One might call this pairing of opposites Duality.
An example of such duality can be found in free-form modern jazz music that involves atonality and broken tempos. When I read that a musician is an acknowledged genius but find their music repulsive at first listen, I become curious. I realize that I must listen more to break their code. A purveyor of this duality is the pianist Cecil Taylor.
Freedom is another central theme in my art. I am in the process of freeing myself from the habits I have of self-censorship. I want to become myself.
This is also a theme in Frank Gehry’s work, and Gehry, in turn, responded to this tendency in Le Corbusier. While researching Le Corbusier online, in Wikipedia I read:
“In the first issue of the journal, in 1920, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret adopted, Le Corbusier, an altered form of his maternal grandfather's name, "Lecorbésier", as a pseudonym, reflecting his belief that anyone could reinvent oneself.”
-(Author Unknown) " Le Corbusier." Wikipedia 23 Oct. 2007. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier
Even you.
2 comments:
Hard to know what's more distorted, the building or the photo of the building. Also interesting that you use architecture as a starting point for the idea of distortion. The levels of available abstraction are different between art and architecture. Some might say art starts at abstraction, maybe stays there, but might move toward reality, aka depiction, which can then be distorted. Architecture is obliged to move inexorably toward reality, becoming a building, however distorted, and not a sculpture. I suppose the reality of art is that it is trying to communicate something, but architecture's unambiguous goal is to exist as a functional building. One has to make a living after all.
just kidding man. keep on blogging!
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