Category Archives: Seeing

Deciding What to Draw (And What to Omit)

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On the same trip to Europe during which I had sketched the Bruges rooftops, my family and I visited London, Paris and points south. I didn’t have a lot of free time but I managed to fit in a few sketches. Looking back at these drawings, I find them to be looser than the pristine contour drawings I had been doing on previous travels.

The quicker technique was no doubt a result of the limited time I had to sketch but another key to saving time was deliberately leaving out parts of the scenes before me. What I’ve come to realize is that deciding what not to draw is as important as choosing what to include. Omitting parts of a scene leads the eye, focuses attention, and allows the imagination of those viewing the drawing to complete the image in their mind’s eye.

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.

University of Central Florida

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Never been to Florida until last week, when I had the opportunity to teach a group of architecture students from the University of Central Florida in Orlando at the invitation of Professor Thomas McPeek. Thoroughly enjoyed the sunny weather and sketching downtown Orlando, Winter Park, and Rollins College with the students, but most of all, I appreciated their openness and optimism—both admirable traits for those hoping to shape Florida’s future.

 

Athens, Ohio

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Patrick Manley recently asked me about this spherical perspective I had drawn of Athens, Ohio, which he remembered having seen in a friend’s apartment. His friend turned out to be Steve Swisher, a former student of mine.

The story behind the drawing begins with the decision to phase out the architecture program at Ohio University. I had always admired the spherical perspectives in Ed Bacon’s book, The Design of Cities, and wanted to do a similar view of Athens to remember the place where I had started my teaching career back in 1972.

In the spring of 1976, I drew a 2-foot diameter circle on illustration board and began laying out the street pattern of the town, using as the center the intersection of East Washington Street and South Court Street, where the county courthouse resides. I used aerial photos for the rooftops, but first I had to literally walk the streets to get the relative heights and massing of the buildings and the portion of their facades that would be visible. Having Google Maps and Google Earth available would have made this drawing so much easier to do! For fun, I placed distances from the center of Athens to various points in the world along the circumferential horizon of the drawing.

Upon completing the drawing, I made a number of prints and mailed them to all of the students from that last semester in the spring of 1976 as a remembrance.

In 2007, Christine Tom of Lamborn’s Studio on State Street contacted me and expressed interest in reprinting copies for sale. I had forgotten that they had sold prints of the original drawing in the late 70’s. Of course, I agreed and so prints of this drawing are still for sale there.

The Fremont Troll

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Another in a continuing series of drawings documenting sights in Fremont. Here, the Fremont Troll lurks beneath the north end of the Aurora Bridge, clutching a Volkswagen bug in the his left hand. The writing on the plaque that I copied beneath the sketch explains the Troll’s origin:

“The Fremont Troll was designed and built by Steve Badanes, Will Martin, Donna Walter and Ross Whitehead, with help from the community. The Fremont Arts Council sponsored the project, which hoped to build a greater sense of place in the neighborhood through art, and with it a stronger community…”

You can tell by the scratchy lettering it was much colder than I had realized when walking along North 36th Street to get to the site. There’s a lot of construction activity at this end of the bridge with the state seismically reinforcing the bridge supports, which I conveniently ignored.

Stimson-Green Mansion

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We had a great turnout yesterday when the Seattle Urban Sketchers group met at the Stimson-Green Mansion for its monthly sketching session.

Spokane architect Kirtland Cutter designed the residence for C. D. Stimson, early Seattle industrialist, and his wife Harriet Stimson. It was completed in 1901. In 1915 Joshua Green, a leading figure in the Puget Sound boating industry and later a banker, purchased the house from the Stimsons and maintained almost all of its original features. When Green died in 1975, the Historic Seattle Preservation and Development Authority purchased the property. After working on its restoration, Historic Seattle sold the property in December 1977 to Priscilla (Patsy) Collins, granddaughter of C. D. and Harriet Stimson, with an easement protecting the main house, carriage house, and grounds from demolition, alteration, or remodeling. In 2001 Collins donated the mansion to the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation, which provides continued stewardship.

As an example of eclectic architecture, the house’s English Tudor exterior features half-timber work, wooden gables, and pointed arches, while the interior rooms combine elements from various historical styles including Moorish, Romanesque, Gothic, Neoclassical, and the Renaissance.

The first drawing is a 20-minute sketch of the exterior I did while waiting for the 10 am meeting time. The second is a view of the central hallway looking out from under a Romanesque style arch supported by clusters of small columns. The space ascends the main stairway to the upper two floors and extends back to a warm, sunny dining room on axis with the front entry foyer. I always enjoy drawng these kinds of transitional spaces because of the multiple viewpoints they offer.