I have recently acquired another book on Baroque architecture and art, lavishly illustrated. There's plenty of material for studies and design work there. Here's a doodle taken from a library interior, with multiple levels and balconies. It's amazing how much detail and ornament Baroque structures have. Their civilization must have been quite different from ours to allow for the construction and craftwork in these palaces, churches, and public places. The modernist architects of the 20th century triumphally threw out all these ornaments, leaving us with grim plain rectangles and lots of big glass windows. Nowadays even if you wanted to, you could not construct one of these Baroque structures crawling with squirming statuary and zig-zag pile-ups of cornices and projections. I am left with books and imagination to guide my drawing lines. The more Baroque I look at, the weirder it gets, filled with erotic saints, alien presences writhing in the niches, and hallucinatory broken lines where once, a simple straight level would do. Now all I need is robots and color.
Baroque doodle is gel ink on sketchbook page, 7" x 2 1/2", July 22, 2013.
No comments:
Post a Comment