Reinventing the wheel

Last few days I have been working on pen and ink drawing. It’s amazing how ink rendered drawing turns out. Yes here your strokes are one shot. You don’t get to take back what you do and also don’t get to do it again, something that has a great philosophical significance.

For a long time I wanted to be able to draw landscapes. It’s something that amazes me a lot. The things that I perceive through my senses, the way each scene makes me feel I wish there were some way to express that. One might ask ‘why do you need to express? What is the use?’ That is a question the answer of which one has to figure out oneself. Human history of science and arts is a history of expression and exploration. Technology, hmm that’s about utility.

It’s something like oxygen, something like mathematical formulae. Even if no one finds it, it’s there. Same thing is true about beauty, and finer feelings. As we are human with limited life span and limited amount of intelligence, it is not possible for us one (or a few, or all of us) to invent everything. That’s where the idea of expression comes. To me, the urge of expression is one of the core elements of our existence. It is as basic as ‘curiosity’ or ‘love’.

Ok, let’s cut this philosophical mumbo-jumbo. And head straight to what I want to say. The difference between landscape drawing and landscape photography is, in drawing you not only get to express what is there, but also get to express what you see and what you feel about what you see. You can make other people perceive the way you perceive it. Make the same joy, same wonder to replicate in others. Of course it depends on your painting skills. Yet, there are a lot of skillful painters and a very few artists. Skill is important. But what is the use if you know all the languages and you have nothing to say?

So, here I am. I don’t have skills but I think I have something to say which I cannot express in words. That is the reason I am undertaking this pen & ink endeavor. Michelangelo Buonarroti once said, “A man paints [or draws] with his brains and not with his hands.” For the last few years I am doing this ‘painting with brain’ thing persistently. I think now is the time I start some match practice also.

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Once I was puzzled by the idea of perspective view. It makes things look real but there is this flaw in teaching about this technique. They ask you to fix some vanishing points and draw accordingly. The choice of vanishing point seems arbitrary. There is another false impression we get about vanishing points. Often if seems there is only three vanishing points!  In fact there is no limit in the number of vanishing points. Every set of parallel plane has its own vanishing point. It is just that, in three dimensional space we can get at most three orthogonal planes. That is why only three VP is taken for basic training. But remember every tilted parallel plane set which are not aligned to these three coordinate directions will also have its own vanishing point.

To choose a vanishing point of a plane you have to imagine yourself standing on that plane. Think of your eyes’ height from the floor. Take the horizon line parallel to the plane and on the exact height of your eyes. Look at your left and right do you have any line shooting towards infinity which is parallel to the floor and perpendicular to the horizon line?  Connect it to the vanishing point on the horizon line. How do you know where on the horizon line the vanishing point sits? It’s simple. Usually it is halfway from the side on the horizon line. But you can actually turn left or right. Then the amount of your turning creates a shift of the vanishing point towards right or left.

This way for every tilted plane you find vanishing point. Just remember there are a lot more vanishing points than three. And the finding of them has to be geometrically correct at the same time intuitive for the artist.