Lines and planes

A sketching expedition to Lincoln.  My thought was to work on the sculptures at DeCordova but I got waylaid, first at the Codman House, then at the Gropius House. This last, the work of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, is interesting in all sorts of ways--architectural, historical--but I just wanted to put pencil to paper.

Lines and planes are the elements of the design, then there were the cross-cutting angular shadows. The most welcome of all were the gnarly shadows of oak branches across the verticals and horizontals. (I didn't go inside but it's not much bigger than my own house. It certainly holds no candle to the voluminous bubble houses favored by today's favored.)

Great to be out in the warmth of the westering sun, perched on a wall, undisturbed. What was hard was actually seeing what my eyes were aiming at. Leaving aside the problem of putting 3D on 2D, I found it a challenge to actually resolve how different lines and planes actually intersected. Was my eye lazy or just unpracticed? Perhaps in the same way that words in a foreign language can be spelled but not understood, so too these geometric forms could be identified but not really felt as representing something happening in space.

In the meantime, I took time off from serious gazing to darken a tree trunk, to hint at siding on the walls, to trace a (wisteria?) vine ascending a fence, and so satisfy the puppy-dog friskiness of my hand.

Architecture teaches me about spaces; landscapes teach me about places; but people, walking or riding, and their wonderful faces, that takes me deep and deeper. Not too much of that today but it felt good to wield pencil and brush. Good fun.