Day 10

'30 seconds to see 15 minutes to complete', Pencil on Paper

I really wanted to carry on the theme from yesterday by doing a drawing of another building in Belfast, but due to limited time this evening choose to do something a little more different... well not in terms of the image obviously but in terms of how I approach it.

I spent a week in Paris a few years back and the Architecture in the city was some of the most beautiful I'd seen but the real notion behind the above image stems from a thought after someone commented to me on yesterdays drawing, that being about the iconography of an object or in this case a building. Although yesterday the drawing was only of a small portion of the building it is instantly recognisable as the building it depicts. Although I am by no means an authority on the subject of Architecture, in a sense to me what makes most great Architecture great is that it is instantly recognisable and it has a resonance. A little while back a friend of mine, who also happens to be an artist, was involved in a drawing workshop with some Architecture students... the aim being to get them to think more creatively about their approach to drawing. Whilst brainstorming  a few possibilities I thought about using the idea of the iconic aspect of famous buildings as a means by which to get them to think differently about how they approach drawing or designing a building. The concept was as follows:

1. Choose a list of well known highly regarded buildings and collate images of each of them to be made into a slide show.

2. These images would then be shown to the students, who would be made aware that they collectively had a set amount of time to study each building, after which the image would be removed from view.

3. It would be at this point they then had a set amount of time to draw the building from memory, and again this would be timed.  

4. With each new image the length of time they had to study it would decrease, as would the length of time they had to draw it.

5. Points would then be awarded to the students based on which drawings most effectively mirror the building  they depict.

The outcome hopefully being that in order to compensate for the amount of time they had they would begin to focus on the elements of the building that were most important, the features that give the building its identity that make it recognisable. Thus highlighting this notion that the reason this particular building is iconic is because it has its own unique personality or character traits that make it stand out, if anyone says the name of any of these places we already know what it looks like whether we've had the opportunity to study it in detail or glimpsed at it for a fleeting moment.

After all that I don't think she actually decided to use the above concept in her drawing workshop, but none the less the idea has stuck with me. I then applied the concept to the above drawing to solve the dilemma of only having about 45 mins to complete a drawing before the day was done, so I spent 30 seconds looking at an image of the Eiffel Tower and then had 15 mins to draw it, being sure to fill in as much detail as possible in that time... there are few details that are a bit off but all in all I feel it was a decent attempt. In fact I still believe this could be quite an interesting workshop to run sometime so this may be something to revisit at a later time.