sometime during the past few days, in a sudden flash of cartoon-lightbulb eureka, it occurred to me where the ancient peoples first saw and realised the potential of the right angle:
trees. or, to be accurate, the angle between a tree trunk and the earth. so obvious and simple, the greatest ideas often are.
two days ago i went to a life drawing session, the first i have been to for roughly 13 years. having experimented with cubic still life i was keen to explore cubic life drawing, the realisation of the human form… in boxes!
this is the most striking piece from the session. despite the angular treatment i find a good deal of grace and humanity in the pose. it has a quiet architectural aura, like an crane on a construction site at night. it occurred to me, as i was visualising the way the left leg box and the lower torso box intersected, that i could draw live from the nude using a laptop.
this is an idea i hope to explore later on.
when i am asked to describe the nature of my art and i vaguely insinuate that its about “cubes and stuff, right angles” i am invariably treated to some kind of impulsive negative response, anything from a guffaw to near repulsion. i understand these reactions. the various alienations of our daily lives, of our pitiless urban environment, are so prevalent and overwhelming that art is frequently if not almost exclusively put to the service of acting as a support or escape from this trauma.
this doesn’t really interest me though. because as herbert read points out:
the artist is very often… …offering something to the community which the community does not want to accept, which the community at first finds very unpalatable.
the charming c has been visiting me in brighton this weekend and, amongst other things, we talked about the tiling i am doing in the kitchen. being square, tiles tesselate perfectly. i pondered whether any other shapes would do the same, quickly identifying hexagons. “yes they would” agreed c. “in two dimensions”. triangles and squares tesselate in three dimensions but the tesselation of triangles involves inverted tetrahedrons, a challenging assignment for modern engineers; i can’t imagine neolithic man taking them on.
spiro kostof’s ‘history of architecture‘, a recent acquisition of mine, shows a settlement in sittard (in the modern netherlands) of about 5,000BC. it is the first (earliest) settlement in the book that displays evidence of rectangular structures. the buildings were wooden and have thus disappeared but what remains are the trenches and postholes that would have held the foundations in place. the aerial view shows that they are rectangular much like modern sheds. where did they get this idea? we are fully accustomed to the notion of right angled buildings, these people were true pioneers.
kostof’s coverage of the prehistoric period is not comprehensive and he openly admits to an almost exclusively occidental focus so perhaps there are other earlier examples of right-angled buildings but, nevertheless, the presence of other pioneering prehistoric building projects does not detract from the fact that the settlers at sittard initiated a culture of construction that exists to the present day and which forms the basic paradigm of almost all building and spacial organisation: that of the cube.
what on earth were they thinking? the truth is often boring, perhaps right-angled buildings were just the simplest shape to erect and tesselate.