Learning from Traditional Painting

The Connoisseur by Henry Herbert La Thangue 1887

An artist’s brushwork is a fascinating personal marker to collectors of traditional paintings. The size and character of the brush strokes, create an underlying pattern in a painting which is interesting to see up close. As an architect and self-taught illustrator, this was not something I had considered until it was pointed out to me by I.M. Pei. 

Following are examples from traditional painting that show unification via texture and brush strokes (click on image for enlargement).

Dew-Drenched Furze by John Everett Millais has a rather obsessive texture which is appropriate in depicting vegetation. The fairly narrow value range is suggestive of wallpaper. And yet, I find it mesmerizing.

Autumn Afternoon by Frederick McCubbin is an impressionist sketch that uses the rough brush strokes as a baseline. I don’t think that the painting would have been as successful if any element had been detailed and finished. 

Many of the artists from the turn of the century (that is, last century) were focused on treating the surface of the painting as an artistic thing itself. Creating a recognizable image while highlighting the blobs of paint produces an enjoyable tension in the viewer’s mind. Surf and Rocks by Frederick Childe Hassam (1906) is a clear example of that approach.

The simple use of rough painting surface can give a certain unity on its own. The canvas tooth of Summer Sunshine by Gyula Agghazy shows this. The fabric grid is hard to see, but it permeates the entire image.

Most of these examples are of limited use to architectural illustration because a client wants to see in detail what he is buying with his millions. Even so, a good renderer can choose a media or support paper that allows both detail and texture. 

Opus Headquarters by D.E. Jamieson 1999

Canary Wharf by Steve Oles 1985

Aeon - The Architecture of Time pg. 4
 by L. Woods 1982

Still, it is a lesson that I gratefully learned.

I.M. Pei

Ieoh Ming Pei died 16 May 2019.

He is described in Wikipedia as “a Chinese-American architect,” but that hardly does him justice. In fact, he was a curious amalgam of Western and Eastern, modern and classical, businessman and artist, pragmatist and theorist.

Other people were closer to Pei, and there are plenty of books and articles covering his life and work. Here I’d simply like to offer a couple of examples of his genius as shown in his comments on renderings I did for him.

He had a sure eye:

Many designers and architects have a hard time making up their minds. Mr. Pei was a pleasure to work for, because he knew what he wanted. When I finished the rendering of the Louvre, it did not show the fountains spraying. 

Mr. Pei insisted that they were necessary to complete the visual effect of the design. He was right: The fountain spray seems to moderate between the hard geometry of the glass pyramid and the ornate classicism of the old Louvre façade.

He was steeped in both art and architecture:

I always make pastel color sketches of any proposed rendering. When I showed Mr. Pei my sketches for the Athens Museum of Modern Art, he saw the mottled effect of the pastel in the sky and insisted that the effect be reproduced in the final. 

I had thought the mottling was a bug,but he saw it as an impressionist feature (along with the “van Gogh trees”). Again, he was right.

Finally…

He brought a classical eye to the ever-churning world of modern architecture. His best work shows a nuanced balance between the desperate newness of modern life and the ageless beauty of simple forms.

He will be missed.