Positive - Negative Space

As there is the notion of positive and negative space in the visual arts, sculpture and architecture as well as music, one can look at life’s problems, roadblocks, obstacles using the trope of positive/negative space.  Instead of grappling with a perceived problem or person as a discreet object, look at the variety of space that abuts it, surrounds it - select a zone of abutting space for your attack, pursuit or attention.  All matter is defined by its context.  As you change one aspect of the context you are changing the nature of the original object / solid and as it changes you may find the new thing more accessible to your skills and pursuits.

Donald Barthelme - A Biography - Daugherty

When someone writes a seven hundred page book about someone I’m only vaguely aware of I’m intrigued.  I bought this book and learned that Donald Barthelme was a literary innovator who helped re-direct American fiction along with a very small group of authors referred to as postmodernists for lack of a better term.  This group includes John Barth, William Gass, Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon.  I felt an immediate connection with DB because his father was of the second generation of modern architects who considered the tenets of modernism a religion.  In twentieth century architecture there is an indisputable godhead - Frank Lloyd Wright and a group of three major disciples, all  European: Le Corbusier, Mies Van Der rohe and Walter Gropius. Don Sr., Donald, the writer’s, father brought his architectural intensity into his home.  DB grew up in one of the first modern houses in Houston, Texas.  His mother was passionate about literature.  DB was drafted into the Army and served a tour overseas at the tail end of the Korean war.  DB had a strong-willed passionate and oppressive father - so did I.  The architecture / dad Freudian angle got me hooked for the avalanche of information that followed.  Roger Angel, fiction editor of the New Yorker anointed Barthelme as the next big thing in the mid-sixties.  DB’s fiction, while erudite, trenchant, funny and soulful is not accessible to many readers.  I love DB’s work.  He is explosively creative.  His lived life is dull as dust.  He sat at a desk and wrote all day every day for decades under the influence of copious amounts of vodka.  He moved from small apartment to small apartment and always re-painted each new place white.  Homage to the color of choice of hardcore modern architects.  He died young probably from immune system failure due to inhaling oil-based paint fumes (my theory) the alcohol was no help.  DB was on one end of a great paradigm juke in American letters when he was replaced on the New Yorker pedestal by minimalist / realist Raymond Carver who would have been a maudlin maximalist were it not for his editor Gordon Lish. DB has two brothers who are also esteemed authors of fiction, Steven and Frederick.  It is very interesting to note that  Donald and Frederick are on the two sides of the great New Yorker juke (too small to be a shift),  DB being pomo and Frederick being a realist.  There’s the Bloomian swerve from one’s precursor and what must be an even larger swerve, that from a famous brother, nice work Frederick, job well done.

Picasso - A Biography - John Richardson (3 volumes)

Picasso - A Biography -  John Richardson  (two volumes of three) - What more do we need to know about Picasso?  Picasso did not evolve from Cubism to his neo-classicism because he was an inveterate explorer who had exhausted the Cubist vein and had to discover a new avenue.  He abandoned Cubism so save his ass during World War One.  There developed a wartime fever to obliterate all things German from French life.  Picasso’s primary art dealer during his Cubist years was the German Kahnweiler and some German signs were spotted in a painting or two.  Picasso had gotten in trouble with the law in his Louvre theft association with the thief and was questioned by police.  He lived in fear of deportation.  Cubism rocked the boat.  Let’s dial back until the smoke clears into this sensuous proto-classical riff. He was Gertrude Stein’s little lap dog.  The whole Picasso as macho bull, towering this and that was a reaction to being such a squirt during the first years of his Paris career.  If Picasso died just prior to the start of World War One he would still be the second greatest painter of the twentieth century.  Matisse, of course, being the century’s towering precursor to all who followed.  Fauvism and Cubism were the Supreme court and Matisse as chief justice gets the nod as the main man due not only to his date of entry in the service of modernism but to the depth and breadth of his ideas.  We must as a people throw  the blinders from our eyes that resulted from Gertrude Stein’s wretched propagation of Matisse’s casual remark about the intention of his work being to relax.  He may have wished to relax after a decade of artistic conflict but the remark should not color his work up to that point.

Henri Matisse - A Biography - Spurling (2 volumes)

This is a great book that establishes foremost, the chronology of Matisse’s artistic development.  This allows an accurate assessment of his relationship to the key developments in the Paris avante-garde.  With information in this careful chronology one can clearly see that it is Matisse rather than Picasso who is the progenitor of twentieth century painting, that the starting point is not Picasso’s”Le Demoiselles d’ Avignon”  but any number of works by Matisse completed in the decade prior to Picasso’s emergence as a Cubist.  Matisse was far more than a maker of pretty pictures.  His inventions with scale, composition, color, drawing, subject drew the attention (fury) of the art establishment and cleared a path for young Picasso.  Matisse was clearly Picasso’s key precursor in Bloomian terms (see The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom - a book you cannot not read along with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn)  as Matisse had been digesting the particulars of Late Cezanne and casting them into a visual language that formed the foundation for all that has followed.  Think of the late work of Cezanne as the U.S. Constitution and the work of Matisse between 1900 and 1910 as the five foundational cases of the Marshall court (Chief justice from 1801-1835) that interpret the great document in practical ways for everyday commerce.  Matisse was Chief  Justice and Picasso was a brethren.  Matisse taught us the meaning of Cezanne not in terms of the corporal content of these towering, soulful communions with god but in how these revolutionary ideas of Cezanne might be expressed in original swerves.  Once Picasso saw Matisse’s swerves he knew he could also swerve. Not only away from Matisse but away from Cezanne himself.  Matisse taught Picasso how to look at Cezanne, how one could look.  Matisse was sickly throughout his adult life for unspecific reasons.  I’ll specify - he was breathing toxic petroleum distillates, paint thinner, turpentine, oil paint mediums all day, every day in claustrophobic garrets during his early years and in larger apartments and studios later.  He was slowly poisoning himself as all artists in oil paints do.  I had to stop working in oils twenty years ago due to health issues related to the fumes.  Just as old people don’t fall and break their bones - they break their bones and then fall, breaking still more bones.  Artists aren’t usually initially crazy or crazy and sick - they spend years breathing this oil-based poison then go off their rockers - see Van Gogh who chewed the toxic paint (mercury, Cadmium, cobalt) off of his brushes to soften them each morning.  Matisse grew up in a village in northeastern France near Belgium that manufactured cloth for Parisian couture fashion.  There were several small factories that competed with each other to develop the latest, most colorful and dynamic patterns for their cloth.  Matisse grew up surrounded by man-made gorgeous colors and fabric textures.  Color was in his blood.

de Kooning - A Biography - Stevens, Swan

I first saw de Kooning’s  paintings in the U.S. Pavilion at the 1962 Seattle world’s Fair when I was twelve.  I have been following his work from his mid-career until the Linda and Paul McCartney phase when he was propped up at his huge canvasses at his Long Island studio In full Alzheimer’s dementia with assistants mixing paint by the gallon and Elaine moving his arm around the canvas.  This book tells the whole story beginning with his difficult childhood in Holland.  He was a drawing prodigy as a child and achieved success in art school.  Here again we have a very difficult mother.  deKooning’s mother regularly  beat him as a child and abused him emotionally, she also lived to a ripe old age.  There must be something therapeutic about abusing one‘s sons.   Something about these problematic mothers  fuels greatness.  This book is a wonderful history of the New York art scene that centered on Tenth Street and eventually the Cedar Tavern where Pollock, Kline and  de Kooning would drink themselves into conversation-filled oblivion nightly. de Kooning was  painter’s painter who planted himself in front of his work each day and remained there grappling with issues from his deep sub-conscious until his energy drained off.  His wife Elaine, also a painter, was a huge benefit to his career.  She was the social adept whose ambition for them both drew her to the critics and gallery owners who could lift a career from nowhere to the radar screen.  She slept his way to the top.  You can smell the oil paint and turpentine in this book.  You can feel deK working his canvas day after day, week after week in a self-imposed deep therapy session, struggling.  After the portraits of his mother emerged in the “Women” series he began to drink himself into a stupor every day and continued drinking for many years quickly  eroding the edge from his work.  For a few years during the late 50s after the Jackson Pollock smoke cleared, it was deKooning who emerged as the titan of the new York School.  He was well-liked by all who met him and in his heyday,  always generous with praise for less well known painters.

CitraModern - UltraModern : Two Modernisms

Arch 323 – BlakeArchitecture History II April 12, 2007

CitraModern                     UltraModern

Sta. pt. Unpinned                Sta. pt pinned

Indigenous                            Cosmopolitan

Personal dialect                   Universal language

Expressionist                        Rationalist

Romanticized                        Mechanized

Non-Industrial                      Industrial

Non-grid                                  Grid

Architecture School - Lecture Topics and coursework

Jim Blake, NCARB807 Bain Place Redwood City, CA  94062 Jim . blake@gmail.com (650) 366-4974

Blissdietbook.com/blog Jimblakeart.com Blakegrouparchitecture.com

Topics upon which I could lecture effectively:

Architectural design process Techniques and strategies for design development Contract documents: Plans, specs, contracts Marketing for a small office – cultivating social networks Coordinating the consultant team: landscape, structural, civil, HVAC / plumbing, electrical, lighting, acoustics, food service, graphics, curtain wall, life safety, etc. Construction administration: delivering quality Architecture theory: Renaissance through contemporary – focus on 20th,21st C. Cezanne, Cubism and the Roots of “CitraModern” Architecture The history of the picture plane: Lascaux to Pollock The history of Painting: 19th through 20th Century: Turner to Jasper Johns The origins of style: tipping point A lexicon of contemporary architecture: nature and neologism Architecture History: Ancient through Contemporary (semester): featuring: Russian constructivist architecture Frank Lloyd Wright: The Wasmuth Portfolio LeCorbusier, Mies, Gropius: manifestos spoken and constructed Architectural enclosure systems: design, detailing, shop drawing review Laboratory design: Biology and chemistry research  laboratories Airport design: large markets, Industrial buildings, suburban office buildings, ferry terminals Wayfinding: Graphics in public buildings: concept, design, detailing Corporate office-design and space planning: the hip and the square High-end corporate interior design: limestone, bronze, terrazzo, stainless steel, wood veneer, millwork:    design, detailing, shop drawing review Structural design in detail for wood frame buildings Structural concepts for types I – V, including long-span steel systems Architectural graphics (two- year program ) orthographic projection, linear perspective, descriptive geometry axonometric and plan oblique projection systems and techniques freehand drawing, painting, human anatomy for architects, masterclass: drawing toward sublimity, the numinous image Residential project delivery: programming, design, documentation, construction phase services. Residential civil works: retaining walls, site drainage, roadway substrate, coord w/ geotech The community urban design charrette: organizing and delivering concepts to civilians, civic leaders and the press Teaching future architecture academics: strategies for the left and right brain. Writing clear, effective English: writing as the residue of thought Brainstorming and flow states: The creative process in the arts: architecture, sculpture, music, painting and  writing

Class Assignment - Montana State - Snow Typology

SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE                               MONTANA STATE UNIVERSITY Spring 2007

Architecture 551,552,553 Jim Blake – Instructor                                                                               January, 18, 2007

Project:  Bozeman Art Center – “A Tale of Two Modernisms”

A Typology / Topology of Snow

During the initial design phase of the Denver Art Museum Daniel Liebskind said that this explosive form was inspired by the Rocky Mountains.  Direct analogs to nature (raindrops, snowflakes, rolling hills, breaking waves, rocky mountains)  while rare, are a source of formal invention for buildings.  It has been more conventional in great architecture to use nature as an inspiration for abstract ordering systems and expressions at least once removed from natural form rather than using nature as a direct superficial reference.  The rigors of crystalline form in the work of Mies, The “organic” asymmetries of Frank Lloyd Wright, and the poetry of clay as brick in the work of Louis Kahn.

We are now surrounded by snow and ice, a wonderland of form, a treasury of nature’s invention. Although our snow is no longer new it still reveals a wealth of topological conditions.  I have sketched a few of the obvious.  Your assignment is to identify via photo, sketch, and diagram ten conditions:  five for ice and five for snow that are distinct from each other and when diagrammed might inform the geometry of a building plan, structure, enclosure system or the base page design / layout of your required notebook.

To do:

Create a base page that will be used to paste up salient images illustrating your research, design process and design product in an 8-1/2” x 11” format with a 1” free left edge for binding.  Your snow and ice explorations will form the initial pages of this notebook.  Remember, your notebooks will be turned in long after the snow has melted.  The level of abstraction of your motif might reflect this.

Reading List  (MSU Bookstore):

Kuhn, Thomas – The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Bloom, Harold – The Anxiety of Influence

Stalin as a Young Man - Montfiore

Joseph Stalin was a published poet of significant stature as a teenager.  Stalin robbed banks to send money to Lenin who used the funds to survive while planning the Russian Revolution.  Because Stalin always found his way back to civilization after being sentenced to exile after conviction for crimes as a young man, this happened five times, it has been asserted that Stalin was working for the Czar’s secret police and was never a Communist but a double agent.  Stalin’s home life as a boy was filled with violence and shame.  He was regularly beaten by both parents.  His mother bragged to villagers (to the chagrin of her husband) that her boy Joseph was not the child of her husband but of an itinerant carnival strong man who found her attractive.Stalin’s arm was crushed in a carriage accident as a young child and never healed.  His destroyed arm prevented him from participating in sports.  Stalin was sent to a seminary as an older teen where he was frequently punished for reading novels.  He especially enjoyed Tolstoy, Hugo and Dostoevsky.

Your next project awaits.