HAND-EYE-BRAIN (GOING TO CHURCH)

I have been trying to merge the digital and the manual for many years.  Specifically, I began to buy digital sketching devices around 2012.  I had used a Wacom tablet a couple of times but looking at the screen while moving your hand in another universe did not replicate the natural fluency of drawing for me.  And so, in 2012 I bought the “Inkling”, a strange hybrid device which allowed you to sketch on paper with a rather fat ballpoint pen, while a sensor, clipped to the edge of the paper, converted those movements into bitmap files.

The fluency was wonderful.  It was easy to capture my natural drawing style.  But size was very limited by the range of the sensor.  There was no way to go back and add to something you were doing yesterday, and the whole business of setting it up and downloading the files was quite cumbersome.  The initial promise faded and it fell into disuse. I did use the sketches in a couple of blog posts and was rather proud of the extra punch I could get with a couple of minutes adding colour in Photoshop.

I should really try to emulate that style with my current technology.

In 2013 I bought a Microsoft Surface, the very first model to come out.  For a while I had a full set of Windows devices (Phone, Tablet, Laptop) which seemed like the obvious way forward to me, but it didn’t catch on with the mass market, so the phone eventually fell by the wayside.

The stylus available for tablets at that time had a thick spongy ball at the end.  Slightly better than drawing with your finger tip, but not really comparable to the fluency of the Inkling.  Drawing directly on a decent sized screen was good, and I became aware of the Wacom series that has a built in screen, but wasn’t yet ready to splash out on such a device which would be too much to carry around on a daily basis anyway.

My collection of Surface sketches is not very impressive, but you can see that I am trying to find a digital replacement for scribbling on random bits of paper.

There is a gap of about 3 years.  Then I was persuaded to buy an iPad pro with the Apple pencil.  I was disappointed with the pencil and I decided to splash out on a Wacom Cintiq by way of comparison.  The iPad is always at hand but the stylus feels like plastic on glass, too slippy by far.  The Wacom has a great feel but you can’t carry it around with you and the cables are a bit of a pain.  Nevertheless I did some interesting work with these two devices.

Finally I felt like digital drawing could compete with the manual version that had been one of my primary thinking tools for more than 60 years.  Quite a bit of “traceover” work here, but also a couple of pics where I just started drawing on a blank sheet and made it up as I went along, tapping into the awesome power of our subconscious brain.

All the same, digital sketching had not become a daily activity in the same way as pencil and paper.  That was only to happen in 2018 when I finally gave up on my Windows phone and bought a Samsung Note 8.  The screen may be small compared to the iPad, but the stylus feels better.  It seems to grip the glass very slightly which is much closer to how a pen or pencil feels on paper.  Also the charging arrangement is about 10 million times better.  You don’t even have to think about it.  Finally the phone slips into your pocket.  It’s the one device you are going to have to hand almost wherever you go, so you can do a quick sketch whenever the mood takes you.

Once the Samsung phone had made digital sketching a part of my daily routine, the iPad could gradually creep back into play.  This happened after my trip to Volterra in Tuscany for a reality capture workshop.  Back home I felt the need to look more carefully at the images I had amassed.  There is no better way of looking perceptively than the process of drawing.  As a species we have been doing that for at least 30 thousand years: representing objects from life by drawing on to surfaces and transforming out grasp of reality in the process. From the caves of Altamira to Picasso’s rapid sketches on glass we have been thinking aloud with the “hand-eye-brain” loop that is embodied in the act of drawing.

There is an interesting range of expression here, degrees of abstraction, flat colour v grainy texture, muted tones and garish colour.  The value for me was in the process, the hours spent developing fluency with digital drawing tools.  Doing the work.

In early 2019 a visit to my good friends in Hastings, Nick & Jane, prompted attempts to work more rapidly, to use a freer line, adopt a more impressionistic mindset.  It takes effort, and it’s not always the correct approach to a situation, but it’s really, really important in terms of merging the digital and manual worlds of visual thinking.

HAND-EYE-BRAIN-DEVICE.  We have all become cyborgs to some extent.  Not sure it’s as dramatic as that sounds.  There is a very deep history of transforming our reality with devices.  The way that fire impacted our digestive system and jaws (perhaps a million years ago) was arguably more dramatic than the “digital revolution” we are now experiencing.  Difficult to compare though.

Stone tools, Language, Sedentary life, Houses & cities, specialized trades.  Culture takes the form of physical devices, of institutions, habits of daily life.  Many animals have culture to a certain extent. But we have made it the hallmark of our species. 

Which brings us to the year of Covid.  A couple of pre-covid sketches take very simple images and try to explore the very personal meaning behind them.  My hand resting against the window of a train as we rumble through the English countryside.  The simple barred window of traditional gulf architecture set in a rough textured wall, stained with the ever present fine sand that gets into everything.

Then a series of freehand inventions, trying to capture the flowing scrolls and foliage of the classical idiom.  I want to go beyond tracing over carefully chosen examples.  Just start drawing.  Invent on the fly.  Try to internalize the unspoken rules, expand your natural vocabulary.  The fourth in the series is a venture into the third dimension with plasticine on a textured tile background.  I’m still intending to make a latex mould from this and cast it in plaster.  Extend the range from digital sketching, via hand drawing through to physical object. 

BIM is my “main thing” but let’s continue to blur the boundaries.  If BIM is to fulfill its promise, it must overlap into the world of stonemasons, carpenters and plasterers.  We can’t just live in our heads and our “social media presences”.  That’s the brain freeze of lock down.  Make the connections, not just to a set of group think “friends”. But to the world of work (and play) out there on building sites and city streets.

A couple of months ago, at the height of lockdown I attempted to breathe new life into work I did in the 1980s in Zimbabwe, my adopted country where all three of my children grew to adulthood before we all found ourselves merging into the economic refugee community (legal immigrants all, I hasten to add … I have every sympathy for the youth of Africa, but I don’t believe we are helping them by demolishing the rule of law in those few countries which can act as a partial model for their futures.  If you are passionate about helping “the oppressed of Africa”, why not go and live there, as I did.  Get to know the situation first hand and make some small contribution of your own to economic and social development)

Sorry about the rant.  I started to redraw some of the pencil sketches I was working on just before I moved from the Curriculum Development Unit to the University.  These were attempts to convert the hands-on experience of my 20s and 30s, into teaching materials for courses in Building which were offered as part of the secondary school curriculum.  While at the University I “taught the teachers” … in reality learning as much from the experience as they did.

Which brings us to the past few weeks.  After more than a year of constructing an intelligent digital model of Notre Dame de Paris as part of an international, voluntary group, I felt the need to think about church design in general a bit more deeply.  Put the work in context.

How to do that?  Has to be by drawing.  Make the hands busy and the brain will do it’s thing in the background.  The subconscious will churn away, processing all manner of visual and verbal data that will come popping back into consciousness, unbidden. at the most opportune and revealing moments.  The mind is a phenomenal machine, more than a machine I suspect, though I don’t believe in woo woo.

And so I have been sketching churches.  Mostly on my phone and based on random image searches on Bing.

 

From there I found myself motivated to tackle something smaller than Notre Dame and to shift back from the Gothic of medieval times to the Classical language of the early enlightenment period.  Hence this weekend, spent “BIM sketching” St Anne’s, Limehouse by Nicolas Hawksmoor: built just over 300 years ago (so closer to the present than it is to Notre Dame’s inception, in years at least)

I will do another post about that process.  For now an image or two.