D’Arcy Thompson’s ‘On Growth and Form’

My last post about the Leeds City Art Gallery reminded me of one small exhibition from Gallery 4 that was of great significance for old art educators such as myself. It has just closed. but if you didn't see it you can always check out the original book. 

‘Growth and form’ was published in 1917, it was an investigation of mathematical scale, order and process in relation to organic growth and tried to establish why forms become the type of forms they were. It was hugely influential and up until the late 1970s was essential reading  for all art and design Foundation students. (In the case of most students like myself this meant looking at the pictures)  Artists from Richard Hamilton to Gego (see post on Gego) were deeply influenced by his theories, as they added scientific weight to the poetry of formal investigation. The book is available here: 

Illustration from D'Arcy's 'On Growth and Form'

One of the most powerful tools that artists and designers took from D’Arcy was the proportional grid. This allowed you to distort any form into another and yet preserve a formal link back to the original. It was logical and unpredictable at the same time, all you had to do was overlay one form with a regular grid and then as long as there were the same number of squares, produce any distorted grid by squashing or opening out distances between co-ordinates and then copy what was in each corresponding numbered reference onto the new distorted grid. You could produce endless variations of form and yet they all looked purposeful, because there was always a logical system laying underneath each drawing.

A typical exercise in changing the dynamic of a set of regular squares. 

You can use grids to change the characteristics of any image.

D'Arcy Thompson's transformation grids aimed to show how a simple mathematical operation could turn a parrotfish (top left) into an angelfish (top right), in doing so he was also able to identify the essential relationships between forms that had a similar evolutionary history. 

Perhaps these grids are so familiar to artists because Thompson took the idea from an artist in the first place. Durer had long ago realised the importance of grids when investigating form. They were essential when trying to draw objectively (see drawing of drawing from below) and when developing perspectives and if all the elements in an image were to fit together logically Durer further realised that similar mathematical principles were required to inform all the elements in his work. 

Durer gridded heads

The moral is, never dismiss artists from the past, they are always worth revisiting and they can become a rich resource that can re-energise your ideas over and over again. 

Leonardo: Perspective drawing

If you want to locate objects in space, the classic method is to produce a perspective first, this perspective can also be seen as a distorted grid, once seen in this way you can 'people' this grid with whatever you are working with and establish a 'reality' or conviction that can support your idea's visualisation. 

See also:

Information on various types of perspective 

Point of view