By chance I found the image above entitled 'Some Primitive Forms', it reminded me of Hokusai's 'how to' drawings, whereby he shows us how to construct images out of basic geometry.
Hokusai
I was also reminded of William Latham's 'Family of forms' and his involvement in the Organic Art product. The idea was to show how organic forms could be 'bred' by asking a computer program to develop more and more complex forms from combinations of basic units.
William Latham
William Latham: A Family of Forms
The concept that the world can be constructed from a series of basic building blocks is an ancient one and relates to Plato's idea that beneath the complexity of appearance, there lay a basic set of simple forms, in his case we have what we now call the Platonic Solids, five simple forms whereby each face is made up of the same regular flat polygon and the same number of polygons meet at each corner. These forms would also come to have symbolic meanings, the cube representing earth, the octahedron air, the tetrahedron fire, the icosahedron water and the dodecahedron the whole universe.The thing about primitive forms is that you can gradually make them more convoluted, which is great if you are thinking about drawing complicated things.
The first form to draw three dimensionally is usually the cube. This can be done in perspective as above or it can be an isometric as immediately below. Once you are able to do this, the first set of complicated forms most students produce are made by cutting slices and blocks out of the first set of primitives.
Isometric rectangular blocks being cut into
You can also twist a basic shape, or elongate it by pulling it. If you have sliced it, you can gradually change each slice, so that a form begins to bend or get larger or smaller as it is built.
Once you have grasped the basic concept you can go on to create organic looking forms such as the shell below. all you need to do as a drawer, is to have a basic grasp of perspective and the time to practice drawing these forms over and over again, so that in your head you have a good three-dimensional understanding of possibilities.
Drawing for snail votive
This notebook drawing for a snail votive may seem a long way from the concept of primitive forms but without time spent doing the work of drawing those forms many years ago, the what seems to be a quickly thrown off sketch, would not be anywhere near as convincing.
Snail votive
In the world of CGI, other techniques and processes have now been introduced that build on more sophisticated rendering systems to do something similar, but with an inbuilt awareness of light interaction as forms evolve, so that the changing form of shadows becomes a vital part of the process.
Some primitives made by raymarching
For instance, raymarching is a 3D rendering technique that iterates rays step-by-step through a scene, often using Signed Distance Fields (SDFs) to determine safe step distances, (the distance an object travels between frames, to achieve natural, weight-accurate, and smooth movement). Unlike traditional polygon-based rendering, it is frequently used to render complex, procedural or fractal geometry by calculating, rather than intersecting, surfaces.
It gets more interesting when you begin putting forms together. Nature of course got there first, anabolism is the process where cells build complex molecules from simpler ones. Examples include amino acids joining to form proteins or nucleotides forming DNA strands.
I'm always looking for visual metaphors and the idea of building images from 'primitive' units, is an interesting one, as it suggests that you can build an image in a similar way to how nature constructs complex forms of life.
This is an old idea, in the 5th century BC the Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus articulated the idea of 'atomism'. This concept which asserted that all matter consists of indivisible, invisible particles called atomos, is at the root of why we now call atoms, atoms. The Roman poet Lucretius, then re-articulated this view and in his influential text 'On the Nature of Things' he wrote that atoms are eternal, vary in shape and combine to form all the physical substances that we experience.
However over the last hundred years or so, we have been breaking down the atom and discovering that it is not indivisible, but that it is made up of quarks, electrons, positrons, neutrons, charm and it seems more and more bits, the more scientists probe into the nature of matter, the more it seems to slip away from our understanding of it as a physical substance.
In India at roughly the same time as Leucippus and Democritus were thinking about atomos, a similar idea was being developed by Kaṇāda of the Vaiśeṣika school of thought, he proposed indivisible particles (paramāṇu) too, however he also proposed the idea of atoms having momentary (instantaneous) presence, a presence that flashed in and out of existence. Kaṇāda asserted that all that is knowable is based on motion. He also asserted that all substances are composed of four types of atoms, two of which have mass and two being massless. These ideas were presented within a larger moral framework whereby he defines Dharma as the cosmic order. He understands that duty, law, and a right way of living sustain our universe. This is a foundational principle out of which Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism will develop concepts of virtue, morality, and righteous conduct. Kaṇāda's explicit mention of motion as the cause of all phenomena in the world, does seem to echo the realisation that it is the flux of energy and solid mass that is fundamental. Our present understanding of the basic interactions governing the universe is based on an agreement that there are four fundamental forces; gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force. There are though still little bits in there in terms of the way physicists think. These four forces dictate how matter and energy interact, but in order to interact there needs to be a factor that allows them to do this and this is where we come across exchange particles or bosons. There are various types and some most of us have come across already, Photons carry the electromagnetic force, Gluons the strong nuclear force, W and Z bosons the weak nuclear force, the Higgs boson that gives mass to particles and the hypothetical Graviton that is supposed to carry gravity.
It would be nice to think that our present understanding of the universe might also come with a moral framework, whereby our understanding of the cosmic order, was reflected in a way to approach life. The interconnectedness of everything makes us aware that we are part of an ever forming universe and therefore any religions or forms of thinking that attempt to fix or hold down our conceptual grasp of who and what we are, should be seen as suspect. Over the centuries we have witnessed terrible wars and conflicts, often initiated by one party or another refusing to see the point of view of another. The inflexibility of thinking that comes from a belief in dogma, has caused us to forget that we need to be in constant dialogue with the world and not see it as something separate from us. Empathy with the not us, could perhaps be the starting point for a new moral framework, one that also saw duty, law and a right way of living as principles on which to sustain our world.
As an artist I have to sustain my practice with some sort of underlying belief. Perhaps this is a curse as much as a strength. It would be wonderful to just 'know' what is right, I use up so much energy worrying about what stance to take but as I get older I get even more thoughtful as to what it is to make art and in this instance perhaps all I can do is leave you with an unformed blob, something waiting for realisation, something on the way to being something else.
I spend time every week with lumps of clay not too unlike the form above and as soon as my fingers begin to push and pull its surface into different directions, ideas of possibilities begin to emerge. Perhaps that is the point, everything is full of potential and all we need to do is to play. Out of play emerges wonder and it is through wonder that we finally find our place in the world.
Coda
I'm working in Graz putting up an exhibition of my votive work. On the weekend I decided to visit the local museums, of which there are several. In the natural history museum I was fascinated by the history of the earth under my feet in Styria, (the Austrian province Graz is in), in particular in the geology and mineralogy of the area. As I wondered through the older mineral collection galleries, I think I found what I was meant to find, a section of hand made forms, designed as a learning tool for people wanting to think about how various rock formations were constructed out of underlying geometrical principles.
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