Plane

C O N S I D E R
Plane. The path of a line in motion [in a direction other than its intrinsic direction] becomes a plane. A plane has length and breadth, but no thickness. It has position and direction. It is bound by lines. It defines the external limits of a volume. [Wong, Wucius. Principals of Two-Dimensional Design. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1972.]

Point, line, and plane are conceptual elements that are not visible. Thus when visible, they become form. A plane on paper, however small, must have shape, size, color, and texture if it is meant to be seen. So must a point and line. Volume remains illusory in two-dimensional design. [Wong, Wucius. Principals of Two-Dimensional Design. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1972.]

PLANE [The Following is from: Harlan, Calvin. Vision & Invention, An Introduction to Art Fundamentals. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986.]

A plane may be flat or curved, opaque or transparent, may exist in a drawing or a painting, or it may be the very real surface of a physical object. It is often conceived in a narrow geometrical sense as a parallelogram or trapezoid or some such; but this is too limiting, as we shall see . . . .

Basically, there are only two types of spatial planes: Those that lie parallel to the picture surface, and those that ^move obliquely to the picture surface.

Whether solid, open, or transparent, planes are capable of activating the space around them or through which they appear to move, of setting up currents of movements in all directions. Planes of transparent colored acetate or Plexiglas may be used exclusively or with opaque planes; or an effect of transparency may be achieved by allowing one apparently solid plane to overlap another and then adjusting the median area according to one's wishes--whether the overlapping will appear to be due to the dominance of the one color plane or the other, or whether there will be an effect of mutual penetration . . . .

Plane figure: a portion of a plane limited by lines either straight or curved. When the bounding lines are straight, the figure is rectilineal. When they are curved, the figure is curvilinear [Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary, 2nd ed.]

Plane: a surface more or less approximating to a geometrical plane. [Webster's New International Dictionary, 2nd ed.]

I include these dictionary definitions of the plane to indicate that most thinking about the plane and planes is in geometrical terms, although one or more recent dictionaries distinguish between mathematical, fine arts, aeronautical, and architectural applications. The word conjures, first, a geometrical and inorganic figure, one of a family of quadrilaterals--squares, rectangles, rhomboids, trapezia, trapezoids--and later, perhaps, curves dealt with by integral calculus and analytic geometry. They have played an important part in all types of perspectival systems and devices, in Cubism, abstract, and nonobjective art (Constructivism, Suprematism, Neo-plasticism and other twentieth century ventures), in architecture and in three dimensional design. Normally, they are associated with man-made or crystalline forms--those that often reveal their structures openly. In a drawing, the paper is the original geometrical plane. It is made to give way to other planes inscribed upon it, some paralleling the surface, some in overlapping formations, some tilting variously in depth, some creating subtle transparent constructs. Cubism gave a new syntax and impetus to all of these planar functions. In those movements that sprang up quickly in the wake of Cubism, rectilinear planes, straight lines, and a very limited range of colors became the principal means of formal invention.

. . . . An endless number of studies could be based on planes in both two- and three-dimensional contexts, to the degree that grammar might threaten to take precedence over all else and a modern academism would triumph. We must be on guard against this at every moment, especially in the often artificial, out-of-touch atmosphere of the classroom. It is good to return every so often to simple relationships. They teach economy of means and why certain works of art--a design, a drawing, a piece of pottery are capable of being viewed many times . . . .

Shape, Plane, and Form Developments
It would be useful at this point to examine earlier studies for qualities that may have been neglected at the time they were done. Perhaps it was enough then to have discovered the physical qualities of materials, things, and surfaces without going very deeply into their psychological esthetic , and structural potentials. It takes a great deal more experience of color, for instance, to fully appreciate such factors as warm and cool contrasts, complementary contrast, the various types of color interaction. It may take still more time and experience to understand and utilize, even in the simplest designs, the spatial dynamics of color--color as area and, simultaneously, color as depth; color as color-space. We acquire the habit of examining color studies, old and new, for the tendency of colors to expand and contract, advance and recede. We should learn to turn them upside down or to one side or another to see if ^orientation has anything to do with their spatio-plastic behavior . . . .

Color. Warm colors often seem nearer and larger than the areas they actually occupy. Yellow spreads more than orange or red. The cool colors tend, in most situations, to appear a bit smaller and more discrete than their ground space. Grays seem retractive. Black, however, usually maintains as strong a forward position as white. Yet color and value contrast, hard and soft edges, and other figure-ground factors are operative, often in very unpredictable ways.

Geometric shapes or planes may share the same edge, may hinge on one another to create cubic structures or stepwise movements in space. Solid planes may be used with open linear planes, overlapping, touching, or separated. The latter do not have to be defined on all four sides; two or three edges are sufficient to establish a plane and its direction . . . .

Planar articulations are not so different from ^linear articulations, except of course the plane asserts itself in two dimensions instead of one . . . . Planes, like lines, are capable of touching, intersecting, and overlapping one another at various points and angles, or they may stand apart in "open" relationships, allowing much spatial interaction. Planes, in addition, may overlap in both opaque and transparent conformations. This gives them some advantage over lines: They have greater tectonic possibilities, especially in their ability to interpenetrate. [One of the fundamental, basic differences between painting and graphics: The touch and mark of brush immediately suggests plane blending into three-dimensional form - This in conjunction with color which is an effect of light interacting with substance which has texture or the quality of surfaces. And, edge is blurred--dissolved from any clear linear implication . . . . ]

Historical
Having viewed planes in rather strict applications, we can take comfort in examining them in more generous, though no less disciplined, circumstance. The history of planes in modern art could be said to have commenced in the art of Edouard Manet (1832-1833). Manet transformed mid-century realism, the realism of Courbet, into something forward-looking and unique. Manet's modernism was not one that may be limited to a neat little moment in the history of technique, in the story of the progress of modern reductionism; instead, his was of a piece with that of his friend, the poet-critic Charles Baudelaire[1821-1867]. Sure enough, it was perhaps Manet's interest in Japanese prints that encouraged his invention of a method or style called peinture claire, assisted no doubt by a keen appreciation of the technical innovations of Franz Hals (1580/5-1666], Velásquez (1599-1660), and Francisco Goya (1746-1828). His characteristic paintings from about the year 1860 onward reveal a systematic elimination of traditional shading, a steady lightening of both form and field, and a tendency to achieve depth by an overlapping of forms in limited space, as in Japanese prints, rather than by means of Renaissance perspective. These forms, because of their tendency to flatness, took on the characteristics of planes (Courbet likened them to playing cards)--anticipating the art of Matisse by at least 40 years. Manet and other artists of his time evidently saw more than this in Japanese prints--for example, the use of rhythmic and contrasting structural lines, high and oblique angles of vision, asymmetry extending into the most casual compositional strategies, and ornament.

Manet's overlapping forms, treated almost flatly as planes, are our main interest here. Examine his Portrait of °mile Zola (1867-1868]: The two Japanese works seen in the background offer both historical and stylistic or technical clues. Japanese prints had been known to Manet and his friends form about the year 1856. An oriental shop specializing in prints and other exotic items was opened in Paris in 1862. Then, by rare good fortune, the Japanese section of the 1867 World's Fair, held in Paris, provided some of the excitement needed to usher in a much-talked-about "new art."

If Japanese prints reveal no trace of shading, Manet's Zola shows little enough--and this is only one aspect of his approach. Japanese prints exclude all unnecessary background information, create depth by planar overlappings, and situate objects and figures in architectural settings by means of oblique or isometric projections. Manet began to do rather similar things in paintings from about 1860. People thought that he had taken leave of his senses, that he was inept or was trying to be perverse. If we commence by examining Zola's right leg overlapping his left leg, the right hand overlapping both leg and book the open book overlapping the books lying flat on the table, and they, in turn, overlapping the porcelain inkwell and the fanlike assortment of papers, through to the wall and the choice of prints on the wall, we have all the evidence we need of the arrival of a new pictorial procedure. Less noticeable perhaps is the way the back of Zola's upholstered chair wants to swing forward, the uptilt of Zola's book and the table top--all the result of Manet's interest in horizontal and vertical oblique projection and shallow depth, which he would have found in Japanese prints, but which had gone out of use in European "high-art" in the fourteenth century, certainly in the fifteenth century, because of a particular need to involve the spectator more empirically in paintings (and for whatever other strange and subtle reasons).

This way of realizing form and space would not be lost on Manet's younger acquaintances, least of all Cézanne, who would discover in Manet's art and in the art of Poussin (1593/4-1665) and Corot (1796-1875), both root and branch of a form language that included more than the "pure openness" of Impressionism. Cézanne used Impressionist color in the service of a more involved pictorial order, one that engaged both eye and mind, perception and conception. He sought more structural equivalents for trees, houses, household things, fruit, boulders, bottles, faces, and mountains; these consisted of both frontal and somewhat forward-tilting planes, large and small. His application of colors in shingle-like strokes, his "constructive stroke," a refinement perhaps on his earlier use of the palette knife, was his way of building form and space alliances from the smallest unit, the plane of the brush stroke itself, to the larger forms--a method he chose to call "modulation" rather than modeling. Whether stated abruptly or subtly, broadly or minutely, his ^basic structural element was the color-plane (color as plane). In his use of it in portrait, landscape , or still-life paintings, he never lost touch with the underlying abstract features, the familiar geometric archetypes--cylinders, spheres, cones (forms with curving surfaces, "horizon" forms), and of course cubic forms (tectonic forms, forms of construction, architectural forms).

The color-plane, starting with the individual brush stroke, would inspire the interest of Matisse and his Fauves circle of friends, Derain, Vlaminck, Braque, Dufy, and others, and would be developed by Braque out of expressionistic Fauvism in the direction of what would be called Cubism during the years 1906-1909, joining forces with Picasso in 1908. [an aspect in the transformation of the pictorial, personal point of view to abstractions.....] The influence of Cézanne became the dominant one. Braque and Picasso showed less interest, at first, in color-plane possibilities than in the plane alone as a means of dealing with form--form virtually on its own, then form in a spiraling form-space context. They reduced the plane to a near-geometric element in grays, earth colors, and diminished blues and greens, in order to reconstitute form in controlled depth from several angles of vision (Analytic Cubism, c. 1907-1912). Again, Cézanne's way of presenting an object from two or three points of view simultaneously established an important precedent. This and related strategies, amounting to so-called distortions (far better the word adjustments)--ways of trying to grasp forms in the very act of perceiving them, painting them--would remain an important legacy, along with Cézanne's use of closed and open structure and passage. Cézanne's paintings inspired not only a new pictorial grammar, but also a new syntax, the two extending their influence through more than one stage and branch of Cubism into architecture and even applied design. The color-plane, broadly extended (as in Synthetic Cubism, c. 1912-1921), the transparent plane and the concept and use of radical juxtaposition and discontinuity, would characterize much of the visual arts "language" of the twentieth century . . . .

The shift from Analytic Cubism to Synthetic Cubism in about 1912 led to a continuing "liberation" of color as color-plane in the works of Picasso, Braque, and Juan Gris and, notably, in paintings by Léger. [Consider a polyphony of rhythms, lines, shapes, and colors in a generous, open matrix . . . . ]

In Synthetic Cubism, all of the form-space experiments of Analytic Cubism gave over to a new order and syntax, thanks in part to the use of collage. The familiar images began to reappear in a much broader color-plane environment, but as masks of themselves. Color was allowed, once again, to assume an important function in the overall plastic ensemble. Ample color planes were made to fluctuate, pass in and out of form and space, across from and space, in an extension of passage . . . .

Transformations
Paul Klee, in his book The Thinking Eye, illustrates what happens to a linear pattern when its regular grid base or flat projection has been distorted, "pulled out of shape" and what happens to a trapezium drawn on a rectangular area divided into 24 squares when the grid lines within the rectangle are placed at odd angles, finally when not only are the grid lines stretched and twisted, but the rectangle itself has given way. These remind me of D'Arcy Thompsons' book On Growth and Form, Chapter IX, On the Theory of Transformations, or the Comparision of Related Forms. Thompson explains : "We are apt to think of mathematical definitions as too strict and rigid for common use, but their rigour is combined with all but endless freedom. The precise definition of an ellipse introduces us to all the ellipses in the world."

Sir D'Arcy describes Method of Co-ordinates, Cartesian Transformations, Radial Co-ordinates, Rectangular Co-ordinates as these relate to animal, human, and other forms of life, accompanying his text with the most interesting diagrammatic illustrations.

A brief return to the discussion of gradients . . . . will refresh our understanding of what occurs perceptually when we pass from a construct, a design, in flat projection (a simple hoizontal-vertical lattice formation) to the same design at a tilt, drawn in vanishing-point perspective, with some or all of its parts out of alignment with the vertical and the horizontal, or warped or bent out of shape. The slanting lines, curving lines, or oblique parallelograms contain more than one "gradient of location," a gradual increase or decrease of some perceptual quality in space, in relation to the implied vertical and horizontal axes of the ground, the paper. So, then, the eye very cleverly "reads" these deviant elements in depth, and the result is a rhythmically altered structure with movements apparently in space and time and one that has gone from being dividual to one that is now individual . . . .

Reference Books: Pure Plane/Form Studies
In this section I will defer to three outstanding teachers, authors, and designers and their publications. Prof. Arthur L. Loeb, senior lecturer in visual and environemntal studies and director of the Design Science Studio at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard Univ.; Peter Pearce, pres. and dir.of research and development of Synestructics, Inc.; and Susan Pearce, director of foundation relations at Caltech. Their books [ . . . . would form the most enlightened, practical, and handy guide for student or teacher--and all four may be held in one hand!] are:

Color and Symmetry, Arthur L. Loeb (NY: Wiley, 1971)

Space Structures - Their Harmony and Counterpoint, Arthur L. Loeb [Reading, MA; Addision-Wesley Publishing Co., Inc., 1976]

Polyhedra Primer, Peter and Susan Pearce (NY: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1978)

Experiments in Form: A Foundation Course in Three-Dimensional Design, Susan and Peter Pearce (NY: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1980).

"The Polyhedral Arthur L. Loeb," an article by George Howe Colt in Harvard Magazine, March-April 1982, pgs. 26-37.

R  E  F  E  R  E  N  C  E  S 

5 Plane adj [L planus] [1704] 1: having no elevations or depressions: Flat 2a: of, relating to, or dealing with geometric planes b: lying on a plane [a __ curve] -syn see Level

Plane table n [1607]: an instrument consisting essentially of a drawing board on a tripod with a ruler ointed at the object observed and used for plotting the ines of a survey directly from observation.