Notebook

Notebook, 1993-

RELATIONSHIPS

Point and Linear
Trajectory
The single point, as we have seen, is chiefly an element of location or position, and therefore, tends to be static. Yet a series of points or dashes is, in a sense, a broken line. The eye following the path of these simple marks, will grasp the original motor act and transform them into a linear trajectory. The experience of movement and the imagery of movement are so commonplace in the twentieth century that we are surprised and perhaps a little amused that the Italian artists known as the Futurists should have made such a great to-do about them in the years immediately preceding World War I. True, we have become accustomed to speeds they could hardly have imagined; yet their ability to translate movement into images of singular force, seen in those drawings and paintings celebrating rebellion, speed, and the machine, remains impressive. We are tempted to compare the best of their images with the great animal drawings found in the cave at Altamira in Northern Spain, were the movement of line is seemingly the movement of life itself.

[Harlan, Calvin. Vision & Invention, An Introduction to Art Fundamentals. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986. pgs. 34-36]











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