November Canal Drawing

Above is this morning's walkn-draw effort, approximately 9x12".

The following quotes are from the Seurat drawing book cited yesterday.

"Where the draftsman is a scribe and the writer a maker of of signs, the origin of man's intellectual mastery of the world appears with such clarity that Paul Valery's apotheosis of drawing sounds less exaggerated than it might: 'Possibly, drawing represents the mind's greatest temptation.'"

Drawing as the apple from the tree of knowledge.

"Though drawing stood at the inception of form-making activity and painting was originally not much more than drawing with color added, drawing nevertheless increasingly received its status and the conditions of its procedures from its relation to painting.  Drawing came to mean design...Doni...saw a connection between disegno and the creation of the universe, and Vasari called it the father of the three arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture.  But the disegno concept paid its greatest tribute to the archetypical nature of drawing by making it a synonym for the faculty of apprehension itself.
           Zuccari surpassed even this notion by recognizing disegno to be a sign of God in man..., thus exalting it to the 'principle of universal creativity.'"

Drawing as the insight into the mind of God.

Underhill

A street view in Brooklyn, Underhill towards Dean. 11x14 oil.

Another variation on feeling and judgement, this time from the Introduction to the book, Georges Seurat: Drawings by Erich Franz and Bernd Growe:  "Most of us tend to think of the world as a conglomeration of separate things that we understand by attaching names to them; with Seurat this accumulation of discrete entities merged into a continuum of the visible.  In Seurat's drawings we experience things that we had conceived as irreconcilable opposites merged and manifested as compelling synthesis--rational judgement combined with emotional immediacy, and ideal generalization with unique and transient individuality.  They show us that these opposites can enter a visual unity without being reduced to a mere gray twilight of compromise."

Those words summarize what I want to accomplish visually.