Sketch Book for the Artist

ABSTRACT

LINES

Writing Time

SINCE THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY, abstract artists and composers

have striven to break down old pictorial and musical

structures to explore new and unfettered modes of expression.

Both abstract drawing and composition involve the perfect

sequencing of sounds and marks against space and silence.

Bussotti, opposite, broke new ground in the 1950s with

graphic scores now considered among the most extreme,

beautiful, and inventive of his time. A graphic score is a

unique, abstract, music manuscript requiring instrumentalists

to improvise, interpret, and participate in the composition.

The scores are also exhibited in galleries as visual art.

Hugo, below, said, "There is nothing like dream to create

the future." An innovator who never fails to surprise, here he

anticipates abstract expressionism by 100 years. His drawing

writes the time of its own physical process by expressing the

extreme concentration of the moment in which it was made.

VICTOR HUGO

French novelist who made many drawings in

mixed media (see also p.28). Hugo's abstract

drawing here can be described in terms of

Gestalt, a German philosophical idea about

the power of moment, often expressed in

visual terms. Gestalt is the instant recognition

of an unnameable thing, a configuration, or a

pattern of elements so unified as a whole

they cannot be explained as a sum of parts.

Ink impressions When drawing nightscapes Hugo often laid

paper disks in place of the moon, brushed night skies over

them with ink then lifted the disks to reveal white moons.

Here he appears to have saturated the cut-out moon disks

with gritty pigment, pressed them face down, and lifted them

away to leave impressions of watery planets and seas.

Texture Compare this drawing to Hugo's octopus on p.28.

Similarity in gritty texture suggests that here, too, he mixed

graphite into ink, and let the drying meniscus deposit

granules in linear drifts such as we would see in the satellite

photographic mapping of rivers. Marks across the center

appear to be made with his fingers.

Two Impressions from a Cut-Out

Paper Disk

1853-55

VICTOR HUGO