Relic 12 hung liu

3.1 Distinguish among outline, contour, and implied line.

3.2 Describe the different qualities that lines might possess.

One of the most fundamental elements of nature is line. Indeed, lines permeate the universe, a fact that informs almost all the work of London-born painter Matthew Ritchie. Describing his painting No Sign of the World (Fig. 3-1), he explains: “I use the symbol of the straight line a lot in my drawings and paintings. It usually rep- resents a kind of wound, or a direction. The curved line is like a linking gesture that joins things. But the straight line is usually more like an arrow, or rein, or a kind of rupture.” From the bottom of No Sign of the World, vi- olet straight lines shoot up into a field of what appear to be broken sticks and branches. Above the horizon line, across the sky, looping lines of this same violet color appear to gather these fragments into circular fields of energy. His work begins with drawings that he then scans into a computer. In that environment, he can resize and reshape them, make them three- dimensional, take them apart, combine them with other drawings, and otherwise transform them. “From the very start, I’ve been working with digital tech- nology,” Ritchie says. “When you make something digital you make it out of little dots. And you can make lines out of particles, but they’re really just bits. . . . These are the classic forms of dimensionality—the point, the line, the solid—and then you add time and you’ve got the universe.” Ritchie’s project is just that ambitious and vast. He seeks to represent the entire universe and

the structures of knowledge and belief through which we seek to understand it. In No Sign of the World, it is as if we are at the dawn of creation, at the scene of some original “Big Bang”—as if the world is about to be born but there is no sign of it yet.

Varieties of Line What are the differences between outline, contour, and implied line?

To draw a line, you move the point of your pencil across paper. To follow a line, your eye moves as well. Lines seem to possess direction—they can rise or fall, head off to the left or to the right, disappear in the distance. Lines can divide one thing from an- other, or they can connect things. They can be thick or thin, long or short, smooth or agitated. Lines also re- flect movement in nature. The patterns of animal and human movement across the landscape are traced in paths and roadways. The flow of water from moun- taintop to sea follows the lines etched in the land- scape by streams and rivers. Lines, in fact, sometimes play a major role in human history, delineating city limits, county lines, and state and national borders— sometimes contested.

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Outline and Contour Line An important feature of line is that it indicates the edge of a two-dimensional (flat) shape or a three-dimensional form. A shape can be indicated by means of an outline, as in Yoshitomo Nara’s Dead Flower (Fig. 3-2). In Nara’s painting, heavy black outlines delineate both the little girl and the light bulb. This outline style is purpose- fully juvenile, evoking the Japanese love for kawaii, or “cuteness.” But, of course, Nara lends his “cute” little girl a kind of menacing punk-rock persona, even if the extent of her violent behavior is limited to cutting off a flower at its stem. The Japanese artist and art histo- rian Takashi Murakami has labeled the style of work reflected in Nara’s demonic little girls as “Superflat,” an insistence on two-dimensional forms that he sees as a defining characteristic of Japanese culture from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese prints to present-day animation (anime) and comic books (manga).

Where outlines tend to emphasize the flatness of a shape, contour lines form the outer edge of a three- dimensional shape and suggest its volume, its

Fig. 3-1 Matthew Ritchie, No Sign of the World, 2004. Oil and marker on canvas, 8 ft. 3 in. × 12 ft. 10 in. © Matthew Ritchie, Image Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

Fig. 3-2 Yoshitomo Nara, Dead Flower, 1994. Acrylic on canvas, 391⁄4 × 391⁄4 in. © Yoshitomo Nara, courtesy of Pace Gallery. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

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recession or projection in space. The contour lines in Ellsworth Kelly’s Brier (Fig. 3-3) create the illusion of leaves occupying real space. Lines around the outside of the leaves define the limits of our vision—what we can see of the form from our point of view. As these lines cross each other, or seem to fold and turn, it is as if each line surrounds and establishes each leaf’s posi- tion in space.

Implied Line If we point our finger at something, we visually “follow” the line between our fingertip and the object in question. This is an implied line, a line where no continuous mark connects one point to another, but where the connec- tion is nonetheless visually suggested. One of the most important kinds of implied line is a function of line of sight, the direction the figures in a given composition are looking. In his Assumption and Consecration of the Virgin (Fig. 3-4), Titian ties together the three separate horizon- tal areas of the piece—God the Father above, the Virgin

Mary in the middle, and the Apostles below—by implied lines that create simple, interlocking, symmetrical trian- gles (Fig. 3-5) that serve to unify the worlds of the divine and the mortal.

Implied line can also serve to create a sense of di- rectional movement and force, as in Calvary, a painting by African artist Chéri Samba (Fig. 3-6). Samba began his career before he was 20, working as a signboard painter and newspaper cartoonist in Kinshasa, the cap- ital of Zaire. With their bold shapes and captions (in French and Langala, Zaire’s official language), they are, in essence, large-scale political cartoons. Calvary places the artist in the position of Christ, not on the cross but splayed out on the ground, a martyr. He is identified as “le peintre,” the painter, on the back of his shirt. He lies prostrate before “the house of painting,” so identified over the doorway. He is being beaten by three soldiers, identified on the back of one as agents of the Popular Church of Zaire. The caption at the top left reads: “The Calvary of a painter in a country where the rights of man are practically nonexistent.” Here, implied lines arc

Fig. 3-3 Ellsworth Kelly, Brier, 1961. Black ink on wove paper, 221⁄2 × 281⁄2 in. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, CT. Gift of Mr. Samuel Wagstaff in memory of Elva McCormick, 1980.7. © Ellsworth Kelly, all rights reserved.

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Fig. 3-4 Titian, Assumption and Consecration of the Virgin, ca. 1516–18. Oil on wood, 22 ft. 6 in. × 11 ft. 10 in. Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice. © 2015. Photo Scala, Florence.

Fig. 3-5 Line analysis of Titian, Assumption and Consecration of the Virgin, ca. 1516–18. © 2015. Photo Scala, Florence.

Fig. 3-6 Chéri Samba, Calvary, 1992. Acrylic on canvas, 35 × 455⁄8 in. Photo courtesy of Annina Nosei Gallery, New York. © Chéri Samba.

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52 Part 2 The Formal Elements and Their Design

over the artist—the imminence of the downward thrust of the soldiers’ whips—and the political power of the image rests in the visual anticipation of terror that these implied lines convey.

Qualities of Line What are the different qualities that lines might possess?