axial – M. Szal

colored pencil on bristol paper – 2009

This drawing, “Learning and Marbles” was in my portfolio, which blessed me with the scholarship to Pratt in 2010. The piece was an assignment from my Drawing 2 class at Carroll. I placed three marbles on a bookshelf with some large, glossy textbooks.

The reflection in the wooden bookshelf and the glossy reflection all intermix with reflections of each other. Thinking conceptually about the subject matter, I wanted to play on the idea of marbles representing knowledge along with books.

Have you lost your marbles?
-Anonymous

I was still developing my eye for depth perception and the nested marbles could have been pushed farther into the recessed textbook’s horizontally rolling plane. This diagonal isn’t balanced with another axial movement and thus, I tried to soften it with a very subtle curve.

L’Aurora (The Aurora) is a large Baroque ceiling fresco painted in 1614 by Guido Reni for the Casino, or garden house adjacent to the Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi, in Rome. I created this gif to illustrate better the geometric structure underlining Reni’s beautiful sweeping forms of gods, goddesses and angels in the glorious gold-filled dawn.

The Baroque was known for dynamic movement and triangle compositions that seemed larger than life yet replaced the idealism of the renaissance with something more akin to the drama of an opera (which also became hugely popular around the same time in the 17th century). Below is another of my favorite Reni paintings, Susanna and the Elders (1620-25). The Susanna painting also uses a fantastic composition with powerful axial movements galore.

Susanna and the Elders, Guido Reni / 1620-25

When I was in art school at Pratt, we had several assignments requiring us to select an Old Master painting to break down axially. Any significant curve, line, or other shapes that define the big moves of colors or a figure in the image can be broken down this way. Our professor had us take tracing paper and draw out the significant axial movements with different colored pens or markers directly over a printout of the original painting. These exercises helped me to understand the deeper essence of composition and our class looked at Baroque paintings in particular for their use of balancing diagonals with triangles for a dynamic yet balanced and compositionally strong image. I still make these from masterworks for inspiration and historical allusions in my artwork.