Thursday, October 27, 2011

Of Broken Stasis

There's yet another mindtrap that I find when drawing. It's a flatness that makes the drawing really awkward. For instance, a face isn't just a flat surface with eye, mouth and nose stickers on it. And although front, profile and certain angles are easier to avoid flatness, a face turned up always become too flat, and it's highly frustrating to attempt moving a face around and have the face parts attached to it realistically.

In a desperate way to find a way to heal this flatness in faces I draw I got obsessed with the idea of finding the opposite quality I see in human faces. It turned out to become a motif that got my attention, and I'll call it Broken Stasis for a lack of a better name, so this one will paliatively represent the idea's existence.

It represents is a design principle of mine. A principle of dynamism and expressivity of shapes and crossing angles that stir visual interest. But this idea has matured more in musical lands, so I had to go learning a little about musical terms to describe it, which is harmful. But since musical theory is full of amazing italian terms that vortex my mind to the music world, and I have to hold control of my mind not to go that way. Yet.

Songs need design principles as visual art, as they also need dynamism and expressivity from chord progression and rhythm that stir auditive interest. And the analogy of a flat line or surface is linearity of steps of notes. The variation between steps and skips in the ascension makes the melodical line more interesting, and it's known as conjunct and disjunct motion. Also, melodies usually have variation of ascension and descension of the notes. Even if the undercurrent movement of the arpeggio is ascending, no arpeggio sounds possibly interesting by only ascending in step notes. It'd be no song, just an exercise, actually. And then again, ideas run too short if notes are always chosen the same way.

The rhythm of the melody also isn't always synchronized with the the tempo, so breaks in the flow like syncopation make it less predictable. Unpredictability is one of the things that create dynamism, thus vortexes in design, therefore, a subprinciple of the Broken Stasis.

And then, all I have to do is to analogize it back to ungap my visual ideas. The aforementioned Broken Line is one of the ways Broken Stasis can be used to bring an appeal to the design of the piece, a little of asymmetric and chaotic appeal well known in japanese art that make it visually engaging. But the Broken Stasis is also used to correct proportions and give them a dynamic appeal. And if the proportions and angles and dynamics are well-used, the gusto effect makes itself present.

Here is a study of mine in which I attempted to summon Broken Stasis, though there's a lot for me to master my own idea. But there's some of it there already, and you can also recognize it if you watch it with the musical terms in mind.
Can you feel the syncopations and skips?

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