Light for the Artist by Ted Seth Jacobs

Author:Ted Seth Jacobs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 1988-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

THE SENSE OF FORM

“The sense of form” is one of those ambiguous technological phrases that sounds very meaningful ... and, in fact, is! The sense of form is all-important. It is difficult to imagine how an artist can have much stature without it. Like all such qualities, it seems easier to recognize than to pin down with exact definitions. Perhaps that is because a sense of form includes various elements. It could be described as a feeling for how everything fits together: the harmonious appreciation of light, shape, color, line, texture, movement. The artist who has a deep, innate sense of form seems to possess an instinctive sense of how light moves on forms and of which way the patterns and shapes of light need to be pulled. It is a sense of which way the form must be modeled in any given situation. This sense of how to express the form in harmony with the direction of light is quite different from a purely sculptural sense of form. The sculptural, or three-dimensional, sense of form gives us an innate feeling for how the body is put together. With a sculptural sense of form, we understand the physical shapes of things; we have a sense of the “style” of living, growing form. That also implies a feeling for how one form relates to another—how forms very subtly slide into one another and interact. This sense of form also includes a sensitivity to the way the body and other living things move. It is a grasp of the continuity of living form. An artist may have a highly developed sense of sculptural form and yet not understand the actions of light. In such cases, the forms may be modeled by shading systems but not lit. This is a fundamentally different way of describing form. The optical artist needs a sense of form that registers equally the subtleties of light and the structure of form. The one is expressed through the other.

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