Charles Dunn has written – if that's the right word – a lovely and enlightening art book, Conversations in Paint: a Notebook of Fundamentals (Workman Publishing, 1995). Dunn's work resembles Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind in that both consist of dozens of chapters, each only a page or two long. But Conversations is predominantly graphical, rich in watercolors by the author. Almost every chapter has a sidebar of apt quotations. The book's structure is a clean, well-thought-out hierarchy. Major sections explore:
- Seeing – the language of painting & style
- Principles – design, pattern, type, & emotion
- Materials – color, line, mass, & volume
- Procedure – planning, painting, & editing
... plus there's a final module on learning in general, and how to do it more effectively.
Without using illustrations it's hard to convey the beauty and clarity of Conversations. Faint shadows, from among the aphorisms that Dunn cites:
"One ought, every day, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words." – Goethe
"Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have." – Samuel Butler
and
"I am going on with my researches ... I am continually making observations from nature, and I feel I am making some slight progress." – Paul Cézanne (at age 67, a month before his death)
Friday, August 18, 2000 at 05:44:02 (EDT) = 2000-08-18
(correlates: Isaac Asimov, InTheName, AchieveNewBalance, ...)