Patrick Vale and His Colossus Drawing of New York
While in Seoul (in between trying to figure out how the toilet worked and how the bathroom mirror managed to never fog) I stared out the window and began drawing the building across from mine. Cities are gorgeous because of their enormity of detail that confronts you. As my drawing continued I started realizing the sheer number of lines that was confronting my eyes. You see it, and you take it in, and you are in awe of what is in front of you, but you don’t really understand it until you start counting the details by attempting to recreate them. And I’ll tell you, an hour or two into it, when I’d barely just finished the air condition unit alone I was done.
A couple months later I try again while in Manila, and then a little while later I try again in San Francisco and again in Addis. Nope. There has to be a system involved… a method. And I don’t know what that system would be. Maybe an early sketch in pencil of vanishing points and the large objects, including their relative ratios in relation to the other buildings in the landscape? Maybe that is the opposite way of doing it? Maybe its just one item linked to another item linked to another item as you go and the key is just the refusal to look at all of it at once.
But what about not only sketching an entire building, but also all the buildings you can see? That is just crazy. That’s what insane people on the padded walls of their cell. Normal human people do not do that. They just don’t. Well, apparently Pat Vale didn’t get the memo, because that is exactly what he did. And it took him several weeks to do it to unsurprisingly. Someone’s ability to mentally buckle down and just draw, and draw, and draw like this is amazing.
