This month in 1858, Hymen L. Lipman was awarded the very first patent for a pencil.
The Patent Office requires a schematic drawing with each application. The drawing must be plain, clear, and straightforward: a simple black line on a white background. Any use of imagination is strictly forbidden. No exaggerations, no color, no expressive variety in the line allowed.
How much important information can be conveyed in such a sterile format?
Here is the drawing Walt Disney used to obtain a patent for his animation camera, 82 years after the patent for the pencil:
Patent drawings may look sterile, but drawing is a centicipitous art form, and drawings which celebrate clarity and precision above all other virtues have a strength of their own. In his book, The Art of the Patent, Kevin Prince shows how patent drawings have developed a language for conveying information with a plain black line. Federal regulations have established these conventions for showing specific characteristics:
Even the most sterilized art forms can't quite conceal the mad passion in our blood.
Looking at patent drawings, I enjoy those occasions when we catch a small glimpse of a human pulse.
Here, for example, some Walter Mitty draftsman just couldn't help adding a cool rock n' roller behind this guitar invention.
 |
| Scary! |
And I'm sure the Patent Office didn't really require a drawing of a bathing beauty to understand how to hold a brush:
 |
| A patent artist's equivalent of Gil Elvgren |
Even the most sterilized art forms can't quite conceal the mad passion in our blood.
That guitar player freaks me out.
ReplyDeleteThat guitar player freaks me out.
ReplyDeleteSteady Van Halen's tapping into your worst fears; burst ears.
That Van Halen is fer shit but it looks like the art in today's graphic novels. It's the intentionally bad drawing style David says we should like.
ReplyDeleteJSL
It's the intentionally bad drawing style David says we should like.
ReplyDeleteI must not have been paying attention when he said that. David has come out against Brunetti, Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman and many other lower drawers over the years.
And I don't know about 'intentionally bad.' I mean, lots of funny cartoon art is 'intentionally bad' in the sense that it is distorted far beyond mimetic credibility. But it is good at being funny because it is willfully ignorant of/ignoring reality as it actually looks. Comedy reserves the right to lack justification.
The question is whether you gain something by losing naturalism; and then how much do you gain. Information graphic drawing styles serve a purpose, like many kinds of design styles. Cartoons make us smile. These forms function.
Of course, just because we like something, or it is effective as a communication for its audience, that doesn't mean it's any good as Art.
The patents are as they are because they must be extremely precise about what idea they are claiming. The one filing the patent wants it to be as general and cover as much alternatives as possible; the one reading it wants to take it in the most strict and limited interpretation possible. For the patent system to work, there must be no two ways of reading a patent, and there are hordes of lawyers making a livelihood on this.
ReplyDeleteSuggesting stuff is a subtle way of makeing people unconsciously believe you are claiming something that is not actually there. That bathing lady only flew probably because the text of the patent left perfectly clear the invention being claimed was the interchangeable brush hair or whatever. If anyone even suspected this could be interpreted as about ways of holding a brush, there would be a bloodshot-eyed lawyer screaming for a more precise drawing.
What better way to explain a sensitive line or one that conveys feeling but with the deadly lines of the patent drawings. Yet, they are understandable to their purpose.
ReplyDeleteMany decades ago when Webster’s Dictionary began using some photos along with their usual ink drawings to illustrate things, a friend commented, it’s amazing how much more information can be gotten from a drawing verse the photos. It really is true how little spatial information is conveyed in photos, especially in those little halftone photos in the dictionaries.
Short of some isometric perspective used in some patent drawings which are almost wildly deadly, these suffice to prove the point that line that’s not expressive of something is awfully dead. I love the last comment on the woman. She does promise much compared to the lifeless lines in the post.
Point well made David and it’s a very hard to deny that you haven’t shown the use of line as a means of communicating the character and feeling of a thing as well that feeling may also convey understanding.
But I can’t help but acknowledge that it’s also true that the work of Harvey Dunn or NC Wyeth founded on solid forms and excellent drawing might be a good subject too, since you have been on the defensive more often than not for your interest in line or concepts in mid century art. It would be nice if such a post and its comments might move the reader beyond terms such as poetic, or poetry to something more specific to how insights and suggestions of imagists such as Ezra Pound might have been expressed in examples in the Golden Age illustrators. I mean you would only have to give the ball a slight nudge to see where it goes. It would be much appreciated I think, if it works for you and in your own time of course.
MORAN-- Me too. There's something scary about this kind of ungainly drawing that I find more frightening than skillfully drawn attempts to be scary. For example, Berni Wrightson might spend three days drawing the scariest monster he can concoct, and it wouldn't unnerve me half as much as this demented mutant Van Halen.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous/JSL-- Like Kev Ferrara I'm not sure the Van Halen is "intentionally" bad. I suspect we're seeing a mechanical draftsman trying to burst out of his shell and show the world that in his heart of hearts he is a wild rock n'roll party animal. I think the results make clear that he is in fact best suited to be a mechanical draftsman (although sadly that profession has been replaced by computers).
By the way, Kev Ferrara is exactly right-- I view this kind of drawing to be first cousin to the monotonous, lifeless line of Chris Ware and others who draw in that mechanical "information graphics" style. I originally added a paragraph to this post taking a swipe at that style of drawing, but decided it was just a distraction. Besides, I was impressed when I visited the traveling show of Chris Ware's work at the Museum of Contemporary Art that in recent years he seems to have raised his ambitions and is doing more diverse work.
xopxe-- Agreed. Different drawings have different priorities. Here, the purpose of patent drawings dictates that there be only one priority: clarity (although we see that a few artists couldn't resist sneaking in a pretty girl or a rock star). We might think that mere clarity is a poor artistic priority, but the financial and legal consequences of that priority can be pretty spectacular. In that sense, patent drawings can be pretty darn strong-- stronger than drawings that we might value for aesthetic reasons.
ReplyDeleteAnd I like the code these artists have developed, as literal as an alphabet, to tell us with line whether we are looking at wood or metal, and whether a surface is red or blue.
I have to wonder how the civil servant reviewing mountains of patent applications in a cubicle at the Patent Office responded to the drawing of the hottie holding the brush. Did he wake up and give it priority attention?
Sean Farrell-- Kevin Prince's book on patent drawings demonstrates your point very nicely. He prints the technical description from a patent without the accompanying drawing and it is utterly incomprehensible. You can also get a sense for that from the introductory language for the Disney patent I included. (Can you imagine applying for a patent for "The Art of Animation"?) Diagrams become indispensable for making sense of these inventions.
I adore the golden age illustrators and would enjoy a discussion about them with this group (most of whom know more about the imagists than I do). I just figured that since everybody in these precincts has probably seen everything that Cornwell, Dunn, Wyeth and Leyendecker have done I would bore people to tears. However, approached the way you suggest might be viable.
Kev Ferrara-- It could be that "intentionally bad" refers to intentionally unsophisticated or naive-- rough lines and child-like scrawls, ranging from Richard Thompson to Jean Dubuffet. If that's what JSL means, I'd have to plead guilty.
He prints the technical description from a patent without the accompanying drawing and it is utterly incomprehensible..... Diagrams become indispensable for making sense of these inventions.
ReplyDeleteDavid, that's why any literary apologetics/interpretations inferred from an image does nothing to substantiate it - ergo the defence of Cy Twombly's 'Orpheus' in the previous post.
I am put off not only by Chris Ware's sterile, ruler-and-compass cartooning style, but by how small the drawings are when published. This is a result, partly, at least, by the great size of his originals. I literally find it difficult to try to "read" his work in their published form. (So, I don't.)
ReplyDeleteSurprisingly, Ware's sketchbook work--as seen in two volumes of his sketchbooks published by Fantagraphics--is nothing like his work done for publication. His sketchbook drawings are naturalistic and observational, possessed of all the "human touch" utterly absent from his published cartooning. I'd think it would be not only more dramatically appealing and advantageous but easier for Ware to draw his comics in this more naturalistic manner.
I don’t have a big problem with these patent drawings. They’re just copies of photographs, not much worse than Austin Briggs stuff. It’s not Art, but if Art isn’t your goal I’m not sure that matters.
ReplyDeleteRichard-- You appear to be ignoring the goal of these drawings, but I think taking the aspirations of the artist into consideration is essential if we are to evaluate different kinds of drawing fairly. A schematic diagram is not just "a copy of a photograph," it is a quantified, precise perspective on reality, captured in lines that have been sterilized of all impurities, drama, imagination, excess. The angle has been chosen solely for clarity. The consequences of this art form can be immense, both economically and for the evolution of science. The digital universe you employ to create art was made possible by drawings such as this.
ReplyDeleteSie haben einen sehr interessanten und hilfreichen Blog. Weiter so!
ReplyDelete