Another Little Bridge

Earlier I posted a squared up drawing of this bridge, which was a study for the landscape of a large commission.  Here’s another.  Both pictures are drawn from the same photograph.  Both are approximately the same size (about 8 x 10 inches).  Yet the differences in media transform them into quite different works.  In an earlier era (just after the dinosaurs roamed) this was called “translation,” at least as regards rhetoric.  But I think the old masters (some of whom are my personal friends) took this rhetorical idea and used it (translated it) into their visual idiom.

I’m quite sure Rubens did.  He had the most distinquished rhetorical education.  Never would he misplace a modifier, of that I’m quite sure!

So, let’s see.  Rhetoric and Rubens makes this picture traditional. Whereas the grid,  that staple of  Dame Jennifer Bartlett (with the authority vested in me I’ve just knighted her — or Dame-ed her)  ah hem, I was saying  that Bartlett-sizing it makes it modern.  And grids are just tiles by another name, which brings back my old pal Pierre Bonnard who actually invented Bartlett. (I wonder does she know?)

I’m on a goof ball roll.  (Somebody stop me!)

[Top of the post:  Watercolor study of a foot bridge, by Aletha Kuschan]

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