Review
Tim Armstrong has assembled a sequence of starting ideas and questions for students of art and design. He identifies themes, ideas and patterns that link visual perception, aesthetics, philosophy, skills and the realism essential for our dangerous times.
He moves from experimental drawing, through techniques of open-ended thinking to central design concepts. His diagrams illustrate today's rivalry between destructive and constructive forces, and he encourages readers to devise their own creative programs in response.
Sample Pages
A Methodical Sketchbook includes charts, patterns, pictures and quotations from a range of writers and artists to support the view that few problems can be solved without reference to politics, economics and human rights. Paintings and sculptures illustrate truth, myth, propaganda, lies, error or speculation. They serve, reflect or resist current trends. Democracy requires free expression. Tyrants try to control the arts. Design can be a matter of life and death.
Sketchbooks are useful preliminaries to all stages. Their immediacy enables artists and designers to work outside conventional programming. In the words of Leroy Eldridge Cleaver, ... You have to be part of the solution, or you're going to be part of the problem.
Armstrong uses his practical research into visual patterns to draw analogies and comparisons with contemporary ideas, many of which are reversible, oscillating, jagged, opposing, illusory or circular, and he suggests that aspiring artists and designers experiment with equivalent divergent, lateral and critical thinking techniques. His sketchbook is structured to update Paul Klee's century-old themes with additions and criticisms. For example the Bauhaus promoted a number of fallacies regarding built environments.
Circular motions and reversals are compared with circular and opposing arguments. Illusions and delusions are compared. Diagrams, moving patterns and charts clarify relationships between social issues and concepts of visual art.
Armstrong also addresses students and others who have lost confidence or opportunity to develop their creative ambitions. His approach is inclusive and restorative, encouraging individual contributions in local and/or international contexts. He suggests that artistic freedom is not only compatible with global necessities; it is vital.
