Aspects of the city

Abstract

The theme evolved into one aspect of a specific city. Portland, Oregon is famous for its bridges. In actuality, they are the hinges that make it a metropolis instead of two middle-sized urban cities. Thinking along these lines, most sketching was concentrated around these connecting links. Eventually the Broadway, Steel and Hawthorne proved to be the most interesting as to line, pattern, and shape as well as most important in the history of the city. These three were combined into a triptych with a different bridge occupying each panel. The most difficult problem was one of composition – how to present each bridge with equal importance in an individual way, yet unifying all so that the viewer would see the three single panels as one entity. I tried to solve the problem of variation and importance by placing each bridge at a different angle and on a different perspective plane, yet drawing each one on a large scale so that it became the dominant area in the panel. Line and color are the unifying factors. Black is the important color in each bridge and also in the beams in the foreground. These beams are not contained within each panel, as are the bridges, but go beyond and into all three so as to form one composition. Much knowledge has been gained personally through this thesis – most of it in the area of compositional planning. It has emphasized the need for detail in preliminary work (line, value, and color). It has shown that there is no substitute for the exhaustion of all approaches to the subject. The learning process here should apply to all works and to the teaching process as well, for these two general ideas of exploration and planning can change the mediocre into something worthwhile.