Nancy Friedman, Co-Education Director
Getting a perspective on life may not be easy as there are no rules, but in art and architecture there are. Marc Capel-Jones did a presentation of one-and two-point perspective on March 3, where the participants drew a house with a gable roof, windows, doors, a patio with a hipped roof, plus stairs, all in two-point perspective using a horizon line and two vanishing points. Although Marc showed an example of three-point perspective, practice was done in two-point only.
Why is perspective so important in art? Perspective gives artwork a sense of depth and space which is so important to make a painting on a flat surface appear more lifelike. Consider what a painting would look like if the road never narrowed as it continued from the desert to the mountains several miles away. Now take a glass of red wine and place it near the edge of your kitchen counter. Before you take a sip, bend your knees and look at the glass from below the counter level, at counter level, and then from above. In this case, you have used the counter like a horizon line. Using two-point perspective, one can draw this glass of wine from all three views. So, from your perspective, is the glass half full or half empty?