RSA Scottish Art

Tower

Small web image of TowerArtist: Andrew Patrizio
Title: Tower
Year: c. 1986
Medium: conté crayon on paper
Dimensions:
Suggested topic:
Source: RSA
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Description: As a sculpture student Andrew Patrizio received a Royal Scottish Academy travelling scholarship which enabled him to spend time working in Italy, studying the art and architecture there and developing his own work. A feature of many of the towns of Tuscany are the tall, narrow towers that are found not only on the perimeter walls but also alongside the houses on the inner streets. As a sculptor, Patrizio was accustomed to thinking about the three-dimensional aspects of objects. He was particularly interested in the box-like nature of the tower and its relationship with its surroundings. In order to explore this he simplified its shape and carefully shaded each face of the structure. This monochrome sketch called Tower reveals the inner structure of the building as well as providing us with a very fine tonal study of the light falling on the tower.The sketch has been executed with care and precision. The soft conté crayon allows a wide range of tones to be created from the darkest lines on the inside of the tower to the pale highlights on the crenellations. Patrizio has not tried to differentiate textures or surfaces. He has limited the sketch to an examination of tone and three-dimensional structure. The borderlines between different tones are crisply defined but they are not outlined. This would have a very different effect - for example, the corner of the building is correctly shown with a slim pale highlight rather than a dark outline which would have flattened the 3D impression. This sketch displays a very convincing three-dimensional form. It appears to show the building using two-point perspective, where the vertical uprights are consistent but the diagonals which represent the horizontal lines are lined up with vanishing points on an imaginary horizon on either side of the picture. This contrasts with single-point perspective - imagine a picture of a road leading off into the distance to a single vanishing point.