Academic Portfolio: Fred Scharmen

Considering the ways in which variable curves are combined, and radiate together from a point to end or change at still other curves, we have an infinitely variable, but systematized, model of natural form that is both intensive (16), and extensive: "Infinite is a word easily said, and easily written, and people do not always mean it when they say it; in this case I do mean it." (17). In The Elements of Drawing, lines and gradations come together and it becomes apparent that, for Ruskin, seeing, thinking, and drawing are the same thing. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary (18) links the word abstract to the Latin roots abs - from, and trahere - to pull or to draw. To abstract is to pull out of, to extract, as in a general principle from a specific instance; and it also means to draw from as in to draw from life. Ruskin's lines are drawn from life. The compound curve as an abstract regulating line is always drawn by a living, moving process; to model these curves, and the processes that form them we must bring an intensity of observation to bear on these phenomena (19). These Abstract Lines are drawn by force or growth moving in the world, no less than the lines made by Ruskin's pencil are drawn on the page, just as his rules and metarules are drawn from close observation and identification with nature.

In The Stones of Venice Vol. I, there is a passage called Abstract Lines (20), In which an illustration is shown of various curves compared. These curves are from different sources and different scales, including a river, several leaves, a few mountains, a branch, and a glacier ("... in the original, I think, the most beautiful simple curve I have ever seen in my life ..."(21)). The general principle that Ruskin seeks to pull out here is that of flow and force, independent of scale or material. In Peirce's terms, each of these lines is an Index, a mark left by a process that moves in time and space (22). An index is descriptive in such a way that, in some sense, it is the thing that it describes: the curve of the glacier's flow, like the groove cut into a record, contains exactly as much information as was put into it, it is not limited by the physical properties of the media, it is an exact expression of those physical properties. Like Ruskin's chain of endlessly modified particular curves: the object and means of representation merge: an infinity of intensive variation, and a moment of flowing movement.

So for Ruskin, a curve is less an equation, and more a gesture, and the way to abstract the essence of a curve is not to calculate it, but to draw it and reiterate the fluid force that created it (23). The index of that force is descriptive, but Ruskin's process of abstraction takes the descriptive index and translates it into a prescriptive diagram (24). This is the process that Ruskin imagines the inventors of the Gothic undertaking: copying the curves of the leaf out of admiration, and discovering that those same forms, the cusp, the pointed arch, the trefoil, had advantageous physical properties when carved in stone at a large scale (25). The shape of the "leafage" is, as such, an index of the properties that allowed it to grow; gravity, expansion, and a hunger for light. The shape, as shape, was copied; it became an Icon, a type of sign that is dependent on physical resemblance to reference its object (26). Almost by accident, the pointed arch leaf form was used as an instrumental diagram, and the discovery is made that a shape that handles the flow of force in one system may be used to reconcile the same forces in different materials and scale:

gravity, expansion, and a hunger for light (27).