MTC ART GALLERY

Café Metro
101 8th Street, Oakland

through August 31, 2000

Open 7:30 am to 3:00 pm weekdays

Blackwell also has published a World Map Centered on the San Francisco Bay Area, and his furniture designs were featured in a one-man show at the SFMOMA as part of the "Bay Area Art Explosion" series.

As an architect and designer, Blackwell has been employed by Paul Weidlinger & Assoc.; Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Architects; the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency; Market Street Joint Venture Architects; and the Bechtel Corporation. He also has been a consultant on a variety of projects for Fluor Daniel Electronics, Paul Castrucci & Associates, Corwin Booth Architects, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and the Greater San Francisco Chamber of Commerce.

Significant projects include: an airport reception pavilion for the late King Hussein of Jordan; planning for the new city of Jubail in Saudi Arabia (Bechtel); conceptual plans for Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC; design of a materials testing laboratory for the University of California at Richmond Field Station (SOM), which was featured in A Guide to Bay Area Architecture; designs for street furniture now in place on Market Street in San Francisco (MSJVA); and the design of an unusual speculative office building at 211 Main Street in San Francisco (Corwin Booth). Blackwell holds an undergraduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a graduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley, both in architecture.

NOTES
by William Blackwell

RECTANGLES
Like it or not, most of us live in a rectangular world. City street grids, automobiles and parking spaces, buildings, rooms and cubicles, desks, our 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of paper, are rectangular. Even the great Gothic cathedrals are repetitive rectangular bays. The most photographed house of the 20th Century, Frank Lloyd WrightÕs "Falling Water", is a marvelous composition of rectangles integrated into a natural environment.

Until recently, the best of man-made structures have followed man-made geometries. The one departure is the new Guggenheim museum at Bilbao, Spain, which uses complex and expensive amorphous shapes generated by computer. Is the usefulness of the Cartesian coordinate system at an end? I think not.

Most of the shapes of elementary geometry relate to the rectangle, and to the isosceles triangles generated by its diagonals. Regular polygons, ellipses, parabolas, hyperbolas and their 3D equivalents - prisms, cylinders, cones, ellipsoids, and paraboloids - all tie to the rectangle.

The artwork in this exhibit focuses mainly on the rectangular relationships inherent in the elementary shapes of geometry -- parabola, ellipse, spiral of the golden mean rectangle, etc.

COLOR
Piet Mondrian felt so strongly about the distinction between man-made geometry and nature that he refused to use the color green. Josef Albers used geometry (squares) as a means to neutralize other elements of art and focus exclusively on the interaction of colors. As a part of his life-style, Goethe had a highly personal theory of color encompassing sensuous, oral, and aesthetic effect as well as allegorical, symbolic, and mystic uses.

Johannes Itten in his classic book The Art of Color went so far as to suggest specific colors for specific geometric shapes - red for squares, orange for trapezoids, yellow for equilateral triangles, green for spherical triangles, blue for circles, violet for ellipses.

Itten also developed by experiment what he thought to be correct proportions for complementary pairs of colors -- red and green in equal parts, three parts yellow to one part violet, one part orange to two parts blue.

The pure shapes of geometry do lend themselves to full strength colors, and some seem to suggest particular colors. In the end, however, the color selections are largely intuitive, chosen to achieve maximum clarity and harmony in a fully resolved composition.

AESTHETICS
The aesthetics of geometry and mathematics are of two kinds. The first is the undeniable beauty in the often surprising and sublime relationships that emerge in the study of shapes, a never-ending voyage of discovery. The second is the pleasure derived in the visual representation of these relationships and discoveries.