Painting like an architect - sol lewitt

when asked of his experience as a draftsman in IM Pei's office in 1955, Sol Lewitt replied, "it was a treadmill... doing stupid things endlessly." despite the stupidity of the treadmill, it did shape his approach to painting though. just as "an architect doesn't go off with a shovel and dig his foundation and lay every brick,"  lewitt conceptualized a process of painting where the painter gives a series of instructions to communicate a layout and then hands it over to a team of other painters to execute the paintings. this is similar to the process in which an architect hands over a series of drawings to a contractor and hopes for the best who executes (fucks up) the construction of the building.

In 1968, LeWitt began to conceive sets of guidelines for his two-dimensional works drawn directly on the wall, executed first in graphite, then in crayon, later in colored pencil and finally in India ink, or acrylic paint. Writing about making wall drawings, LeWitt himself observed in 1971 that "each person draws a line differently and each person interprets words differently"

wall painting at Yale Art Gallery

 wall painting instructions

sometimes we see this kind of room for improvisation in architecture. For his own summer home, alvar aalto gave a set of instructions for a wall of his house to his masons and instructed them create different patchworks of brick as they pleased.

Aalto's summer home in muuratsalo

A couple weeks ago, i headed north to see Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing Retrospective at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Opened in 2008, the exhibition will be on view for only 25 years and is housed in a three-story 27,000-square-foot historic mill building. here lewitt played architect and developed the configuration and sequence of paintings to work with the existing architecture. the wall paintings form open ended rooms which are organized around the exterior windows. with over 105 drawings covering one acre of wall surface, the wall painting ideas span 40 years from 1968 to 2007, some of which LeWitt created for the project shortly before his death. 

LeWitt in Mass MOCA

 these set of instructions, i thought could be translated into a set of wood block stamps that are printed in overlaid patterns to create different geometric fields.