Part 3: Depth bands in the city

In most urban drawing (there are a few important exceptions to this noted below) the focus is on action space, even if some vista is visible.  Urban sketching is often predominantly about drawing action space. But does it have to be? If we are experiencing three bands of space, might we try to reflect this in our drawings?

Vista space in the city

Sometimes in the city our view simply doesn’t include any vista space. From my café table today, my view is bounded by the shops on the other side of the street. That happens to be a little over 30 metres, I’m guessing, but it feels like action space to me. I have no vista in that direction! 

In cities we rarely have time to notice vista even when it is visible. Except perhaps when we draw. When we draw in the city our visual field may often include some vista that we have not paid attention to until we start to draw – the buildings far down the street, or the hills glimpsed between buildings.

One exception to the usual focus on action space in urban drawings  is the view of a city from outside, or from far away, where all is vista.

The City of London drawn from Greenwich

 

Another exception, is the city view from a high viewpoint. A townscape drawn from the top of a high building is all vista – everything is beyond action space!

St Giles church from the 12th floor of Centre Point

 

Another approach might be to imagine yourself to be a zoom lensed camera, making the distant view the core of your picture, with only minimal elements of action space to provide framing. This kind of drawing might also reverse the usual practice of drawing the foreground (action space) in more detail than the hazier vista.

Personal space in the city

When we are drawing in cities, we often also ignore personal space as a part of our visual experience.  Very often we will even choose a drawing location that ensures that there is nothing visible in our personal space (except perhaps the ground and our own hands, which we ignore). We probably think of this as choosing a view which has ‘nothing in the way’. And yet personal space is of such psychological importance to us, particularly in city environments, that it seems odd not to include it in our drawings.

Perhaps the most common way in which artists have included personal space in urban drawings is the ‘café table’ picture, in which the lower half of the picture may focus on plates and cups immediately in front of the artist. We’ve all made these kinds of drawing I’m sure!  

sketchbook page - piazza in Verona

  

One reason we don’t we make more use of personal space in urban drawing is that it is difficult! Objects in personal space occupy a relatively large amount of the visual field, and will obscure things further away. The ‘café table’ picture works because the personal space objects are raised up closer to eye level, and can be included in a picture without changing eye level very much. 

Wapping foreshore - vista in the centre, additional sheets added laterally, including personal space at the right

sheets added vertically

Including objects in personal space often means making drawings that are longer, or wider than you might normally draw. One way of doing this is to add pieces of paper as you change your direction of view. This can be laterally  or vertically.

The drawing at the right began with drawing the vista view of St Paul's and the sky, continuing down, adding sheets as necessary until I could draw the edge of the platform at my feet. 

Another way of including objects in personal space, and in action space, might be to abandon any idea of drawing the space as if it’s a view from a single viewpoint, and instead, construct a picture from elements composed on the picture plane. This is one of the ways in which Picasso and Braque conveyed the world. 

(Next post: the cues we use to read space...)