Shape

323 What the Thinking Eye Sees
What the Thinking Eye Sees
After I tried schemas for my own designs and saw how well they worked to define
rules, I tested them out on examples from Paul Klee’s The Thinking Eye. I’ve already
talked about the opening lessons in Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook and the way they suggest
a kind of visual calculating with shapes and rules. But there are more examples in
The Thinking Eye of far greater variety. It’s a perfect laboratory for schemas with exciting
experiments ready to try.
There are plenty of designs like these two
that I can get directly with rules. The rule
that’s defined for squares in the schema x fi x þ tðxÞ is already familiar. And two additional
rules introduce the idea of dividing shapes or the regions they bound—here, for
the diagonals of squares
and for horizontal or vertical cuts
This implies division rules in a new schema
x fi divðxÞ