Yo!

After reading what Hejduk had to say about my character I dug a little deeper into the topic of Albrecht Dürer. The path I started to go down on in terms of research was the right one after all. After sifting through some incredibly dry historical stuff on Dürer I've found a couple of interesting things that I'd like to pick up on in the development of my character and his house(s):

> Dürer, like most Renaissance painters was obsessed with the mathematical rules of proportion and beauty. He even wrote 8 books about it; 4 about measurement and another 4 on human proportion.

> His artwork is laden with Christian and Renaissance symbolism and iconography. Yet three works stand out. They are St. Jerome in His Study, The Knight, Death and the Devil, and most famously Melancolia I. Wikipedia tells me art historians often refer to them as Dürer's Meisterstiche, "masterworks".

> In fact, it is said that his self-portrait, probably his most famous work, is an ellaborate exercise on how to paint a beautiful person using the Renaissance rules on beauty and proportion, rather than depicting Albrecht Dürer.

> I find the idea of a supreme ever-present all-governing rule intriguing and I can see how one could obsess about such a topic for a lifetime. People have and still do. It was proportion in the Renaissance, a modern example is the '23 Enigma'.

> I would like to explore this further by tweaking my character a little. I have hinted already that my character has some sort of obsession, but an updated version will follow soon... ish.

> I have also taken cues from Dürer's studies of drapery, one in particular which I have already posted earlier. I have this idea that an obsessive investigation about anything can be metaphorically represented by this cloth, cloaking the everyday life that's beneath, smothering it.

> The folds and creases can be seen as a metaphor for the constant cross-relating and doubling-back of thought that goes on when someone is seriously obsessed with something. For the person everything seems to revolve around and relate back to the obsessed about topic, but in fact I see it more as an additional layer. Like a draped cloth with folds and the spaces between.

> And so somehow I have ended up learning about mathematics from Donald Duck. I think I have lots of things to work with and go off on tangents from. I'm feeling like maths, algorithms, codes, iconography and symbolism are things that can very easily be related to an architectural idea and serve as a stimulus for it.

Over and out!