At one time drawing was the essential skill that separated artists from the rest of us, but no more. Now some big-buck artists can barely scribble. Still, there's something mesmerizing about the ability to make faces and places appear on a page using nothing more than a pencil, a chunk of chalk or a wash of tinted water. To some it comes as a gift, like a musician's perfect pitch or an athlete's superb coordination. But it's also a skill that can be learned and improved through a lifetime of practice.
Somewhere in that continuum from innate talent to bloody hard work stands Minneapolis architect Michael Plautz, 68, whose marvelous drawings were published this month in "Draw: Quotidian Lines" (Octane Press, Austin, Texas, $40).
Spanning more than 30 years, the book includes the 1967 drawing of a New York building that won the Wisconsin native a year-long sojourn studying drawing in Paris and the French countryside. The rest is a lifetime of handwork, from sketches of Rwandan gorillas to lithographs of fish and ravens, pencil sketches of family members, watercolors of exotic flowers and European villages.
The dominant images are of places and spaces -- architectural renderings in pencil, ink or charcoal of buildings, passageways, arches, alleys and plazas from Plautz's grandmother's house in Slovenia to the fountains of Versailles, hilltop Tuscan towns, African villages, Greek monasteries and Cambodian temples.
European vistas -- the Coliseum in Rome, a dusky interior of St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice, the towers of San Gimignano, Italy -- recur as mementos of the decades Plautz has spent teaching drawing to American architecture students studying abroad.
"He's one of the best of his generation, I think, absolutely one of the best," said Tom Fisher, dean of the University of Minnesota's College of Design. The college plans to do a show of Plautz's drawings in 2012 because "we think it is important to put an incredibly talented person such as Michael Plautz in front of the students" as a reminder of architects' tradition of "hand drawing the world around them," Fisher said. Dates for the exhibition have not yet been set.
Architecture students at the university are still required to take a drawing course, and watercolor is an elective option. But given a choice, most students opt to work out their ideas on a computer, Fisher said. While computers are terrific tools that can speed the design process and enhance accuracy, they alter the way people think and express their ideas. Drawing remains a core value in architecture because of the "very subtle and complex" connection it makes between the eye, the mind and the hand, he added.
"Drawing is a concentrated way of seeing that forces you to look and to think," Fisher said. "It also forces you to slow down, which is really important in understanding and shaping space."
