Art and Architecture – A Personal Journey
Image: Darkness, by Debra Krakow
Full disclosure: I wasn’t one of those kids who grew up knowing they wanted to be an architect, impressing their parents with their towering Lego creations. My life’s ambition, until I turned seventeen, was to be a ballerina. My father was an architect. He mostly designed warehouses, worked long hours and always seemed to be worrying about something. The career had no appeal. Then one day, he showed me a portfolio of pencil sketches from his student days at McGill. They were beautiful, delicate and artistic. Art was my favourite subject in school but these drawings were on a whole different level. I went into architecture to learn to draw like that. Fine Arts would have been a more direct route but, architecture offered a better path toward financial independence.
My father had learned to draw from Gentile Tondino, the art prof at the McGill School of Architecture. In fact, we had a big Tondino painting hanging in our stairwell at home. So I was surprised and delighted to find that he was still at McGill when I arrived as a first-year student. McGill didn’t require an art portfolio for admission: Tondino knew that drawing ability could be taught and he proved it by turning all of us into artists in the span of three years. Every Friday afternoon, we would sketch a young female model (clothed), while he admonished us to “draw what you see, not what you know.” By third year, the models were nude and the classes were moved to Saturday. Every summer, the class would meet in a small town like Gananoque or La Malbaie and spend a week sketching outdoors, mostly in watercolour.
The benefits of that training went far beyond the ability to make convincing napkin sketches and renderings. Drawing is about observing and recording – essential skills in visualization and design. It fostered our creativity and brought artistry to our design work. On the flip side, I discovered that architectural education is the best foundation for an artist. A painting, after all, is a design exercise – it’s about the arrangement of shapes, lines and colour to achieve tension and balance, interest and beauty. Now that I have begun to teach art workshops I see how much the students could benefit from design training.
There is a long tradition of architects bridging the gap between art and architecture, working with a foot in both fields simultaneously. We all find our niche somewhere along the art-architecture spectrum. For some, the two interests merge. These are the architects who incorporate art installations into their designs or produce imaginative renderings for design competitions. For me, the two careers paths have evolved separately: architect by day, artist by night. As an intern and junior architect, my office work was more technical than creative. In the evenings, I delved into painting, print-making and sculpture to satisfy my creative drive. As my architectural career morphed into project management and I had even fewer opportunities to use my design skills, my art career flourished. For the past several years I’ve worked as a project manager for the City of Kingston while painting in my spare time. As I became adept at managing larger and more complex projects, my paintings also got bigger and more complex. From the outside, these may appear to be unrelated and even conflicting endeavours but to me, the synergy is clear. My best paintings emerge when I’m thinking like a designer, and my best work in the office comes when I think creatively.
Finally, this year, I have come full circle; with gallery representation in Toronto, Ottawa and Kingston and a thirty-year architectural career behind me, I’m surrendering my architect’s seal to become a full-time artist. It’s been a long and satisfying journey, and I could not have become the artist I am any other way.