Eiichi Tosaki

This volume investigates the meaning of visual rhythm through Piet Mondrian's unique approach to understanding rhythm in the compositional structure of painting, drawing reference from philosophy, aesthetics, and Zen culture. Its innovation lies in its reappraisal of a forgotten definition of rhythm as 'stasis' or 'composition' which can be traced back to ancient Greek thought. This conception of rhythm, the book argues, can be demonstrated in terms of pictorial strategy, through analysis of East Asian painting and calligraphy with which Greek thought on rhythm has identifiable commonalities. The book demonstrates how these ideas about rhythm draw together various threads of intellectual development in the visual arts that cross disparate aesthetic cultural practices. As an icon of early 20th Century Modernism, Mondrian's neoplasticism is a serious painterly and philosophical achievement. In his painting, Mondrian was deeply influenced by Theosophy, which took its influence from Eastern aesthetics; particularly East Asian and Indian thought. However, Mondrian's approach to visual rhythm was so idiosyncratic that his contribution to studies of visual rhythm is often under-recognized. This volume shows that a close inspection of Mondrian's own writing, thinking and painting has much to tell scholars about how to understand a long forgotten aspect of visual rhythm. Rodin's famous criticism of photography ("athlete-in-motion is forever frozen") can be applied to Muybridge's zoopraxiscope, the Futurists' rendition of stroboscopic images, and Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase." Through a comparative study between Mondrian's painting and these seminal works, this volume initiates a new convention for the cognition of the surface of painting as visual rhythm. "Mondrian's simultaneous emphasis on the static and the rhythmic is hardly fodder for a publicist. Eiichi Tosaki has taken on the challenge of elucidating Mondrian's theories of rhythm, and particularly his conception of "static" rhythm. The result is a tour de force that will forever alter the reader's encounter with the works of Mondrian." Prof. Kathleen Higgins.

Bimanual Coordination Drawing investigates visualising compositional rhythm in the genre of drawing, by using a bi-manual technique. This approach to drawing produces non-figurative artwork, pursuing the musical condition of visuality through the concept of ‘rhythm as composition’. The aim of BCD as a studio practise is to generate a variety of configurations or patterns according to the number of strokes/beats, which can be interpreted and analysed as forms of rhythmic structure. I have theorised BCD according to my own understanding of visual rhythm, which was the subject my former dissertation1 and is based on the idea of “rhythm as composition”. Applying this concept of visual rhythm within practice-based research enables BCD to investigate visualising compositional rhythm in the context of developing unique approaches of drawing and creativity. Artistic practices which closely interrelate theoretical and philosophical investigations and discoveries within the studio practice are very rare. In this thesis I will demonstrate the close connection between my BCD practice and theory/philosophy, especially around the understanding of ‘image’ and ‘rhythm’: I propose the idea of ‘image-screen’ as a pictorial strategy for theorising visual composition beyond the referential semantic realm]. The BCD drawing project argues that the urge to construct referential images is no longer the main purpose or aim of manual image making. This project emphasises the participation of short-term and long-term memory in the drawing process, through which the composition opens up the linear flow of time. The BCD process generates compositional structure in its fundamental state, by finding elementary patterns based on the number of strokes that form each drawing: these basic patterns are conceived as an elementary, combinatorial vocabulary for further improvisation and further development. It introduces the cooperation between left and right hands as a process that involves separation, conflict and unity, rather than habitualised technical skill: the goal is not just to establish fluency in the drawing process to generate visual rhythms. There are broader, socio-cultural implications of bi-manual dexterity: these arise from the epistemological shift that BCD affords.

The principle aim of this paper is to articulate a means for understanding and seeing rhythm within theëthicknessí of the surface of Mondrianís early mature Neo-plastic canvases of around the 1920s, workswhich imply a ëlatentí sense of rhythm which is far more perplexing thanthe more obvious expression of visual rhythm of the Boogie Woogie paintings of the New York period. My goal is to provide the fundamentals for reading rhythm in Mondrianís early matureNeo-plastic paintings, which, in terms of rhythm, are typically overlooked by art critics for being tooëcoldí, geometric, and static[1]