CVA Foundation students will be exhibiting their drawings at The Fifth Annual Cathedral Community & Family Day on Sunday, March 4, 2012 from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. The festival celebrates art, history, and music and will host activities on all levels of this expansive landmark on the hill.
Linear perspective is a mathematical system for creating the illusion of space and distance on a two-dimensional flat surface. Linear perspective proposes that an artist or designer imagine the picture surface as an “open window” through which to see the world. Straight lines are then drawn on the paper to represent the horizon and orthogonal lines connecting the viewer’s eye to a point(s) in the distance. The most common categorizations of artificial perspective are one, two and three-point. These categories refer to the number of vanishing points in the perspective drawing.
In these drawings, College of Visual Arts first year Foundation students investigated interior perspective in the Cathedral of St. Paul. After creating a series of small or thumbnail sketches in their work journals they chose a viewpoint and composition. Each students photographed their compositional choice and used this photograph to understand and plot the elements of linear perspective in the composition by marking and labeling their eye level /horizon, vanishing points, and orthogonal lines. After preparatory work in their journals, students moved back on site in the Cathedral for three weeks of drawing applying the rules of linear perspective and the language of drawing to describe and express the space and essence of the Cathedral of Saint Paul.
The Cathedral of Saint Paul
239 Selby Avenue
Saint Paul, Minnesota 55102