This work is typical of Moss’s study of geometric form of this period. She made drawings as finished and complete works in themselves – and often they relate to her...
This work is typical of Moss’s study of geometric form of this period. She made drawings as finished and complete works in themselves – and often they relate to her work in sculpture. To accompany her first show of ‘drawings and constructions’ at Arra Gallery, Mousehole, Moss wrote:
I would like to ask the public to look at the work, as free as possible from preconceived ideas on art. These drawings are constructed on a very simple principle - a geometrical figure - sometimes broken, sometimes cut, sometimes divided, sometimes sub-divided - until the relation of the lines to each other produce an aesthetic emotion.
If one considers the lines in these drawings as sounds (note or chord progressions) and geometrical figure as the musical key, one can, to a certain extent, compare these drawings to music.
Music is the “art of combining sounds with a view to beauty of form”; this work aims at “beauty of form” by coordinating form and line on the plane.
Quoting from Plato..... what I understand by beauty of form is, something characterized by straight lines and circles, surfaces and solid bodies composed with the straight line and the circle by means of the compass, the set-square and the plumb. For these forms are not like the others (natural forms), beautiful under certain conditions, but they are always beautiful in themselves.....– Marlow Moss, 1949.