Drawing Into Architecture: Sketches and Models by Antoine Predock

Whether capturing a site visited on one of his globe-trotting trips, or imagining one of his buildings, Predock’s sketches trace the hand’s intuitive rush across a surface, condensing a rich sensorium of perceptions and experiences into memorably succinct collations of line and color. 

As a student in the 1950s at the University of New Mexico, Predock regularly drifted from the architecture program (in Engineering) over to the Art Department to study with the sculptor and painter John Tatschl, and the painters Elaine De Kooning and Walter Kulhman. These artists showed Predock how seeing and making ran together in a dialogue between visuality and materiality mediated by the human body: as De Kooning explained at the time, “painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.” 

Later, in the 1960s, the architect and painter Robert Walters introduced Predock to the expressively pliable medium of clay models: carved by hand with a knife, in place of a drawing’s pen or brush, Predock’s clay models use a sculptural material to painterly effect, shaping form and space into planes of solid and void.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website