11 June 2026
Read Paul Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook (1953) based on his Bauhaus lectures for the first time today before getting to work and felt reinvigorated by it. Evergreen. Over time I’m planning to sit with each of its subdivisions (below, as organized by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy) in depth…
I: Line as point progression Line as planar definition Line as mathematical proportion Line as coordinator for the path of motion
II: Line as optical guide Line as optical reason Line as psychological balance
III: Line as energy projection
IV: Line as symbol of centrifugal and centripedal movement Line as symbol of will and infinity Line as symbol of color mutations and kinetic harmony
…but for today I’m noting the first principles he lays out because they’re helping me think through the spatial inquiry that’s starting to happen in my studio (the Delimitation Stacks). With the caveat that I’m trying to submerge these things after learning them as I make—their relationship to intuition feels very important to preserve.
Anyway, to begin with, I think the categorization of active, medial, and passive lines (with respect to their cause, impact, and effect) relates to what I’ve arrived at recently in thinking about the goal of an optical essence of a space as a stack (vertical for now) of independent elements, which can then be individually (and endlessly) augmented to arrive at new structures. Which, when done well, seem to point towards inner relationships. Which Klee traces to nature—how we can think of line as it relates to the rhythms, patterns, and forms of human anatomy, plans, and earth, water, and air.
And so I think what’s crucial to implementing his teachings is to internalize them to the point where I can take an “active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal,” yet still honor certain instincts of the eye as they relate to emotional honesty. The toggling of delimiters through active, medial, and passive lines can be a playful, exploratory exercise. Even the simple notion of finding a space between an active and passive plane feels like it could be generative for an entire painting—an active/passive gradient—or a single choice to move something stagnant into a more dynamic range.