futuristic jedi grandpa

The Twelve Technical Rules (or How to Achieve the Twelve Things to Avoid) to be followed are: 

1. No texture. Texture is naturalistic or mechanical and is a vulgar quality, especailly pigment texture or impasto. Palette knifing, canvas-stabbing, paint scrumbling and other action techniques are unintelligent and to be avoided. No accidents or automatism.

2. No brushwork or calligraphy. Handwriting, hand-working and hand-jerking are personal and in poor taste. No signature or trademarking. “Brushwork should be invisible.” “One should never let the influence of evil demons gain control of the brush.”

3. No sketching or drawing. Everything, where to begin and where to end, should be worked out in the mind beforehand. “in painting the idea should exist in the mind before the brush is taken up.” No line or outline. “Madmen see outlines and therefore they draw them.” A line is a figure, a “square is a face.” No shading or streaking.

4. No forms. “The finest has no shape.” No figure or fore- or background. No volume or mass, no cylinder, sphere or cone, or cube or boogie-woogie. No push or pull. “No shape or substance.”

5. No design. “Design is everywhere.”

6. No colors. “Color blinds.” “Colors are an aspect of appearance and so only of the surface.” Colors are barbaric, unstable, suggest life, “cannot be completely controlled, ” and “should be concealed.” Colors are a “distracting embellishment.” No white. “White is a color and all colors.”White is “antiseptic and not artistic, appropriate and pleasing for kitchen fixtures, and hardly the medium for expressing truth and beauty.” White on white is a “transition from pigment to light” and “a screen for the project of light” and “moving” pictures.

7. No light. No bright or direct light in or over the paiting. Dim, late afternoon absorbent twilight is best outside. No chiaroscuro, “the malodorant reality of craftsmen, beggars, topers with rags and wrinkles.”

8. No space. Space should be empty, should not project, and should not be flat. “The painting should be behind the picture frame.” The frame should isolate and protect the painting from its surroundings. Space divisions withing the painting should not be seen.

9. No time. “Clock-time or man’s time is inconsequential.” There is no ancient or modern, no past or future in art. “A work of art is always present. The present is the future of the past, not the past of the future. “Now and long ago are one.”

10. No size or scale. Breadth and depth of thought and feeling in art have no relation to physical size. Large sizes are aggresive, positivist, intermperate, venal and graceless.

11.  No movement. “Everything else is on the move. Art should be still.”

12. No object, no subject, no matter. No symbols, images, or signs. Neither pleasure nor pain. No mindless working or mindless non-working. No chess-playing. 

(by Ad Reinhardt)