Wacław Szpakowski made mazelike drawings from a single, continuous line. [Complete article at https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/02/15/rhythmical-lines/] ...Szpakowski made ink drawings on tracing paper. He traced lines by hand, always making them one millimeter thick and setting them four millimeters apart, to produce carefully calculated optical effects. He thought of these rhythmic compositions as expressing the underlying mathematical order of the universe. Occasionally, he even performed them on his violin, reading them as musical scores. Unlike most artists in our exhibition who exchanged ideas and works, Szpakowski worked in isolation and in complete indifference to the art of his time. [http://inventingabstraction.tumblr.com/post/44807887113/waclaw-szpakowski-from-the-series-a-a-9-c1924] A Pole born in Warsaw and educated in architecture at the Institute of Technology in Riga (Latvia), Szpakowski led a difficult life, interrupted tragically by two world wars, but wherever he was, he worked with architectural projects to earn a living and made geometric drawings of ''rhythmic lines'' or "infinite lines" in his spare time. He never had a single exhibition of his drawings during his lifetime, but 5 years after his death his series of Rhythmic Lines was shown in the Museum Sztuki in Lodz, and in 1994 a larger collection was exhibited in the National Museum in Warsaw and also in the Willem Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen, with a catalogue published by Atelier 340 (Brussels). Szpakowski's geometric single-line drawings seem to be decorate art, and in fact, he did some true decorative art in the 1950s when he needed money, designing a geometric ceiling for a cultural center, but he insisted that his drawings were more than decorative. He certainly recognized that the simple zigzags and labyrinths he drew had similarities in textiles and decorations of many cultures, but he saw this simply as proof of the universality and profundity of what he as doing. Szpakowski took photos and made sketches when he traveled through Latvia, White Russia, and Russia, observing the landscape, the natural lines, and trying to abstract them, trying to find the true geometry behind the accidental variations. In one of the notebooks he wrote this: "A man who communes with nature and sees constantly the same objects must learn automatically their characteristic features, and creates in his mind their image…" Szpakowski's work is original and singular, despite the fact that is sometimes resembles patterns seen in the decorative art of many cultures. As the Belgian art critic Marc Renwart puts it, his "work comes from the sources of decorative art, but it is not itself decorative art. Contrary to general opinion, Szpakowski believed that straight lines do exist in nature, that trees are basically two parallel lines, and that what he was doing was derived directly from nature." Szpakowski played the violin rather well and liked to think of his "rhythmic lines" as music. It is true that if one follows one of his infinite lines from beginning to end, as he wanted the viewer to do, one does experience up-down-forward-backward rhythms that resemble melodies. The geometrical structures created in this way during a period of over 50 years, from 199 to 1954, were treated at the same time as sound recordings, almost as scores of musical pieces, discovered in nature. Cycles of sketches, invariably drawn with a single line, never crossing, referring to both visual, sound and psychological sphere of human experience, became Szpakowski's method of describing the world. [Looking at Numbers Door Tom Johnson,Franck Jedrzejewski; found on Google Books]