Sol Lewitt Wall Drawings Instructions

How to Actually Execute Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings Instructions

Reading Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings Instructions Without Losing Your Mind

You get a printed sheet with about three or four sentences and you're supposed to turn that into a four-foot-by-eight-foot wall drawing. That's the basic transaction. The instructions are deliberately stripped of visual reference. There's no diagram. You read the text and then you figure out the geometry yourself. I've done this for about a decade across various institutional commissions and private reproductions, and the first thing I tell people is that the text is both precise and profoundly ambiguous at the same time. It's not a bug in the system. It's the system. Let me walk you through a concrete example. Take Wall Drawing 66, which was one of the very first. The instruction reads something like: "Lines, two inches apart, beginning in the upper left corner of the wall drawing, going down to the lower right. Lines, two inches apart, beginning in the lower left corner of the wall drawing, going up to the upper right. These lines may cross each other. Black ink on white wall." Two inches apart is a measurement. Upper left to lower right is a direction. But where exactly does that first line start? The corner point itself has no width, so technically the first line could begin one inch in or exactly at the edge. Both readings have been defended by different installation teams. The Sol LeWitt Estate doesn't publish an official answer for most of these because part of the conceptual framework is that the instruction IS the artwork, and the execution is a performance of that instruction. Different executions are allowed to vary within reason. Here's the practical workflow I use. Step one: print the instruction exactly as it appears in the official catalogue raisonné, which is Complete Writings on Art, 1965-2003. The instructions sometimes live in multiple sources, and the wording can shift slightly between editions. Step two: I calculate the diagonal of the wall space I'm working with. For a standard eight-foot height and assuming a proportional width, the diagonal gives me the maximum span any single line can cover. Step three: I draft a small-scale version on paper at one-eighth size to work out the spacing before committing anything to a wall. This usually takes me about twenty minutes and saves me from making a mistake that would require sanding off six hours of ink work.

The spacing math is where most people stumble. If the instruction says "lines two inches apart," that means the gap between parallel lines is two inches, not the center-to-center distance. People who come from a drafting background sometimes assume center-to-center because that's how technical drawings work. In LeWitt's world, two inches apart means two inches of empty space between adjacent lines. This distinction matters enormously when you're covering a large wall because it compounds across the surface. A misread here on a forty-foot wall means you'll be off by several inches by the time you reach the far edge. I ran into a specific problem once installing a reproduction of Wall Drawing 385 — "Black lines, one-half inch apart, in one direction only, covering the wall." The instruction seemed straightforward. Black lines, half-inch spacing, one direction. But the wall I was working on was a freshly plastered surface with a slight texture, and the paint absorption varied across the plane. Where the plaster was more porous, the black paint spread outward slightly, reducing the gap between lines from the intended half inch to maybe a third of an inch. By the time I noticed, I'd already done about three feet of the run. Rather than strip and restart, I adjusted my spacing measurement by subtracting the observed spread and used that reduced gap for the remainder of the installation. The result wasn't identical to what it would have been on a non-porous surface, but it stayed within the spirit of the instruction. The estate's documentation guidelines for reproductions do note that surface conditions can cause minor variations, and this falls within the acceptable range. Another thing nobody tells you about these instructions: the directionality language. When an instruction says "from left to right" or "going upward," you need to establish your frame of reference immediately. Is "left" the viewer's left or the installer's left? The convention, as I've learned from studying previous installation records, is viewer's left. But I've seen at least two documented installations where the team interpreted it as installer's left because they were working against the wall and facing it. Both were accepted by the estate as valid readings because the instruction doesn't specify. This is one of those edge cases where the ambiguity is baked in, and the workaround is simply to document your convention in the installation notes and stick with it for the entire work.

When you're sourcing the actual text of Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings Instructions, the primary source is the catalogue published by George Braziller, currently in its third edition. The estate's official website also maintains a searchable database, though the entries there sometimes omit publication details that matter for provenance. If you're working on a commissioned reproduction for an institution, you'll need to go through the Sol LeWitt Foundation for licensing. Personal study copies of the instructions are freely available in library collections and in the catalogue. I keep a photocopy of the relevant instructions at each job site rather than relying on my phone, because screens make it harder to annotate and calculate margins simultaneously. There's a practical constraint that comes up repeatedly and that the instructions themselves never address: lighting. A wall drawing executed in flat black ink on a white wall will read completely differently under gallery track lighting versus fluorescent shop lights. The contrast shifts. The darkness of the lines appears softer under warm light. I always do a final review under the lighting conditions that the installation will actually exist in. This takes about ten minutes and has caught me at least three times where a spacing that looked fine under daylight-equivalent LEDs was too tight under the warmer tungsten the gallery uses. The fix was adjusting the spacing by a sixteenth of an inch, which is barely perceptible during execution but makes a measurable difference in the finished appearance. If you're planning to execute one of these for the first time, start with something from the early period — pre-1975. The instructions from that era tend to be shorter and describe simpler geometric operations. Later instructions sometimes introduce layered color sequences that require drying time between steps, which adds a scheduling dimension that isn't obvious from reading the text alone. Wall Drawing 715, for example, calls for three layers of colored lines applied in sequence. You can't rush the second layer. The estate's installation guidelines recommend a minimum of four hours between color applications for the acrylic inks they specify, though this varies with humidity and wall porosity.

The biggest misconception about working from these instructions is that precision is the goal. It's not. Consistency within the logic of the instruction is the goal. If you measure every line and they end up being a hair off, that's fine. If you start measuring one way at the left edge and switch methods halfway across the wall, that's a problem. Pick a measurement strategy and apply it uniformly. I use a laser measure for the initial layout points and a flexible tape for the running spacing. This combo lets me verify the start and end positions while maintaining consistent intermediate gaps. The whole process for an eight-foot by eight-foot wall drawing usually takes me between six and eight hours depending on the complexity of the pattern.

Common Pitfalls and What to Do Instead

Don't use masking tape to lay out your starting grid. I used to do this for years and it worked fine until I tried it on a wall with uneven drywall compound. The tape adhesive didn't bond consistently across the surface variations, and my reference lines drifted. Now I use a chalk line snapped directly onto the wall. It's faster and it conforms to the surface. The chalk mark is visible but faint enough that it doesn't compete with the actual drawing once you begin ink application. Don't assume that "black" means the same thing across different instructions. LeWitt specified different inks for different periods. Early works typically call for India ink or artist's ink applied with a brush or marker. Later works sometimes specify acrylic house paint. The viscosity and coverage properties differ significantly. Using the wrong medium can change both the visual weight of the lines and the drying time, which cascades into timing issues for multi-layer drawings. Check the instruction for any medium specification. If none is given, the standard convention is black artist's ink on a primed wall surface. One more thing that catches people: the scale of the instruction versus the scale of the wall. An instruction that says "lines one inch apart" produces a very different visual effect on a two-foot panel than on a twenty-foot wall. The human eye reads density differently at different scales. What reads as a textured field at close range becomes a uniform gray tone at a distance. This isn't an error in the work. It's just a fact about perception that you need to account for when deciding whether an instruction is being interpreted correctly. I've seen installers double the spacing on large walls because they thought the instruction demanded it. It didn't. The instruction said one inch apart, and it means one inch apart regardless of wall size. The visual effect changing with scale is intentional and documented in LeWitt's own writings on the subject.