Bob Dylan and Drawing

John Lennon

Of my two main adolescent musical influences John Lennon was the only one who I was aware of at the time that drew as well as made music, but it was Bob Dylan who opened my eyes, because his music was as much visual as verbal, as much about image as melody. I'm reminded of this because Bob Dylan was performing in Leeds this last week and at exactly the same time as he was on stage at the First Direct Arena, I was sitting in the City Varieties Theatre listening to O'Hooley & Tidow performing one of their last shows before formally ending their musical collaboration. At one point during the evening Heidi Tidow reminded us that Dylan was playing at the same time within a few hundred yards and thanked the audience for choosing to see them instead. Their song 'Two Mothers' is about the universal experience of having a mother and becoming one and as a lesbian couple they are very aware of situations where a child is given away to new mothers, who will now have to undertake the responsibility to sing lullabies. They are regarded as being part of a continuing folk tradition and are artists local to my West Yorkshire area; Dylan's example still encouraging others to get on stage and perform songs about their lives, even though they may be very different to the one that Dylan told us about. In many ways I felt that I was honouring my debt to Dylan by being there rather than going to see him, he doesn't need my support and if I had been to see him, it would have been more about being in the same room as him, than about hearing new stories from folk songs. His model, one he inherited from Woody Guthrie and many others, of making musical poetry out of the condition of the world, is hopefully one that will continue to be passed on, generation to generation.

 'Two Mothers': O'Hooley & Tidow

It was Dylan that opened my mind many years ago to the possibility of making art out of experience. My teenager mind was listening to lyrics such as "Put your eyes in your pocket and your nose on the ground", (from 'Ballard of a Thin Man': Highway 61: Revisited), and as it did it visualised the words for me, I could clearly see that image of eyes sitting in a pocket and a nose pressed to the ground; it was a bit like being on an acid trip without having to take acid. Dylan's voice was for me the voice of a contemporary poet, it was authentic in a way that 'good' singers never were for me. Perhaps I don't have a very musical ear, but there was an edge to how he came across that said, "I mean this, like it or not, this is how I see the world." 

One thing I learnt quite early on was that you shouldn't try to analyze his songs. Friends who just didn't get it, would say to me, "But what does it mean?" At the time I found it hard to explain that the meaning emerges as a feeling that you get from the interplay of lyrics, melody and his voice and is never fixed. His writing was I felt and still do, deliberately ambiguous and when embedded into his music the totality creates an overall atmosphere that I would as a teenager sink into and use to leave the world behind. I liked the fact that he could be surreal, a documentary maker, a poet that would write about a memory or a heartache, be outraged, be funny or perhaps be just trying to capture a feeling that he had. I felt I wanted to say stuff about all these things too, but I was tongue tied. Above all, I felt that his art (and I really did feel that what he was doing was art), was an expression of what it feels like to be a human being, trying to make sense of being alive and that it seemed to me was probably the most amazing thing that any human being could want to do. His records shaped me, my decision to be an artist, was very much made because I recognised something about the creative spirit in myself, something I first saw as I glimpsed myself through the lens of his words. 

I still listen with eager ears to any new recording that he might make, especially as we have both continued to make art as we have aged. I dread to hear that he might have died, as I fear that something of myself will die with him. He has in my mind, been a fellow traveller for over 60 years and I feel I understand why he still needs to tour, even though he is now in his 80s. Each time he plays those songs, he must find something new in them. The times that his work emerges into change and as they do, reception morphs; the song never remains the same. The older I get, I think I work harder. The more work I do, the more I realise there is more to say. I sense that he feels that too. Why stop, what else would you do? 

In Love minus Zero no Limit', there is a line "With your mercury mouth in the missionary times", an image I remember arose in my mind as I first heard it; a certain languid feeling, slid into a taste of metal and as it did it poisoned the image I had begun to draw in my mind, making it awkward and difficult to accept. Out of those moments of difficulty I began to get a handle on what this art stuff was about, it was making the familiar strange and it was hard work. As I got older and became 'professional', I continued to find images in his lyrics that would inspire me, especially when he left me surprised by how he put things. I have even made drawings in the past responding to what critics have said is Dylan's worst song, 'Wiggle, Wriggle', from 'Under a Red Sky; the line ''Wiggle 'til you're high, wiggle 'til you're higher, Wiggle 'til you vomit fire', somehow hit me splat in my insides. I always did wriggle too much, my father said I suffered from St. Vitus Dance, I could never keep still and even now I find it difficult to sit down and watch a TV programme, without having to jerk my leg around, raise my arms or keep twisting my neck. It was that album that reminded me of the power of nursery rhymes and that sometimes you just had to go back to being a child if you wanted to renew yourself. I suspected Dylan had children around at the time, as I did and somehow I had to let their world into mine. 

Sketchbook page: Idea for fire/eye vomit

I'm still making images about vomiting up what's inside

Over the last few years we have seen more and more of Dylan's visual artwork. He sometimes couples his hand written out lyrics with his own illustrations, as in the image and text pairing below of 'Lay Lady Lay'. But these images although competent enough, are not going to open any new perceptual doors for me. I can see that he enjoys making them and everyone needs a way of releasing those images that stack up in your head but at the end of the day it is still his lyrics and the way he sings them that move me. 

Bob Dylan: Lay Lady Lay

Walt Whitman's poem "Song of Myself," contains the line, "I contain multitudes" and in 2020 Dylan revisited the idea himself, this time listing the people who crowd within him, it was as if they were all trying to get out. But as they do they climb over each other and a multi-headed creature begins to emerge; all push and shove, all masters but no leaders. We are all like that, underneath the thin skin of ourselves lives a congregation of others and this is perhaps Dylan's main legacy. He reminds us that we are all multiples of the many, that we inherit the forms of others and that there is no such thing as a truly unique individual. We take what we are given and we reweave the elements into new clothes. An attempt to get those clothes to fit perhaps being what many artists spend most of their time doing.

There is also something about Dylan's voice, that rough and worn thing that is not at all lovely, but which gives authenticity to the lyrics. It is for myself a sensibility akin to Cézanne's touch, sometimes crude, harsh and ugly and yet at other times exquisitely sensitive but always totally sincere. When at its best art is 'artless', it just is what it is. Style it seems to me is art's enemy, an infiltrator that snuck into the building via aesthetics. I was never a gifted draftsman, always a clumsy maker and it took me a long time to accept that, but once I did, I felt the work I began to do became more honest and less an attempt to cover up visual weakness with intellect. 

Bob's voice when young was the sound of my adolescent mind

So yes I'm still an adolescent in some ways, never getting over a first love. I remember that I used to watch snails in the garden when I was very small, I was fascinated, I wanted to know them and inhabit their world.  I still love snails and sometimes make images based on them, defenceless, without their shells. Something old and yet always new. Dylan was often accused of plagiarism but we are all plagiarists, if not we would never be able to communicate with each other, he takes Whitman's line and re-digests it, acknowledging the fact that without Whitman there would be no Dylan, but without Dylan many of us, including myself, would never have read Whitman. We are all interconnected and inseparable from the world, something we should acknowledge or else we pretend that we are self determined isolationists, a self conceit bolstered by Capitalism, one that it seems to me, has led us to destroy the very ecosystems that we evolved within.  

Snail votive

See also:

Drawing and wellbeing

Eye music

Andrew Lister Another artist who listened to Bob Dylan

A review of Pushing Paper A reminder to myself of how often Dylan comes to mind

Fine art?

A linear enjambement

Rosemarie McGoldrick: 'Animalcules IV' (2025)

An enjambement in verse is the continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line. For instance the poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams, is constructed in such a way that everything depends upon a continuation of the first line, therefore the first line ends without punctuation, so that the thought continues into the next line; thus creating a sense of flow.

William Carlos Williams
XXII from Spring and All (1923)

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

The Red Wheelbarrow is a short haiku like poem that makes us aware of how objects work upon our personal sense of a visual poetry.

The line that continues is also something that can be purely visual. Rosemarie McGoldrick has an exhibition of her work on at the Centre for Recent Drawing at the moment and she uses a sense of enjambement in her drawn images depicting microscopic forms of imagined plankton and geometric krill. She is another example of an artist trying to visualise the invisible and I was particularly interested in her work because of the idea of enjambement. When I was looking at  permeable boundaries, such as the ones that surround an amoeba, I was trying to visualise how the body of the amoeba was open and flexible, becoming at times part of the surrounding environment and at other times seeming to reassert itself, switching from one state to another. I saw in McGoldrick's images a possibility of a type of visual language using a linear enjambement, that could allow me to redraw microscopic and human sized forms in such a way that they were interconnected much more clearly into their environment and to each other. It also fitted very well with my earlier thoughts about lines as symbols of invisible forces. 

Two stages of relationships between bacteria, feelings, their human hosts and other things

Lines of relationship are constantly shifting and when trying to visualise an embodied complex of interoceptual feelings, some areas are just blank. In the image above the black blobs were drawn as indicators of unknowns that still have complex relationships between all the other aspects of a being situated in an environment. One issue I have also had to think about in these type of images is how power is depicted. I have been looking towards the depiction of what is sometimes called a 'flat ontology' or sets of equal relationships between things. However I'm also aware that as soon as we focus on something it has more power in our minds over other things, that then move into the background as we shift our attention away from them. For instance in the image above the form moving into the frame from the left hand side is weightier than the more complex form situated in the middle of the image. The connections between are though drawn as if they are of equal weight. Perhaps my thoughts can be clarified by referring to another image that uses similar lines to depict a relationship. 

Mesmerism

The invisible power of mesmerism is represented in the image above as another example of a male exerting power over a female. However I'm more interested in the lines of force being rather like the strings attached to a puppet. 

Although the hand of the puppeteer is usually thought of as a means of control and the strings the means by which that control is asserted, you can see it as being a relationship that goes both ways, the puppet in effect also directs the puppeteer. Connections go both ways. 

It is however Jorinde Voigt's use of lines to express relationships that I reference in my own drawings, as her images are reflections upon the transience of experience and the impossibility of actually recording it. In her drawings I see a glimpse of Cézanne's struggle to draw how he saw; as in Cézanne, there is a beauty in Voigt's work that emerges in relation to her seeking to pinpoint life's ever changing patterns. 

Jorinde Voigt

The drawings that were on display at this year's Turner Prize exhibition by Nnena Kalu were also a type of linear enjambement. In her case the drawings were all repeated, the continuation of the sentence beyond the end of a line, being accomplished by picking up a swirling linear thought  and doubling it. Her drawings seem very much about her own energy, about her body's movement and a celebration of it. Although related in form to some of Voigt's drawings, Kalu's feel less of an emotional dilemma, more a celebration of her existence than a struggle to affirm it.

Nnena Kalu

Nnena Kalu's doubling reminded me of Robert Rauschenberg's Factum 1 and 2.

Robert Rauschenberg: Factum 1 and 2: 1957

Factum 1 and Factum 2 are nearly identical, both using the same mixed-media techniques, of collage and paint on canvas. Rauschenberg's doubling, is this case is more a commentary on art's originality and uniqueness, paint never dripping in exactly the same way, every abstract expression being an original feeling. However the style of collage next to free paint marks, makes each 'combine' out to be a 'unique' Rauschenberg. Nnena Kalu's drawings are similar in that they are not exact copies, but close enough to at first sight be seen as identical doubles. Rauschenberg's approach being more cerebral, whilst I feel Kalu has found her way more instinctively. All of these attempts to meditate on the nature of the creative act involve in one way or another the continuation of a communication beyond an initial setting out of what is to be communicated. They are like hair extensions, attached to the starting point, but going much further, becoming something new in the process.  

See also

Lines as symbols of invisible forces

Jorinde Voigt drawing as abstraction and metaphor

Stitched, dashed or dotted lines

The emotional line

A straight line

The art of memory

 

From: An Intuition of the Bare Two Oneness

I was thinking about Frances Yate's wonderful book, 'The Art of Memory' the other day. I haven't read it for many years but I was reminded of it because not long ago the artist Rosie Vohra had been asked to make a personal selection for exhibition within the Leeds Arts University library and she had chosen an artist's book that I made over 40 years ago, 'An Intuition of the Bare Two Oneness'. I wrote the text for it at a time when I was under the influence of Yates' book and some of the images directly reflect the types of structures she used as illustrations in the book. Looking at the images again I was reminded of the fact that I was also trying to make sense of computer technology. We had been trying out a new type of wax printer, that took wax coated paper sheets of cyan, magenta, yellow and black and ran them one after the other through a series of rollers that passed underneath a heater, whilst at the same time thousands of pins  pushed down on the sheets in the areas designated by your design, that had been converted into CMYK separations, thus transferring the wax to the print paper. It was a clumsy process and we only ever had that one printer and it was never replaced. However, because there were now four layers of wax, there was a certain richness to the surfaces laid down and I wanted to make use of that. The final images were printed off and bound together with a text that I had typeset also using a computer and that I thought was it. At the time I thought it was a very good piece of work, but now on re-examining the book I realise that I ought to have bound glassine paper into the book between pages, because over the years the wax has begun to rub off onto the facing pages. However the fact that the book was out on display gave me a chance to photograph it and of course rethink what I might be able to do if I revisited the idea. 

From: An Intuition of the Bare Two Oneness

Frances Yates introduced me to several ideas that have cropped up again and again in my work; in particular because memory enhancement was part of rhetoric training and rhetoric was about getting your ideas across to other people in memorable ways. Something that as an artist I'm constantly having to think about and as a former lecturer who used to introduce students to communication theory, I owe it to myself to always remain aware of these issues. 

Playing with the idea of what comes where in terms of a visual hierarchy

Since making the book, I have become much more interested in animism and ideas that touch upon a 'flat ontology' or level playing field, when we come to look at our relationships with other things. The medieval idea of the great chain of being, a hierarchy with God at the top, followed by angels, humans, animals, plants, elements (fire, water, etc.) and finally, inanimate objects like rocks at the bottom, is still in many ways how human beings think of the world and how it relates to them. Perhaps because of the spread of atheism, God and angels no longer have pride of place, but that often means that we humans then take top spot. In my watercolour image above, a cow has reached the top of the stairway but is about to fall down, leaving a field of wheat in top spot. I was playing with hierarchies, trying to subvert the order of things as usually pictured by humans.

However going back to Yates and her explication of how memory training was used, in particular in relation to Cicero's work on rhetoric, one of the big issues was making images that were startling in their appearance and also linked to what you want to remember by some sort of likeness. For instance, testis is a Latin word for “witness” and was used in Cicero's time in relation to witnessing one's manhood, therefore the words testify, testimonial and testament share a common etymology with the word testicle. Cicero at one point suggests that in a speech, if you want to remember that now is the time to speak about certain legal matters, you could mentally place a giant pair of testicles at a particular spot within a building that you were in your mind walking through, to help you remember the various components of your speech. It's a good image and one I must try out as a drawing at some point. We have all at one time or another tried to remember stuff and have realised that we can do this much easier if we can find a link to something else, especially a link that also takes a memorable shape and locates what we are trying to remember in a pictured space that you can mentally hold in your mind. For instance; if you want to remember a shopping list, you can visualise each item in its place on the shelves of a supermarket. Then you can picture yourself walking through the various aisles and picking up what you need. A renaissance memory theatre operates in a similar way; theatres, such as the Globe, were places most people knew, just as a supermarket is now. Therefore in people's minds they could visualise the structure. Aisles and rows of seating could be set out in a way we are all familiar with and to this day we still go to a theatre or cinema, expecting to make our way to row H, seat 12 etc. It was a space that was easily cross referenced and particular spots pinpointed. Within this space, you could then place the various things you wanted to remember. However certain theorists at the time, such as Giulio Camillo, went further and decided that they could control the system and give it an overall structure that related to that idea of the great chain of being, a hierarchical system, that fixed into place and ordered all things.

Giulio Camillo's Memory Theatre

This is how Frances Yates describes Giulio Camillo's Memory Theatre; 

“The Theatre rises in seven grades or steps, which are divided by seven gangways representing the seven planets. The student of it is to be as it were a spectator before whom are placed the seven measures of the world ‘in spettaculo’, or in a theatre. And since in ancient theatres the most distinguished persons sat in the lowest seats, so in this Theatre the greatest and most important things will be in the lowest place. That there would be no room for an audience to sit between these enormous and lavishly decorated gangway gates does not matter. For in Camillo’s Theatre the normal function of the theatre is reversed. There is no audience sitting in the seats watching a play on the stage. The solitary ‘spectator’ of the Theatre stands where the stage would be and looks towards the auditorium, gazing at the images on the seven times seven gates on the seven rising grades."

My present day version would be the memory supermarket, shelves stacked with knowledge packets instead of cereals or frozen foods, the fresh food aisles being now places to find new untested ideas, the cleaning products section perhaps devoted to philosophy and ways of thinking, such as the use of Occam's Razor. The bread shelves might be devoted to staple knowledge and the cake section where you might find titbits of information. The science of electro-magnetic fields might begin with the electrical goods section, whilst chemistry was located in the cooking supplies area and biology located where potted plants are. I think you get the drift.

James Joyce was fascinated by Giordano Bruno, who was one of the inventors of the art of memory. In Ithaca, the 17th part of Joyce's Ulysses, Leopold Bloom stops “chanting” a Jewish “anthem… in consequence of defective mnemotechnic”; a reminder that in his mind Joyce was both trying to bridge between the everyday and the mythic and build a memory structure in order to do this. He uses everyday events as a series of triggers to reference Homer's Odyssey; this final chapter of Ulysses recounts the very mundane events that happen as Leopold Bloom takes Stephen Dedalus home to number 7 Eccles Street for a cup of cocoa and to discuss the night's experiences; the chapter's title being an allusion to Odysseus's return home to Ithaca. Joyce suggests that every day is a journey and in its own way that journey can be as eventful as the voyages of Ulysses. 

The chapters of Ulysses in their own way are also therefore a type of memory structure, the important issue for myself being that everyday events and things can be used to help us think about big issues. I have written a blog post about the hand as a memory system, (as always check out the 'see also' section at the end of each post), a reminder of how much of our thinking is embodied.
The linking of things by finding connections is also something that can be used in the construction of magic and is the reason ritual objects have the power they have. In order to work, magic objects must have a point of contact with something that gives them traction or meaning, the contact if not directly physical, usually being a likeness of some sort. This process is termed the 'Law of Similarity' or 'Sympathetic Magic'. It can also operate by 'touch' which is a very physical connection. For instance a witch doctor could curse the ground that you might walk on; if so you will need protection, to stop that curse getting into your body. This is why historically in India and China and in many other cultures, people used to wear ankle bracelets. A curse would need to pass up and through the ankle, in order to get into the torso, which is the seat of all our vital organs and a charm bracelet worn around the ankle could prevent this. The bracelet also acting as a physical reminder of the need to be mindful of psychic attacks. 

My work developing contemporary votives at one time overlapped with the design of charms, each one a response to a conversation about someone's worries. The charm bracelet above was designed as a type of three dimensional memory object, each charm shaped to reassure the wearer that some sort of psychic protection was in place. Gradually I was becomming aware of things like memory beads, rosaries and South American quipu, all external to the body and operating as recording or memory devices that began with touch and yet were also to be seen. They were of course operating as external brains.

References:

Barker, G. (2023) Votives and Charm Bracelets Materialising Health-Related Experiences Through ‘Sacred’ Objects. In: Wearable Objects and Curative Things: Materialist Approaches to the Intersections of Fashion, Art, Health and Medicine. Palgrave Studies in Fashion and the Body: Palgrave Macmillan, London

Joyce, J. (2010) Ulysses Wordsworth Editions

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2008). Metaphors we live by. London: University of Chicago press

Yates, F. (2014) Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition London: Routledge

Yates, F. (2014) The Art of Memory London: Bodley Head

See also:

Connecting the singularity 

Memory drawing and hands

Faraday's lines of force

Magic

Deer teeth, perception and symbolic language

Votives and charm bracelets

Drawing and communication theory

Knots

Rafts, plinths and islands

If you type into Google "Rafts, plinths and islands", you get a reply that points to the different types of land and structures found in the survival game 'Raft'. However I'm thinking about how we present artwork and how we sometimes try to isolate the work from the world, so that we can contemplate it.

Rafts, plinths and islands are three dimensional ways of thinking about framing. They are also usually associated with sculpture rather than drawing, however there is a fair amount of territory that overlaps and I have in the past looked at drawing as very thin sculpture, a reminder that all physical things, no matter how flat are all three dimensional. 

I can remember first coming across Anthony Caro's work in the late 1960s and one of the things that was fascinating about it, was that it didn't need to stand on a plinth. 

Anthony Caro, Prairie: 1967

By eliminating the plinth the work became part of the world you were in, it occupied the same space as you did. This was such a different feeling to encountering sculpture on a plinth. It felt at the time liberating and democratic, to bring sculpture down from off its aristocratic pedestal. 

Rodin: Hand of God: 1998

Sculpture presented on a plinth, such as 'The Hand of God' by Rodin, is presented to us as if it belongs to another place, in effect it occupies an island that you have to get to in order to appreciate it. The island plinth is rather like another country, the game 'Raft' taps into the psychic feeling tone we have when we encounter islands as places of intrigue, mystery and/or danger; islands hold within themselves secrets that can only be discovered by exploration and getting there is sometimes a struggle. The plinth standing isolated in a gallery space, operates in a similar way to an island, the work that stands upon it may be new and uncharted, but we know someone has presented this work to us as something worth contemplation. 

The aesthetic 'struggle' to understand what art means is often encountered in galleries, especially if the work on display is of classical provenance. The 'special' nature or 'aura' of the work is signified by the plinth, you immediately know it is of cultural and monetary worth by the fact that it has been three dimensionally 'framed' and presented.  

From the Dauphin website

Companies such as Dauphin operate as art display consultants and if you are thinking about how to present work, it is always worth looking at what they do, if only to steal ideas. If you go to their website you will find that they operate as a service that adds value to the work they present. Compare what they do to shop window displays, where expensive items are spotlit and are given small pedestals to isolate them from other objects or set into felt or silk. For art display consultants the art object is no different to any other culturally valuable item, the job is to heighten the allure of the object and at times to give it an almost religious significance. 

Jewellery shop display

St Mark's Basilica treasury

Spotlit and behind glass, the religious treasures of St Mark's in Venice, are presented as objects for veneration. The sculpture as presented by Dauphin it is suggested ought to have a similar level of veneration. However the relics in St Marks are set into a vitrine, a way of presenting things that is closely related to plinths and pedestals but more concerned with religious value than monetary value. I shall preserve the issues related to vitrines for another post, as they not only signify religious value, but the idea of the museum gaze and the sanctity of research. 

The plinth is a modern version of the pedestal. The pedestal is a sort of shorthand version of the column and it signifies Classicism, which was and still is, an aesthetic attitude that suggests the primacy of the culture of ancient Greece and Rome. 

A classical pedestal.

If you place modern sculpture on a classical pedestal or niche, as I have done with one of my ceramics, or in the work of Lee Bul further below, it is framed or separated out from life, as well as curiously, unframed, the incongruity making the observers very aware that they are meant to see that a point is being made. 

Ceramic votive fetish presented on a classical pedestal

Lee Bul: Long Tail Halo 2024

Of course you can simply place your work on a domestic object such as a chair.

Contemporary artists are very aware of these issues, but perhaps the first modern artist to play with the idea of the plinth was Brancusi. 

Brancusi display currently at the Pompidou centre

Brancusi shapes his plinths into forms that chime with the sculpture placed upon them.

Dogon: Kambari style

Certain sculptures made in the area of Africa that we call Mali by the Dogon people are given the attribute, 'Kambari' style. Made at exactly the same time as Brancusi made Portrait de Mme L.R, and for many years before he began carving, these sculptures also integrated their bases into their body forms. They remind us that the carvings are made from tree trunks, the base often being both something that is a 'ground' for the figure to stand on and a formal device that echoes the shape and form of the material that the figure was carved from. Brancusi used to celebrate his 'primitive' approach, often by incorporating elements from Romanian folk art and African sculpture into his work, which he saw as a source of more authentic artistic feeling.

Brancusi: Portrait de Mme L.R. 1914–17

Brancusi's 'Portrait de Mme L.R.', is like the Dogon sculpture shaped out of wood, the supporting base, or plinth, is an integral component of the sculpture, you can't take the top part off and put it on another base. If Brancusi had been a painter, it would be as if he had begun painting onto the frame of his painting. Something that we see happening in the work of Howard Hodgkin, 60 years later.

Howard Hodgkin:Blue Movie: 1986/7

Picasso of course got there first. He realised you could use the frame to play a perceptual game.

Picasso: Still life with chair caning and rope frame. 1912

Picasso asks us questions as to how we see and what we see. The chair caning is a print, a slice of existing life, but non the less an illusion. The letters are real letters, the fractured viewpoints of the painted still life are reminders of the various positions taken by the artist as he looked at the still life and the rope frame asks us to think about the caning again, as its twisted material is of the same material family. But it also asks the question, "`Where does the image stop?" Does it stop inside the frame, or is the rope part of the experience? This conundrum is opened out in some of my earlier posts in particular in relation to the parergon.

We have now returned to the wall space and framing a flat image, hopefully it now makes sense as to why I'm looking at the plinth within a blog focused on issues related to drawing. 

There is a sort of halfway house for sculpture and that is the raft, something that in the case of a flat image is not that dissimilar to the shelf. 

Open a larger version of the following image in a popup:

Sébastien de Ga: Aluminium Sculpture on Pallet 1, 2017

The wooden pallet is often used as a type of raft when presenting work. It is high enough to separate the work out from the floor, but low enough to suggest that the work still bears some sort of floor relationship. Pallets also have a sense of a working life or everyday reality associated with them. They are made for easy manoeuvrability and suggest therefore impermanence. 

The raft can also be a small island, in the case of Hans Op de Beeck's still lives, he 'frames' the work by installing it on a low platform. That halfway house between a full blown plinth and the raft is as I pointed out similar to the relationship between the frame and the shelf, another presentation technique de Beeck uses.

Hans Op de Beeck

Hans Op de Beeck

Standing frames on a shelf or ledge

Standing a frame on a ledge reintroduces the physical presence of the frame. It is another of those contradictions that we sometimes encounter when displaying work. On the one hand we want to cut the work out of an everyday space to suggest that it is something different and that you ought to spend time focusing on the ideas that the work is holding. On the other hand we may want to suggest that the work is available or 'domesticated' is some way. There was some work presented in the last Venice Biennale on old chests of drawers. The sculptures therefore feeling more like ornaments. 

Objects sitting on top of a contemporary chest of drawers

Michael Samuels

Michael Samuels has made sculpture from furniture, therefore the plinth is an integral part of the sculpture, table legs still operating as table legs, even though the table is no longer a table. 

The image above could be a plan view of a gallery floor with island positions marked for sculptures or an elevation view of a gallery wall with flat works displayed as isolated images. On a flat wall the space between images set out like this can feel vast. The difference being that in plan view you are actually in the room space, standing on the floor, therefore you are also activating the room space as an additional three dimensional object, this is not the case on the wall. On the wall you can cluster a group of works together rather like islands and then put one larger work some distance away, suggesting a larger land mass off in the distance. The viewer it is suggested needs to travel between these images, just as you would when sailing at sea. However you travel in the mind, your eyes do the work, as you stand on the outside of the situation. 

So yet another series of things to think about when displaying work. There are always more issues and the next subject related to presentation methods I shall deal with is that of the display case and how that effects and affects the meanings associated with art work. I'll leave that for another post. 

See also:

Hanging work for an exhibition
Trapping and framing
More on framing
The frame and the screen
More theories about drawing (Includes more on the parergon)

Reflections on the salon hang

Fixings and fittings

Framing a large drawing

The frame and the banner

Drawing into installation

Hanging large drawings

Drawing as thin sculpture

Three Men's Morris

The board for Three Men's Morris

For my birthday recently my daughter Ruth sent me the rules of the game Three Men's Morris. In order for me to play the game, she also sent six small shells that she had picked up off a beach in Uist, three of a cool grey colour cast and three of a warmer colour. The game is played with three counters per person on a board with nine points. The objective is to be the first to get your three counters in a straight line, something that is called a "mill". Players take turns placing pieces until all six are on the board. Once all counters are placed, players move one per turn to an adjacent, empty intersection following the lines on the board, aiming to be the first to align their three pieces in a row; a move that wins the game.

It's an ancient game and its moves reminded me of the dynamics of the square as set out by Rudolf Arnheim. He believed that everything we see is part of a visual field of forces and these forces are attractors that force us to look in certain ways. Using drawings he demonstrated how the formal elements that underpin visual thinking are integrated into fields of visual force dynamics. His diagrams pointed to the fact that perception and thought act reciprocally and after reading his text and looking at his drawings, I did find that I had become much more aware of the energy fields that emerge from a geometric form's inner dynamics.

The field dynamics of a square according to Rudolf Arnheim

In the diagram above, the circles represent centres of attraction and how they reach out into the spaces around them and the lines visual forces and their direction. 

Playing the game Three Men's Morris, in some ways re-enacts Arnheim's idea. You gaze at a board that is marked out in the same way as Arnheim's square's emergent energy fields. Each move in effect destabilises the dynamic and as you play you are constantly looking for patterns that seek cohesion, in the case of Three Men's Morris, joining three points together. In effect by playing the game you reveal the underlying structural skeleton of a square. The counters, or in my case small shells, appear to move along the structural axis of the overall form. As they do so they create a 'flow', that moves through the square's focal points, leading your eyes' movements through one part of the square to the next. This 'flow' is a beautiful example of Arnheim's idea that perception and thought act reciprocally, as you think of the next move, you are at exactly the same time 'seeing' the pattern that is both there and implied. 

Perception and thought are tied together, but at some point within the timeframe of almost instantaneous action/reaction decisions, I suspect Bayesian probability theory could be applied by a statistician, in order to determine the probability of a particular move. However there are two types of approaches to Bayesian probability theory, objectivists interpret probability as an extension of logic, probability quantifying an answer that presumes we have a starting point or baseline that we tend to call common sense. However subjectivists, approach probability as something that corresponds to a personal belief. Therefore rationality is subject to substantial variation due to differing beliefs. The objective and subjective variants of Bayesian probability differ mainly in their interpretation and construction of the prior probability, i.e. where are we coming from in terms of an approach to reality? This is I think a vital question in a time of post truth. 

Because of my daughter's gift, I've been stimulated to think about board games as a way of presenting ideas. I have dipped my toe into the territory before and I did make a game once and had it made up with ceramic pieces made in the form of small boats as counters. 

Snakes and ladders type game 2016

I discovered this monkey game recently, which is a variant of The Game of the Goose, which was the first board game to be published commercially.

The new game of the monkey: By E. Wallis: 1820

I was fascinated by the new game of the monkey, as it seems to open doors for a wide range of stories, in particular those stories whereby there are no fixed formats. For instance in space 14 there is a monkey I think trying to seduce a woman with a saucepan for a hat and in space 23 there is a Little Red Riding Hood monkey. Both suggest a lascivious monkey, but without a particular narrative. This opens out the moments of action in the game into unknown territory. I have been using the figure of a monkey a lot recently, and was in particular thinking of the monkey's position as substitute for humans in scientific and medical experiments. My recent time in Gothenburg in particular re-alerting me to the way monkeys are used to test out the implications of new medical procedures before they are used on humans. Although initially working my ideas through as images and making the occasional ceramic, it is the game format that I'm hoping to develop. 

Monkey studies

A board game can be a substitute for a life's journey and another of my go to concepts in terms of how we visualise a life's journey is the Wyrd. This old nordic vision is of the intricate web of fate. Imagine that your umbilical cord at birth has an invisible twin. This one is never cut and as your life unravels it unravels too, winding itself around first of all your immediate family and the landscape of your youth. It gradually wraps itself around all the experiences of life, until a fabric is woven that is your life cloth. It represents the interconnectedness of everything including the past, present and future. Individual lives extend out threads that weave a tapestry of their own destiny. The Norns spin, measure, and cut the threads of life for humans and gods alike.

The final cloth is the result of an amazingly complex decision tree. As I looked at playing Three Men's Morris, the decision tree for that is I thought a symbol, that could stand for the one that underpins the Wyrd.

A decision tree for Three Men's Morris visually maps all possible moves and outcomes, showing each decision point where a player can place or move a piece. It's a game tree that starts with an empty board and branches out with every possible move, leading to a win, loss, or draw for the players. Building this tree involves mapping out the game's two phases: the placement phase (the possibilities surrounding decisions made as all pieces are placed on the board) and the movement phase (pieces are moved to adjacent, empty spots). There are four aspects to the decision tree that need to be taken into consideration. The Nodes, which represent the places from where a player must make a choice. The Branches, that represent the possible moves a player can make from a given node. The Options, that indicate which player's turn it is and what their options are and the Outcomes, that show the result of the sequence of moves (win, loss, or draw).

A simple compact decision tree of a game of three men's morris is an interesting structure in itself.

Three Men’s Morris placement phase has 9 empty positions at the start, when player 1 places a piece, 8 open positions remain. When player 2 places a piece, 7 open positions remain, then when player 1 places a second piece, 6 open positions remain. This continues until player 2 places their third counter, which leaves 3 open positions. There are therefore 9 × 8 × 7 × 6 × 5 × 4 × 3 = 181,440 possible placement sequences, all of which will have taken place before the game actually gets started. The decision tree that shows every placement sequence up to completion of the placement phase (the 6 initial placements), is set out below.  

Three Men’s Morris placement phase decision tree

As the decision tree grows it reminds me of when I was getting fabrics made using a Jacquard loom. Although the loom I was getting my work made with no longer used a card file and was now driven by computer, I was very aware of the complexity that underpinned the process. We tend to forget how complex many of our computer programs must now be. For instance when BBC computers were introduced into the college back in the late 1970s, we were taught how to write code to place a dot into a position on a screen. Then we could join that dot to another by defining co-ordinates. Therefore just to draw one line we had to write several lines of code. Many years have passed since then, but deep down within the complexity of some 3D animation software there will still be the code for joining two points on a screen, but millions of operations have been conducted since then and it is unlikely that I will ever get even an inkling of what they entail. However that doesn't stop me from thinking of that complexity as being not unlike the woven tapestry of the Wyrd. Several people have observed in the past that complex technology when seen by people from non technological societies will seem like magic. Indeed Arthur C. Clarke in his essay, "Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination", stated as the third of his laws for future prophecy, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". My present awareness of new technology is already making me worry that we are now entering a new magical era, whereby AI magicians will conjure new realities out of nothing.

Punched cards used to operate a Jacquard loom

The complex matrix of threads that are interwoven with punch card directions

As I play the game of Three Men's Morris, which is also my granddaughter's favourite game, I'm reminded of the wonderful complexity of life, of how from that initial moment of our conception, when a sperm fertilises an egg and they combine to form a zygote, that single cell will begin to multiply and a decision tree begins that will eventually be of such complexity that it is impossible to hold in the mind, except as an idea and in my case I still find the old nordic vision of the intricate web of fate as being as good as any other that humankind has produced. 

See also: 

Weaving and grids

The square and the rectangle

The first ever drawing was a hashtag

Category theory and drawing