Drawing and photography

I have recently been asked to write about a forthcoming exhibition of a painter I know, Adam Stone. He has been working from a photographic archive and using the images he comes across as starting points for painting. By being asked to write about his practice I have been once again in effect questioned about my own very ambivalent relationship with the photographic image. I do find it personally impossible to work from photographs and find it hard to justify why anyone else would want to use them as a source from which to work from. So I will try and unpack the processes behind my agreeing to do the writing for the show. 

Adam Stone: Merrion Centre, Leeds

This is a slightly edited copy of the press release

The Gallery, London opening 1st March 2018

Lorca would have told us that a photograph can never possess el duende; that quality of human movement that makes something unforgettable. Lorca believed duende could be found in all the arts, not just in dance, and that it can only come into existence when someone is totally possessed by an outside of the body experience, one where subject and object are conjoined, where the physical world and the artist merge with the spirit; and when this happens forms arrive as if “shaped like wind on sand” (Lorca, in Berger, 2016, p.99)

The best of Adam Stone’s paintings give to his investigations of a photographic archive that duende that Lorca saw as essential to the recreation of a lived experience. Stone’s striving to find a something in the act of painting, means that images arrive and then retreat in a maze of mark-making. Each painting as it emerges through the fragments of a previous image picks up traces of other lives, “enough suggestion of a double life” to ensure that his audience is always engaged. The painter in his painterly dance is at his best at one with his painting, or as Cezanne put it, “At this moment I am one with my picture. We are an iridescent chaos”. (Cixous, 2000, p.588)

Because of a photograph's supposedly ‘indexical’ relationship with the world, the distinction between image and reality has often been blurred, but by adding a further painted layer Adam Stone opens a door into another reading, one that questions the basic assumption of the relationship between a photograph and reality.

A photograph is seen as evidence of a subject’s existence. But it is also an absence. Its very momentariness makes us aware of the time that was not captured, its framing makes us aware of what was not in the frame. In these spaces and times not recorded lies nostalgia, and in nostalgia we draw away from reality and internalise the world, constructing it of memories and reflections, rather than experiencing something real. In being shorn of time, a photograph sucks us into it, so that we give to it the time it doesn’t possess.

Stones understands that a second layer of vision is needed in order to construct a base for meaning that was only a possibility in the first; his paintings reach down deeply into the time and spaces that the photographs cut and sliced into and they begin to repair the wounds of absence by giving back the richness of a life’s existence, by hand crafting and leaving traces of a bodily dance embedded into the materiality of oil paint as it runs and smears and is brushed across the ghostly textures of previous images. These are paintings about the difference between reality and what is real, and he shows us what it is like to be a ‘real’ painter.

I began my ideas about what to write by thinking about the fact that Bergson stated that if we could see the world directlty there would be no need for art. (Bergson, 2008, p.46b)  he goes on to state that, “Between nature and ourselves, nay, between ourselves and our own consciousness a veil is interposed” (Ibid) I was interested in this because I have come across a lot of people who believe that photographs give us a direct access to being able to see the world 'directly'. J. F. Martel when reflecting on Bergson’s account wrote, “What is revealed to us through art is a plane of reality that combines the observer, the act of observation and the object observed in one sensation, one event.” (2015, p.51) Martel brings the human being back into the equation. These are statements about the power of art to give us revelations about what is always there, to illuminate the everyday, to reveal the strangeness behind the familiar, and when you stand in front of a drawing or painting that has responded to a photographic image, you can I believe begin to see what Bergson and Martel were thinking about. (I use the term responded rather than copied, because I think there is a huge difference)
For a painter, using photographs as a starting point can be problematic. The photograph can become a trap; one that is so easy to fall into because the authority of the lens has become ubiquitous and we live in times where image making is often judged by its ability to be like a photograph. So how can an artist, especially one with a long track record of prioritising looking directly at the world, overcome this trap? Perhaps William Blake provides an initial clue.

From: To Thomas Butts: With Happiness stretch’d across the hills

And a double vision is always with me.
With my inward eye, ‘tis an old man grey.
With my outward eye, a thistle across my way.


By double vision I think Blake is referring to the fact that seeing isn't simply a process of opening your eyes and capturing the world. It is a process of thinking. As you build a conceptual framework about the world (your inner eye) you use it to help decide what you are seeing with your 'outer eye'. You need internal and external eyes if you are to escape the trap of the photograph. For me, it is as if the photograph has only one eye. Paradoxically I see this as the inward eye. This is why the photograph evokes the nostalgia of the past, its own technology dates the image as soon as the shutter is released; it is immediately embedded into its own history. Its technology shapes what is recorded, it is in fact simply a reflection of technology, but technology dates easily. In contrast the outward eye of the painting reactivates the thistle of life experience. Something new emerges from the materiality of paint and its manipulation. In paintings images grow slowly as opposed to the simultaneity of arrival that is the provenance of the photograph. Although painting is a very old technology, it is too close to the human hand to date. A brush is in effect an extension of the fingers, the technology is so primitive that the smearing of paint with it is hardly different to what would happen if you used your fingers. 
Because in effect the trace of the body movements are captured by brush strokes, I began to think of the body's movements as being like a dancer and this reminded me of Lorca's comments on duende, and that he believed that all art forms can have this, even though duende is usually as a term reserved for that flamenco dancer who has entered the zone of forgetfulness, the space of now, who is inhabiting the moment in such a way that everyone watching the dance is transfixed by the wonder of sound, movement and a moment of total syncopation. This it was I felt that the painter could put back into the photographic image. The thin slices of reality given to us by photographs can suck us in, because they are so undernourished, we need to feed them with space and time, and eventually I would argue, contact with too many photographs can suck us dry. This is why we need paintings of photographs, to feed our need for space and time and to protect us from being ghosted out by fast fading photographic images. 

A photograph’s status can be seen as evidence of a subject’s existence. But it is also an absence. Its very momentariness makes us aware of the time that was not captured, its framing makes us aware of what was not in the frame. What we miss from our past becomes nostalgia. Therefore in those spaces and times not recorded by the photograph lies nostalgia, and in nostalgia we draw away from reality and internalise the world, constructing it of memories and reflections, rather than experiencing as something real. In being shorn of time, a photograph sucks us into it, so that we give to it the time it doesn’t possess.

A second vision I decided was needed in order to construct a base for meaning that was only a possibility in the first or internal eye of vision. 

As to how that base for meaning might be constructed I turned to Heidegger, in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, he considers ‘poiesis’ in its sense of ‘to make’ and suggests that it is in hand making that we can come to an understanding of being, that the process of making things gives us an opportunity to actualise our existence. 

Heidegger wants to live in a world of technology is such a way that it doesn’t “warp, confuse and waylay our nature”, he saw our being as initially developing an understanding of the world through nature, ‘physis’. Then in a further stage by using ‘poiesis’ which is seen as a way of helping things come forth and in this case ‘poiesis’would be the act of making the painting. (Dreyus & Spinosa, 1997, p. 160)

The dual lenses of Blake, could then become those of ‘physis’ and ‘poiesis’, the photograph (physis) being in many ways a natural event, a simple chemical or digital recording of an instant, the painting (poiesis) a hand made process that is used to help an idea come forth.

One other term was ratting around at the back of my head, and its a religious one, the Thomistic notion of 'connaturality'. This is to do with the religious idea of 'possession', a state that is as sister Anselma Scollard states, "both intimate and profound". (2008, p.23) This is perhaps the state that an artist is in when they are lost in the contemplation of their work and it is the handwork or 'touch' produced during this time of possession that elevates the image above and beyond the possibilities of the photograph. 

So eventually I managed to convince myself that there was a way to work from photographs. 

I also think working on top of photographic imagery is interesting and it is another way of bringing together physis and poiesis. In the case below the hand made stitch bringing life back into the dead world of the technologically captured photograph. These images below by Jessica Wohl benefiting greatly by the conjunction of the two worlds of hand crafting and rapidly ageing photographic formats. 

Jessica Wohl

Wohl also draws on her images and constructs collages, which is a natural extension of an idea that brings different language formats together. See this earlier post Drawing on Photographs

Jessica Wohl

It is interesting to compare Wohl's approach to the Reunion series of photographic prints by Diane Meyer, based on found elementary school class pictures from the 1970s. As the information about the work from the Klompching Gallery states; 'This project continues the artist’s interest in the relationship between photography and memory. In the class photographs, the faces of the students, or what would normally be the main focal points of the image, are obscured with cross-stitch embroidery made to resemble the digital pixel structure of the image'. The fact that these images are now digital also points to another issue. The original images would have been analogue, but then they were scanned in and made digital. This new life as a pixilated image, is then added to by a further 'analogue' process, the stitch. The process asks another question, what is the new status of memory? The vast banks of digital files kept on servers all over the world are our collective memories and in case of disaster or war, it is easy to imagine a time when these banks are destroyed or are wiped in some way by a virus. Individually we all now pay for digital storage space and on our deaths who will continue to carry on paying for this? At least with the photographs printed on paper there was a trace of a memory, a ghost of a former time, the digital record will leave no trace of itself. 

Diane Meyer: Reunion

The work of Alex Hamilton is useful to look at in this context. Because he uses the same photograph over and over again, he is able to create a dialogue with his audience in relation to what the original photograph might mean and what the artist's intervention might transform that meaning into. Each image is in some ways similar and in others very different. His practice of photocopying the photographs and then transferring the images onto heavy watercolour paper before beginning to work by hand, facilitates the movement from indexical relationship to surface for invention. The photograph for Hamilton becomes in effect a contemporary equivalent to Cozens ink marks, (see) a surface used by the artist to stimulate visual ideas. The transfer of the image to archival paper, at the same time asks a further question about the nature of conservation and value. 

The Forth Plinth: Alex Hamilton

Finally I ought to reference the work of Ian Mckeever. He has had a long career whereby he has often interrogated the relationship between drawing and photography. 

Ian Mckeever: from the Waterfall series

The image above consists of a drawing on the left and a photograph on the right. They are both of the frozen surface of a waterfall on the Isle of Skye. The drawing can be seen as a companion of the photograph, a critical friend if you will. It does not set out to copy the photograph but creates a pairing. In doing this the physical nature of the drawing is highlighted, it is easier to see that the drawing's gestation is also geological. It consists of the traces of marks made as various materials rub off against one another. We can see the duration of mark making much easier in the drawing than the chemical capture of light represented by the photograph. Both though represent a haptic, or direct 'touching' engagement with a situation, the drawing more attuned to physics and the photograph to chemistry. Mckeever took analogue SLR photographs of the situation and then developed the 35mm negatives and enlarged them to the same size as the drawings, so that the grain of the photographs became very visible. In doing this he makes us more aware of the photograph as a physical entity. However the two processes are always fundamentally different, as McKeever has explained: ‘to begin with the photograph is a decision to leave something out; with a drawing it is a decision to put something in … 

References

Bergson, H (1911) Laughter: An essay on the meaning of the comic Book Jungle 

Berger, J (2016) Confabulations London: Penguin

Blake, W.  (1982) The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake Berkeley: University of California Press

Martel, R. F. (2015) Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice Berkeley: Evolver Press

Dreyus, H.L. & Spinosa, C. Continental Philosophy Review (1997) 30: 159. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1004299524653

Hélène Cixous, (2000) “The last painting or the portrait of God” in Cazeaux,C. ed. The Continental Aesthetics Reader London: Routledge

Scollard, Sr A. (2008) The sense of touch versus conceptual art in Oxlade and Reichert 'Art without art' London: Ziggurat

As to the Jasper Johns quote in response to being able to see glimpses of earlier attempts at image making through gaps between areas of new paint, 'enough suggestion of a double life' I think it's by Max Kozloff. 

See also: 

Drawing from photographs

Drawing on photographs

Making large drawings from photographs.  Louise Lawler