Guest drawing blogger: Mike Croft
For the starting post of the new year I'd like to introduce Mike Croft who is the first of my guest drawing bloggers. I first met Mike in the early 1980s when he was making a series of large drawings of cathedrals. These were impressive studies of the types of complex spaces that you find in buildings that have been built on organic principles rather than to an architect’s plan. We were both working on the Foundation Course at what was then the Jacob Kramer College and because of the importance of drawing in the curriculum at that time, we found ourselves constructing situations whereby certain different aspects of observational drawing practices could be explored. Mike left to move to London and then on to S.E. Asia, teaching on various design-based programmes in universities. His most significant pedagogic experience being developing an exploration of the perception of movement with the first year students of a new design programme in South Korea. Movement and the question of time, of which movement is of course an expression, have been abiding interests within Mike’s work for several years and being able to explore this with a group of students who already had strong drawing skills was a cathartic experience.
Mike has this to say about the changes he has experienced when teaching and making drawings. “Thinking back to the days of Jacob Kramer College, the emphasis seemed much more on the image, and a degree of investment of rigour in drawing to ensure that the image was well founded. What may have changed, and has certainly been my more recent experience of teaching through drawing, is an emphasis on drawing as a research tool that students use while not necessarily being interested in drawing as its own medium, or a medium of fine art”. I would suggest that the change is more one of philosophical positioning here at Leeds. Drawing as process is of course important, but perhaps we are now looking more at drawing as a thinking tool rather than observational record.
Mike points to his work as having “a certain cursory character compared with what you might imagine as being a ‘well founded’ image” and points to Henri Bergson’s distinction in ‘Matter and Memory’ ([1912] 2004), between what he calls the ‘present image’, as opposed to the ‘represented image’. ‘Representation is always there, but always virtual – being neutralized, at the very moment when it might become actual, by the obligation to continue itself and to lose itself in something else’ (2004: 28). Mike loves this quote, pointing out, “concerning conscious perception, because through it one can acknowledge and build into an image one’s own sense and feelings of movement, and the drift and development of thought and action while drawing. The ‘present image’ may be considered the image in its sense of passing through, and conveys in essence a degree of insubstantiality but in the affirmative sense. Of course, in the sense of difference between say, the sketch and the finished work, this is nothing particularly new”. He points to the recent drawing blog post on ‘clouds’ stating, “what more beautiful instances of ephemeral insubstantiality than clouds!”
When I look at Mike’s drawing research, I’m always impressed with his focus and clarity; recent drawing experiments whereby he explores how to respond to changing perceptions in relation to movement, as always reflect his desire to be accurate, minimalist and systematic in response to the overwhelming amount of experience that sense data provides us with.
Mike’s blog posts are designed to help you as drawers think more carefully about movement. (He has crafted two, but because there is a lot of information to digest, they will be separated by a few days) As he points out, “working with and through movement in drawing may possibly be a way of attending more to how we see, perception itself, rather than perception’s resulting observations, while attending no less to whatever is the motif, the object of observation”.
When drawing, going back to hard earned thoughtful and measured looking is always worthwhile and Mike helps us approach the process with fresh insight.
Bergson, H. (2004) Matter and Memory (first published 1912) New York, NY: Dover
Link to TRACY where Mike has made some of his earlier research publicly available.
The Observation of Perception: Mike Croft
What I’d like to say relates to drawing that concerns observation of the external world, but through the filter of perception. Of course, that there is a relation of the latter to the former is obvious, yet we may tend not to notice, let alone see, perception’s role in the process. Also, conventionally, we mostly select objects for drawing that are still or slow moving enough to enable what we assume will be some degree of representation of them. Notice that I’ve used ‘some sort of’, ‘may tend not to’, ‘mostly select’, and ‘some degree of’, which suggests that nothing I’ve so far said can be really concrete; it’s all open to interpretation. However, insofar as what I’ve said is relatively true, the facility of observation, in this case primarily visual, is automatically challenged and even sometimes contradicted by aspects of our innate biological and physiological facility of perception.
Perception may be said to work both for and against objectification of the object of vision, mostly in ways that are either automatic to, or beneath our awareness. How I happen to think this is due to at least two pivotal realisations – points of learning – neither of which happened in art school drawing classes. This is not to say that the classes did not provide the potential for such realisations, just that they were not theoretically articulated at that time. The situation may be somewhat different now. The first realisation was back in the 1970s’ when I was first a student. I happened upon a large-format book on psychology, in which was a photo of a girl’s face and next to it a semi-abstract rendition of it that transformed the face into a continuous kind of line map comprised of tiny flicks and dashes. (The phenomenon of drift and flickyou might, yourself, wish to look up on the Internet in relation to visual perception.) The rendering of the face turned out to be a printout from a non-digital eye-scanning portal, a device invented by the Russian psychologist Alfred L. Yarbus (1914 - 1986) in the 1960s’. The device would record eye movements of a person attached to the device while looking at an image, usually a photograph, for a short period of time. The limitation of this is that the observed material does seem to be photographic, and therefore flattened, but I was quickly extending the visual characteristics of Yarbus’s findings to objects in three-dimensional space.
There are now digital equivalents of eye-scanning portals, but they work very differently. The useful point about Yarbus’s device that relates it to drawing is that it recorded in line, by means of a stylus, which looks similar to and is practically adaptable to drawing. It is however a mechanism, and like any medium imposes its own behaviour to some extent on the user’s intentions. What I learned from it, which caused it to be a pivotal influence, is that in perception we do not incessantly inscribe contours around objects, either on a page or in space, however eloquently we might use the phenomenon of contour in aesthetically inspired drawing. The oval of a human face, for example, does not register in perception except in a fragmentary sense, or even when we are giving it special attention. What is more likely to happen is that we register points and intersections of things in a hierarchy of importance according to whatever are our intentions of looking, Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Photograph and resulting eye-scanning reading from an eye-scanning portal by
A. L. Yarbus, and a contrasting portrait drawing by the author.
In the above trio of photos, I’m comparing the Yarbus photo and printout that I originally noticed with a portrait drawing of mine that is made according to certain drawing conventions, especially that of the closed contour. It’s not necessarily a bad drawing, but to make a bald statement that is therefore open to challenge, it’s not how we look from either the point of view of the observer or the observed! If you compare the Yarbus printout with drawings by the British artist Frank Auerbach, for example, you may feel that Auerbach has arrived at similar knowledge to that provided by the Yarbus, although through the progress of his own experience. At the time of this discovery, especially the examples from Yarbus that concerned the various scanning of an image of figures in a room, this knowledge helped me to understand the kind of scanning across space that is a characteristic of drawings by an artist such as Giacometti, Figure 2.
The eye-scanning’s element of science may help underline the fact that drawing can and often does have an investigative basis. In those early student days, the eye-scanning images enabled me to loosen up line and conceive the depiction of objects more in terms of marks and dashes and, most importantly, sense that space could be traversed through the drift of one’s vision during perception, with or without mapping objects in its course. Currently, I find that the more popular literature of quantum theory on the question of space provides some basis for untethering such marks and dashes almost entirely from the object, so that they start to say something, albeit as a very crude analogy, about the structure of space itself. In this respect, you may be interested in investigating such contemporary research in quantum physics as loop theory(Rovelli, 2017, for a clearly explained introduction).
So, to conclude this first point of discovery, the Yarbus findings challenged and in some respects even negated some of the conventions that I was being taught in the context of structuring visual observational experience.
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The second realisation concerns a very recently read comment on the Italian Renaissance theorist Leon Battista Alberti (1404 – 1472) concerning the optical pyramid, which is an attempt to conceptualise how the eye reads three-dimensional objects in space.
Alberti invented a device known as a netor veilto enable the precise depiction of objects through the extraction from them of a structure of coordinates plotted onto a semi-transparent net stretched taut on a plane in front of them. A derivation of this as a gridded frame is shown clearly in use, in a woodcut by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer (1471 – 1528). The artist can be seen plotting such coordinates from the frame relating to a human figure lying in front of him (Gombrich, 1977: 259), Figure 3.
Figure 3: Woodcut by Durer, showing a painter using the device of a gridded frame to aid observation.
The point in relation to what I want to say about this concerns the fact that the gridded frame is positioned midway between the figure being drawn and the drawing plane. According to Dahl (2003: 5), Alberti gave ‘ontological status’ to a non-visible essence somewhere in the middle of the optical pyramid, a kind of plane of being, where Alberti suggests that there’s something more than visual going on in the experience of looking. Coincidentally, and in a sense incongruously, considering that it is such a material device, the net, veil or grid is positioned in just such a middle space between the artist/observer and the human figure or object/s observed. If perception is both the facility that enables observation and something other than observation, then Alberti was suggesting that there could be a sense or realisation of beingcoming through one’s striving to render the appearance of objects in space accurately.
The Alberti device has since been developed as a more synthetic means that incorporates the slight curvature of the eyes’ lens through the skill that many of us will have learned of holding a pencil or straight-edge at right angles to our outstretched arm, variously perpendicular or horizontal to vision. When used correctly, this system of establishing proportional relationships between objects in three-dimensional space can be very accurate. It’s the scope for the convention’s inaccuracyhowever, while nonetheless striving for accuracy, or through noticing anomalies in the system, that interests me, Figure 4.
Figure 5: The author plotting positions of objects from four slightly differing viewpoints, and the resulting drawing, Dermatograph pencil on white laminated cardboard, 119 x 84cm, 2018.
The above process of mine concerns making a measured drawing from four very slightly differing colour-coded positions of a single open eye, using a thread held taut between a vanishing point on the drawing set-up and the eye. The resulting reading of the drawing is one aggregate configuration comprised of several mismatched layers. How this relates to Alberti’s idea of the in-between is that – perhaps – the ontological value comes through in the very impossibility of absolute correctness, in which the drawing as a presentationis to be found in a sense of its oscillating somewhere between its referenced objects and its agent, the drawer. It’s paradoxical that the Alberti device is so material, when what it and its derivations presents is an embodiment of less tangible aspects of life.
Drawing can in this respect be a relationship almost in the manner of a hologram result of an otherwise two-way process of looking and the return to one of what’s being viewed. Since the basis of the hologram is in a certain projected interferenceof the object, this idea of interference is the key – the interference of aspects of perception on observation. To give you an example – although this doesn’t necessarily reflect my current approach to drawing – I relatively recently drew a single figure slowly rotating in a chair through 360°, and shifted the drawing of the figure across to the right at the moment the actual figure crossed a midway diameter demarcated on the floor. While the drawing reads as two separate seated figures, the schematic marks between them are an attempt to conceptualise both moving the figure and keeping it linked to itself. If I speak of an energisedspace between the two apparent figures, this is not so much observed as conceptualised through gestural marks as restless eye movement back and forth, in regard of space itself rather than surrounding infrastructure that one might otherwise reference. Such visualisation of space at least suggeststhat what’s going on is a change in looking at the figure conceived as its back view, to one conceived as its front view at a certain moment when a shift in consciousness of the situation takes place, which is debatably more a question of perception than observation, Figure 5.
Figure 5: Two drawn versions of a single rotating figure, pencil on paper, 84 x 59cm, by the author, 2013.
The idea of an intangible and non-visible in-between plane as a source of interference has been adapted by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901 - 1981) where, in the context of discussion of internal psyche, the mid-way of the optical pyramid is a metaphorical ‘stain’ or ‘decoy’ that muddies any assumed clarity of observation (Harari, 2004: 121-31) – but this would have to involve a more extended discussion. In terms of my own albeit limited adaptation, imagine that, when drawing, the drawn object falls somewhere between oneself and whatever is the actual object, and in the process it’s observed basis is as much confounded as enabled by one’s perception. This is the idea that I’d like to introduce in the second blog entry, particularly through links to a couple of video clips that show such a drawing in process and simultaneously explain it through speech.
There will undoubtedly be plenty of existing artistic work and research on this subject of discussion, but a third and overriding key point is that one tends to engage in and with drawing from wherever one is with one’s own interests at the present time, Drawing as a medium in any case often exerts a degree of autonomy that sets it apart from whatever are one’s expressed intentions.
References
Dahl, T. (2003) The Transformation of Space and the Construction of Engineering Knowledge and Practice—From Renaissance Perspective Thinking to Gaspard Monge’s Descriptive Geometry. Hård, M. et al (ed) Transforming Spaces. The Topological Turn in Technology Studies.(http://www.ifs.tu-darmstadt.de/gradkoll/Publikationen/transformingspaces.html
Gombrich, E. (1977) Art and Illusion. (First published 1960) United Kingdom: Phaidon
Harari, R. (2004) Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction. New York, NY: Other
Rovelli, C. (2017) Reality Is Not What It Seems. (First published in English 2016) United Kingdom: Penguin
Yarbus, A, L.
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