Four studies of feet, Augustinus Terwesten I, 1672-1711
This is one of my occasional posts about various parts of the body and how they have occupied the drawing mind in various ways. This study of four feet by Terwesten, has always fascinated me because its not really a study of feet, it is a study of how sculptors' have rendered feet, which is a totally different thing. In particular they take no weight, because they don't need to, they are still fused into their various stones, out of which they have been shaped, but never to escape. In comparison Van Gogh's feet are firmly planted on the ground, you feel the reality of the earth beneath these feet.
Van Gogh
Euan Uglow
Euan Uglow attempts to pin the feet of his model down to a floor too, but even with all his measuring points and 'tacking' down of the image, he never manages to achieve the weight that Van Gogh does. When drawing the body, I nearly always begin with the feet, if not it can feel as if there is nothing of substance for me to hold on to. Just like a building, a human body needs structural support and this begins with the feet.
Kiki Smith
Kiki Smith's feet are still 'real' but are about the reality of their own being, not about the reality of the floor they are meant to stand on. They exist in an alternative universe, one that Louise Bourgeois would recognise.
Louise Bourgeois
Michelangelo
Michelangelo's foot pushes off against the ground, the big toe operates as a fulcrum around which weighty action can take place; his feet enact their part in a dynamic universe, where humans have as much traction as Gods.
Picasso: Guernica detail
In Guernica, Picasso uses feet to articulate an expression of anguish.They are still powerful, but scarred and distorted, as they both take the weight of the narrative and of the humans that they belong to.
Dali
In comparison this foot by Dali is almost dreamlike. Its soft smudged contours attempt to give weight, but it's not realised; it is as if he has achieved a way of describing mass without weight, the ankle is thick, but unconvincing. The shading on the other side of the foot doesn't help convince us that the foot has to support a leg and a body, because the white space in the foreground sits next to the foot, not underneath it, thus creating a void. Dali's foot is a filled in line drawing, rather than a discovered solid. For a solid hallucination, we need to look at Durer's feet.
Durer
Durer's study of the feet of a praying man, is a wonderful image of vulnerability and at the same time the reality of presence. You really feel he looked at these feet, the twist through the ball of the foot down to the toes of the left hand foot in particular feels so 'right' you can feel it in your own body.
Guston: Rome
Philip Guston has made a numb foot, a left over classical image, that he has suffused with that feeling we have when older, that our feet belong to someone else, they used to be useful and clearly beautiful, but now they look worn out.
Feet can of course be about other things besides how they look. From pressure points in reflexology to symbolic religious representations; they have operated as entry points to both the body, mind and spirit. The footprints of Buddha remind us to stay on the true path; the spiritual master plants his lotus feet in the heart of the disciple.
The feet of Buddha
It is perhaps at this point that I need to explain how some of my own images are developing. I have been making votives, objects made as a result of conversations with people about their health. In order to 'externalise' these conversations I needed a readily available 'set' of images around which to establish a dialogue, so I decided to design set of cards, that could allow me to operate rather like a tarot reader.
I had already made a hand votive using slumped glass and I had been excited by the effect of light shining through it. This had reminded me of first going to Chartres Cathedral and the way that light shining through stained glass can be very spiritual.
The spiritual and emotional power of light and colour was something I had recently been more tuned into because of my continuing work as a first year fine art degree tutor. I had been asked to set a series of starting points for students who had chosen to work in what is now called studio 'P'. Traditionally an area devoted to painting, I wanted to open the area out to experiences that went far beyond one particular medium, in particular I wanted to celebrate light and colour as concepts in their own right. Colour in print operates very differently to the way colour is mixed in painting; thinking in cyan, magenta and yellow was for myself much closer to thinking in coloured light, even though it was subtractive as opposed to additive colour. These cards allow me to engage in a dialogue that begins at a certain level of emotional intensity echoed by the colour range.
Foot votive: design for slumped glass votive dish
Light shining through hand votive in the form of a shallow dish.
The spiritual and emotional power of light and colour was something I had recently been more tuned into because of my continuing work as a first year fine art degree tutor. I had been asked to set a series of starting points for students who had chosen to work in what is now called studio 'P'. Traditionally an area devoted to painting, I wanted to open the area out to experiences that went far beyond one particular medium, in particular I wanted to celebrate light and colour as concepts in their own right. Colour in print operates very differently to the way colour is mixed in painting; thinking in cyan, magenta and yellow was for myself much closer to thinking in coloured light, even though it was subtractive as opposed to additive colour. These cards allow me to engage in a dialogue that begins at a certain level of emotional intensity echoed by the colour range.
Card votives
The point about votives is to take the human and let it be infused into non human things. By putting your pain or worry into something else, you do what all art has always done, turn a lump of material, (clay, paint, marble, wood, etc.) into a carrier of emotions and ideas that can carry messages between people. In this case print on card. Once embedded in something else rather than existing as a thought in someone's head, the object can then operate as an intermediary between either people and people or people and other things including gods, inanimate objects and animals. A thought externalised become concrete and as it does so it carries with it the worries, aspirations, feelings and other emotions that surrounded the thought when it initially sat in someone's mind.
When I began to think about these images of feet I was also reminded of the very first engagement I had with images of feet; those found in shoe shops.
My mother was always worried about the size of her feet, she wore size sixes, a size that in those days (the 1950s) was deemed to be very large for women. This 'worry' related to something else I was aware of as an idea, one based in my childhood reading of weird and strange 'world facts' books, it was the thought that Chinese women had their feet bound up when young, enabling their feet to fit into 'impossible' tiny shoes, ensuring that they could only walk with small shuffling steps, a movement that was seen as appropriate to a cultured femininity. Even if untrue, the idea stuck and I have found it still lodged in my memory over 60 years later.
Feet were thus in my head from a very early age, culturally significant. This is perhaps why types of shoes are so important. A report by researchers at the University of Kansas has revealed that people can predict with 90% accuracy, personality traits of strangers based solely on their shoes.
Of course both animals and objects have feet as well as humans.
Leonardo: Dog's feet
Bruce Moore, Studies of Feet (Chickens), 1947, pen and ink on paper
Furniture with feet
Our man-made world makes constant reference to our own bodies; chairs have arms, backs, legs and of course feet. The objects we make have mostly animal type feet, but sometimes very human ones, as in the case of the Egyptian bowl below. To stand up is to rely on feet and in our world, standing up is often seen as a unique human attribute.
Standing up was supposed to give humans an evolutionary advantage, but as this case is something argued by humans the writers might have a degree of bias. Suffice it to say that feet have a long history of significance in the arts.
Roman foot votive
A more recent foot votive made by myself.
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