Caroline Leaf: In conversation

I was recently asked to hold a one to one on stage conversation with the animator Caroline Leaf. This was one of my last formal tasks as a staff member of the Leeds Arts University before I retire and even after all my years of teaching and hosting similar events, I was really terrified of meeting her, as she is one of my heroines of drawing. 

Her animated film, 'The Street' was named the 2nd best film of all time in the world at the Olympiad of Animation in Los Angles in 1984 and how Ben Simpson managed to persuade her to come to Leeds and why he chose me to interview her I'm not sure, but I took the opportunity on gratefully and hopefully didn't come over as too much of a clod. She had even taken the trouble to look at one of my animations, 'Boat at Sea' and was gracious enough to write to me that... 'I’ve seen your migration animation with the little boat of people and the beautiful drawings. I like seeing the paper of each drawing flicker so I know how you made it, I like the variety of the kinds of waves and how they feel real and threatening and at the same time I see they are drawings.'

From someone of her status that was for myself high praise. 

She talked about her time as a student at Harvard and how at that time the way animation was taught was to give students the time and space to find out what could be done, with whatever means they could get their hands on. This led to a focus on the basics, how one frame could lead to another, and that led to some very personal approaches to the process of animating, in Caroline Leaf's case, it led to her discovery of sand animation. The drawing in all her animations is sensitive and very well observed, she could have been a painter rather than an animator and during the evening she showed us her recent work, which is no longer animation and is both abstract and made directly from observation. Her drawing observation skills are clearly evident in both sets of new work and she is a wonderful example of how the skills learnt in drawing can be applied in so many ways. 

So if you haven't seen her work before, below are links to some examples. Her animations embrace reality by dealing with film as if it is sculpture. Each frame feels as if it is travelling around an object, just as much as it is some sort of low relief sculpture. The physical nature of the material, whether it is paint or sand is always central to her vision, which is why these films are so 'human', they seem extruded from her hands and her fingers. 

The Owl who married a Goose

The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa

The Street

So thank you Ben Simpson for giving me the opportunity to meet a drawing heroine of mine and thank you Caroline Leaf for agreeing to come to Leeds and to give both a masterclass and to take time to be in conversation with myself in the university lecture theatre. For those of you who follow this blog and who have never come across her work before, if the links still work, you are in for a treat. 

See also:

Fine Art: Animation now

The fine art of computer animation

Yael Bartana and animated collage

A link to one of my own animations 'Boat at sea'

Invisible worlds

From: Jacob Von Uexküll: 'A Stroll through the worlds of animals and men'

Jacob von Uexküll was fixated on the unwelten or phenomenal worlds of other creatures. He was particularly interested in how living beings perceive their worlds, arguing that organisms experience life in terms of species-specific, spatio-temporal, "self-in-world" subjective reference frames that he called 'umwelt'. He believed that every living creature inhabits a world of its own. The structure of this world being determined by the nature of each individual species; by its physiology, its behaviour, and its interactions with its environment. Von Uexküll firmly believed that these worlds disclosed themselves only through individual subjective experience, therefore these worlds were private and unique to each living creature. This of course fascinates me, because I have been worrying about how to move forward in my work on interoception and have at times begun to think about whether or not the internal lives of other creatures could be intuited or thought about in a way that could parallel what I have already been doing in relation to my fellow humans. If the hidden unseen world within us can be explored, as if travelling through some sort of sublime landscapes, then the interior worlds of other creatures can also be imagined as alternative universes, not unlike perhaps, those alternative worlds in Doctor Strange as imagined by Steve Ditko back in the 1960s. I used to love Doctor Strange comics. Waiting eagerly for them to turn up at my local newsagents in Dudley, they opened doors that still remain ajar in my mind even now, those comics showed me how the possibility of otherness could be depicted.

From Doctor Strange: Marvel Comics 1960s Steve Ditko

Ditko was able to blend organic forms with geometry, creating hybrid forms that were perfectly suited to the depiction of spaces and places between worlds. These were environments where the normal laws of physics no longer applied and where magic and other mystical forces held sway. These small printed paper panels were gobbled up by myself as a teenager, a spotty youth who was also looking at Surrealism, especially the other worldliness of Tanguy's paintings. Ditko in effect bought Tanguy into my world, via my local paper shop. 

Tanguy

Many years later I'm still trying to make images and once more of invisible things, the signals sent to us from inside our bodies, signals that include our embodied minds; that are a product of the strange interface between outside and inside, all of which when I think about the possible worlds of other creatures, become image triggers, but images that can arrive blended with ghostly apparitions from the past. 

But again I'm drifting off on another tangent, I only seem to be able to get an idea of what I'm doing after the event. Perhaps this is the right way round, because then you discover the image as if it is fresh minted, if you had worked it out beforehand, it would arrive stale and already used. 

Jacob von Uexküll had this to say, 'We are easily deluded into assuming that the relationship between a foreign subject and the objects in his world exists on the same spatial and temporal plane as own relations with the objects in our human world. This fallacy is fed by a belief in the existence of a single world into which all living creatures are pigeonholed. This gives rise to the widespread conviction that there is only one space and one time for all living things.' (Von Uexküll, 1934 in Schiller, 1957, p.14) 

The diagram below is from Von Uexküll's 'A Stroll through the worlds of animals and men'. I was interested in his way of relating our external spatial alignment with the world to our internal physiology. Our particular way of orientating ourselves has a lot to do with where our senses are clustered and by them being located around the axis of a bilaterally symmetrical organism and then being 'sided', i.e. eyes are only on one side of the head, and mainly located in the top or raised part of the organism. But hidden beneath all this external sensor location is the fact that inside the head, an extension of our ears has a semicircular canal form. This form is an ancient one and is designed to help an organic form orientate itself when moving.

The semicircular canal system first of all evolved in fish. Fish are jawed vertebrates like humans and like us have inner ears with three semicircular canals, which are what allow fish and humans to sense the position they are in space and stay balanced in the world. If you look at the three canals they are joined together, but orientated to follow the three axes that we associate with the coordinates of Cartesian geometry that are usually labeled x, y, and z.

However a fish is always swimming in a world of water and we tend to only swim occasionally. The semicircular canal system was evolved to cope with a much more complex set of body movements than we have to deal with, and this allows us to move our heads on an extended neck, quickly and without the disorientation that you would expect. Even so our world is very different, but because of the evolutionary links between us, perhaps imagination can offer an insight into what the differences might be. 

The worlds of fish are unique to each species, just as the world of an animal is unique to each species. You would not expect a freshwater trout to inhabit the same world as a sea going manta ray, just as you would not expect the world of a human to be the same as a giraffe. 

When I was a boy I used to go with some of my dad's friends fishing to a place near Upton upon Severn. I was not very good at it but I do remember catching a few Roach. We would cast a few balls of damp bread out onto the water first and I still remember the wriggling maggots that were then used as bait. As a boy I was mainly restricted to bread bait and was a bit squeamish as well, so was happy to miss out on the maggots. We used to camp over night which was the best thing and there was always a fire and an attempt to cook the fish caught over it. The world of the fish was totally invisible to the world of young boys, fish were simply other things, part of the strange natural world that was outside Dudley. It was only when I began drawing seriously that I also began to get a sense that things like fish might have worlds of their own. I would buy a fish from the market to draw, usually one I knew would be tasty, draw it and then eat it, but in drawing it I had to slow down and really look and as you did you began to slip, if only for a moment into the possibility of a fish's world. 

The roach is a member of the carp family, therefore it, like other members of the family, lack teeth set into jaws, instead, they grind up their food with toothed bones set into their throats. It spends a lot of time rooting around in mud at the bottom of ponds and rivers and in order to identify what it is finding in these dark, murky waters it has a highly developed sense of smell. They usually feed by swallowing mud, which they then process in exceptionally long intestines, which can often be 15 times the length of the fish. Their specially adapted mouths can dig up to five centimeters into muddy sediments, their extended top lips, capable of working like shovels. Roach use special holes called “nares” to sniff out tiny bits of chemicals in the water, just as we sense tiny bits of chemicals suspended in air by using our nose. However a fish's nares are just used for smelling, unlike our noses that are also used for breathing. There nares are also far more sensitive than our noses, fish like dogs, relying far more on smell than humans. So what I wonder would be the inner feeling tone of such a creature? Where we look a roach may well smell, where we try not to get dirt mixed up with our food, the roach is designed to sift out its food from mud. Our sense of well being is intimately associated with breathing and as we breath in we also smell the world. However fish breathe in a slightly different way. They take water into their mouth, this then passes over the gills which are situated inside the mouth, just behind its head on each side. The gills' filaments and lamellae (folds) contain blood from which gases are exchanged through the thin walls, the oxygen rich blood then carries the oxygen to other parts of the body. Fish exchange gases by in effect opening their mouths as they swim forward, an action that pumps water over their gills, so that within the gill filaments, capillary blood, flowing in the opposite direction to the water, is subject to a counter-current exchange. As the exchange takes place, carbon dioxide passes from the blood through the thin gill tissue into the water. At the same time, the water's dissolved oxygen is absorbed into the blood. The gills then push the oxygen-poor water out through openings in the sides of the pharynx, or what we would call the throat. As a feeling this must be not too dissimilar to using lungs to breath, except for the fact that water is a much more viscous substance than the air we move through. It would be a similar feeling to running with your mouth open and thick air entering the mouth but then exiting via slits in the throat. This breathing must be central to the roach's inner feeling of 'rightness', watching them gasp as they were lifted out of the water, was always traumatic and my own chest still tightens as I cast my thoughts back to those days of fishing with the boys. Sound would just like ourselves, be very embodied for these fish. Roach have their ear's otoliths hard-wired into their swim bladders by a series of bones that extend from their spines. Otoliths are the inner ear bones located in a fish’s skull. Inside them are tiny hairs called cilia that are stimulated by vibrations in the water. These vibrations are interpreted as a sound by the fish’s brain. Roach have a heightened sense of hearing due to the close proximity of their swim bladder to the otolith and it is connected to the bladder by a system of bones called the Weberian Ossicles.This connection means that their hearing range is considerably different to humans; because sound is created by rapid changes in pressure and the swim bladder works as a sort of very sensitive pressure amplifier. This is why anglers are always quiet, they know that fish can hear them, especially as they walk along the river bank and in particular because water is an excellent conductor of sound vibrations. A human can generally hear between 20 and 20,000 Hertz, (Hertz is a measure of sound frequency, or pitch). The roach can hear between 5 and 2,000 Hertz, so it can tune into lower, deeper sounds than ourselves. Gradually the more information about this fish we have, the more our imaginations can begin to build a picture of what it must be like to be a roach. We now need to add the fact that along both sides roach also have lateral lines, which consist of sensory receptors called neuromasts used to “feel” sounds. A lateral line is made of a series of U-shaped tubes. Every time the water outside the U vibrates, a tiny hair is made to wiggle, which in turn sends a nerve signal to the brain that then translates information coming from the collective of wiggles into information about where the vibrations came from. Information coming from these lateral lines is used to find food, escape predators and to avoid obstacles. So the roach has two overlapping sound vibration sensors. This is probably an evolutionary adaption to the fact that there are about 800 times more particles in a metre cube of water than there are in the same cube filled with air. Sound waves therefore travel much faster in water than they do in air. In freshwater at room temperature, sound travels about 4.3 times faster than it does in air at the same temperature. Therefore fish are operating in a fast sound environment and they have the necessary sensors to cope with sound information travelling so much faster than the sound information we are experiencing. Their bodies are attuned to sound in such a way that it might feel as if their ears extended down the full length of their bodies and were also attached to their lungs. It seems as if they swim through sound as much as they swim through water, i.e. they can 'feel' sounds as if they can be touched. 

Taste is another of the senses that fish like ourselves have, but they can taste with their snout, mouth, tongue, and throat. Again they are more fully immersed into the world because water has dissolved into it all the chemicals fish need to respond to. Our tongues need to be wetted by being inside our mouths and then taste can operate. The problems faced by fish as they emerged from the water were as you can imagine considerable. Dryness is in fact a much more sterile condition than wetness and we still carry within us enough wetness to soak our body's insides so that nutrients can be dissolved in our stomachs to enable them to be taken up by the body as food. 

Some of the fish's organs are the same as our own, like us they have a stomach, heart, liver and kidneys, but gills are different to lungs and a lateral line operates very differently to ears, and pectoral and pelvic fins operate very differently to arms and legs. But perhaps we can think about movement through the air when flying, as being closer to what it feels like to be a fish? For a plane, like a bird, the air is thick enough to give it support. A bird's wings operating like a fish's fins to power the creature through a fluid environment. I remember taking a helicopter ride over New York before the attack on the Twin Towers and the thrill of being held stationary in the air so that we could look down at certain landmarks and then the feeling of my stomach turning over as we wheeled away to find another spot from which to view the city. Of course swimming itself is something that we also still do, some mammals such as whales and dolphins eventually returning to the sea and re-evolving in order to readapt their bodies to it. These types of experiences, information and thoughts all help to get a feeling for the roach's 'umwelt'. In our imaginations we can begin to sense what it might be like to be another creature, a process that is an important one if we are to develop both empathy and the possibility of using animism as a way of making sense of the world. 

Roach: Sensations No. 2, 3 and 4

Reference:

Von Uexküll, J (1934) A Stroll through the worlds of animals and men in Schiller, C.H., (1957) Instinctive behaviour; the development of a modern concept. New York: International Univer. Press 

Available at: https://monoskop.org/images/1/1d/Uexkuell_Jakob_von_A_Stroll_Through_the_Worlds_of_Animals_and_Men_A_Picture_Book_of_Invisible_Worlds.pdf 

See also:

Why draw animals?

Drawing elephants and other animals

Animism and drawing lines

Drawing and healing

Sensibility as structure

Van Gogh: Olive trees

 Cezanne: Pine trees

Sea-Side Landscape with Pine Trees: Kubo Shunman

Adolphe Appian: A Great Beech Tree

Pine Trees: Hasegawa Tohaku

Thomas Gainsborough: Trees in landscape 

Artistic sensibility is a strange thing, it is something seen but not heard much of. If you make an image of a tree and I make one as well, when we put them side by side they will look very different and the thing that will define that difference will be sensibility. Your sensibility is different to mine. It is sometimes called style, but style is something worked on, something refined, something looked for as a type of individual signature, but sensibility is just how it is. You cannot escape your own sensibility, it is a true reflection of you and lies deep within the structure of your images as well as deep within yourself. It has however also been defined as 'the sensitivity and capacity to appreciate and act upon concerns of or pertaining to art and its production' (Ingman, 2022) It is in this case not just about what is inherent to myself, but something about my sensitivity to the broader concerns of art itself. Sensibility is an inherent characteristic of any artist's work and approaches to representation are rooted in the formal aesthetic consequences of these differences in sensibility. The images of trees that grace the top half of this post being my attempt to illustrate this issue without the need for words.

The representation of the world using hand made images is embedded into aesthetic considerations, the forms that we draw are not only attributes of how we make them; they are part of the process through which these things are made. The type of marks I use to make a drawing are an extension of my sensibility, my 'touch' being a combination of the physical and mental control that I both consciously and unconsciously exert within my making.  Through experience I know how for myself forms will look and function within a finished drawing, which is a necessary understanding on my part, if I am to put my 'stamp' on those particular aesthetic qualities that are part and parcel of what I would call 'my work'. Such knowing requires me to be an active and intelligent maker and is a sign by which I recognise other active and intelligent makers. 

Sketchbook image of a Tree: 1980

Sketchbook image of a tree: 2022

As I get older I'm also very aware that sensibility changes and I can now show my own sensibility changes to myself by going back to old sketchbooks and looking at what I was drawing 40 years ago. In many ways I remain the same but I can see in recent drawings less preoccupation with image and more interest in rhythmic variation. I am of course changing physically as well as mentally and my fingers no longer move as freely as they did, but this is compensated for by the fact that my mind/body is more capable of recognising what it is that I think I'm doing. 

Sensibility is often associated with romanticism and individuality. The artist's unique handling of their materials was at one time regarded as an essential aspect of art appreciation; when I was a student, part of our art history training was focused on the ability to recognise artists from small details or sections of their work. You were supposed to recognise the difference between let's say a Murillo and a Raphael by looking at the way a coat sleeve and hand or a section of background landscape was handled. You were being trained in a type of connoisseurship, whereby your 'taste' was seen to be refined because you could spot the difference between 'real' and 'fake' artworks, as well as between famous and not so famous artists. This approach is of course still important to those that work for the big auction houses such as Christies or Sothebys. In French there is the term, 'la patte' which is sometimes used to refer to the artist's 'mark'. In all of these uses there is presumed to be a value in difference. The artist's signature style is often seen as a mark of genius. 

This is how people on the edge of the art market view the issue:

'A signature art style reinforces brand recognition and will help your artwork grow traction. You know you’ve nailed this when customers glance at a new piece in your portfolio and instantly recognise it as yours.'  

'Your signature style is the most important factor that sets you apart from everyone else and will make your work recognisable.'

Ok, so what does this mean? For the art market difference and uniqueness are more valuable than profundity of expression, raising awareness, seeing the world differently or even making a better piece of art. If you want your prices to go up, you need to produce work that has a unique sensibility or rarity value. The capitalist system in effect is defining your work, not as part of an ideas communication system, or as a spiritual encounter but as part of a commodity exchange system. The media is far more concerned to discuss what a painting is worth, than to discuss what it might mean and there is a desire to invest in something that is 'authentic'. (Of undisputed origin and not a copy; genuine) If we look at the art of ancient Egypt on the other hand, the same style was maintained for thousands of years, and each artist was taught to copy the forms that were laid down by the ruling powers. 

But what if sensibility had more to do with structure. What if it operated as the bricks with which you build your house? During the 18th century it was often argued that individuals who had ultra-sensitive nerves would have keener senses, and be more aware of beauty and moral truth. However a refined sensibility it was believed, also led to a physical and emotional fragility. This combination meant that people with heightened sensibility were on the one hand seen as possessing a type of illness that was at the time called "The English Malady," (hysteria" or "hypochondria), but on the other hand certain people who were also 'sensitives' were seen as having an artistic sensibility; a virtue that allowed them to see things that others could not. This situation still exists in popular culture, the effeminate, unpractical artist, is still a trope within certain parts of society, as is the genius artist, whose refined sensitivity gives to the work of that artist a particular look that is unique. But if this heightened sensibility led to something else, such as a recognition of how ideas and concepts could be built from the sensitive engagement between the artist and a material; then a more positive and robustly creative definition of sensibility could be arrived at. If we go back to the images of trees at the start of this post, then perhaps we can tease out another, alternative meaning of 'sensibility'. 

Van Gogh's 'olive trees' is an image composed of dynamic energy flows. The characteristic dots and dashes that he uses to compose his image, are his building blocks, the bricks and mortar with which he builds his world. A short stab alongside a jab, a twist alongside a tick, a rhythmic tic tock of hand jive, are all woven together to create a patchwork of flowing, rhythmic marks, that is unmistakably Van Gogh's. He 'lives' within these frozen gestures; gestures which capture his speeding fingers thinking their way across the paper surface. This is sensibility as structure, this is not about the too sensitive artist, this is about a sensibility that can build concepts, that has a muscular structure enabling it to wrestle an image into shape. We can argue the same thing about Cezanne who has also managed to form a conceptual vision out of his fleeting visual perception of a particular stand of trees somewhere in southern France. Again the building blocks are small units of mark making, units that build up to form a new unity. In Cezanne's case they are inextricably linked to his concept of 'petite sensations' his awareness of the process of looking and how this process had to be recreated as images. 

Kubo Shunman was a Japanese artist renowned for his delicate sensitivity and avoidance of harsh contrasting colours. Like Van Gogh his marks build the surface structures that control our vision, however his touch is smoother and more flowing than the European artist and if you look at the accompanying calligraphy, you will see where his particular style of application comes from. This is drawing that has evolved out of calligraphic writing, a practiced hand underpins each mark and a deep appreciation of the potential symbolic nature of forms surrounds and integrates both the calligraphy and the drawing.  

Adolphe Appian is an artist of the outdoors; you feel the wind whistling through ink marks which he uses to establish the main tonal elements of this drawing. He then uses looping contour drawing of black chalk to pick out the tree's weight and solidity. The brush gives him expressive movement, the chalk volume and weight. He makes dashed lines to indicate foreground grasses, pushing one type of mark against another, an indication of a complex sensitivity to a wide range of material possibilities when making an image. It is as if his mind/hand flicks between an awareness of the tree's inner coiled strength and a flowing world of flickering leaves and wind blown grasses. 

Hasegawa Tohaku's drawing has a minimal, reserved aesthetic, that is able to use the empty voids within the image to carry the weight of his sensibility. His building blocks are of spaces as much as they are of marks. He draws the world's emergence from a cloud, on those days when the mist covers everything and only gradually can forms begin to be picked out. Atmosphere becomes concept, touch hardly there, just enough to make you feel the cloud. Finally, Gainsborough has a flowing touch, one that skims over the surface. You feel the direction of his diagonal hand movements, as the image evolves under his fast fingers. A lightness graces his drawing, allowing sunlight and vegetation to flow alongside a breeze that moves through the scene. In this drawing nothing is fixed. 

You would not mistake these artists for each other, each one has evolved an approach to drawing that allows them to give an overall control to the feeling tone of their images. This control is what I'm pointing to as 'structure'. Just as when you scan a building made out of brick rather than stone, you quickly sense the difference in overall shape between the brick structure and the stone structure. Bricks allow one type of shape to form, stones another and so it is with the individual marks that are the result of an artist's particular handling of a drawing material. This is not to do with any particular sign of genius, just as a deer moving through a muddy field will leave particular hoof prints that depend on its weight, sex, age, build and state of mind, (is it running from something, browsing for food, looking after a young fawn, investigating new territory etc.) an artist leaves traces of their actions dependent upon weight, sex, age, build and state of mind. Intentionality is of course the measure of difference here, how much of a difference in intention lies behind the marks I make and the marks the deer makes? In my world of course I am inclined to think that my marks exhibit more intention than a deer's, but in the deer's world perhaps the forms of marks in the mud mean far more than I can imagine. 

Reference

Ingman, B. C. (2022). Artistic Sensibility is Inherent to Research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 21.

See also: 

Up close and far away

Feldman's model of art criticism

Resemblance, mimesis and communication 

Object orientated ontology and drawing

Why it matters

Louise Despont: Drawing with templates

Drafting templates

Shape template stencils come in a variety of formats, including drafting templates which are designed to help engineering students speed up the process of making complex technical drawings but also as children's stencils for those who want to be able to make drawings, even if they can't draw recognisable images. I introduced them briefly when we were looking at French Curves but once you begin looking, you will find an amazing variety, including letter forms in a wide range of typographic styles, people, animals, objects and of course emojis. 

Artists have often used them and there is a territory that sits somewhere between hand cut stencil graffiti art (Bansky, Blek Le Rat etc.) and a type of 'pop' gallery art that tends to use ready made stencils; Ryan McGinness, being a typical example. 

Ryan McGinness

However in terms of pure drawing, the artist who has taken the format of engineering stencil drawing to a very sophisticated level is Louise Despont.

Despont works with coloured pencils and architectural stencils on paper. Her images work as huge diagrams that may refer us to Victorian geological maps or cross sections, or remind us of  certain botanical illustrations. She reinforces these associations by drawing on old sheets of ledger paper, fragments of lines or text showing through her own self imposed geometry. The weaving together of old and new gives a certain authenticity to these images and their bilateral symmetry, makes them feel almost spiritual, as if they stem from a forgotten religious order, somehow familiar but strange.

A close up view of her drawing's surface 

As you can see from a close up, she pins sheets of old ledger paper together and then imposes her own geometric structures on top. She then draws with coloured pencils to achieve a very subtle colour effect. The white paper surrounding the thin lines of crayon drawings softens the colour, lowering its saturation, so you get this washed away look or perhaps more accurately a feeling that these drawings have faded due to their great age. 

It is their scale that makes them so impressive. They reproduce well, these small images can be 'read' easily because of their structural clarity and her way of working by defining areas within the edges of geometrically outlined forms. This ability to be read at very different scales is vital during a time when the mobile phone is many people's first port of call when searching for any artist's work on line. 

“Taraxacum,” graphite and coloured pencil on antique ledger book pages, 75 1/4 x 95 in

“Calc Fluor,” graphite and coloured pencil on antique ledger book pages, 53 x 67 1/4 in

Despont says this about her work, “I think my work has always attempted to bridge the worlds of plant wisdom and healing with a language of architecture, I’m interested in drawing the invisible, in attempting to represent the unseen but nonetheless powerful forces and systems that surround and inhabit us. I’m interested in art-making as a co-creative experience, a bit like gardening. I plant the seeds and tend to the work, but what grows comes from its own source.”

“Aconite,” graphite and coloured pencil on antique ledger book pages: 75 1/4 x 95 in

There is a certain lineage to these images. There are hints of Paul Klee, an artist that made images at the other end of the scale range, his best work often being no more than a few inches wide. 

Paul Klee, The Angel of History

Paul Klee: Variations (Progressive Motif), 1927

Paul Klee: Departure of the Ghost 1931

I also get a sense that the obsessive nature of Despont's images is rather similar to the work of Scottie Wilson. 

Scottie Wilson. 2 sheets: Untitled; Jewelled eyes

Scottie Wilson's images seem to fit this context because of their tonality but also because of their totemic nature and their use of an almost bilateral symmetry. 

Louise Despont

Despont's smaller drawings, can also fall into a quirky territory that is inhabited by those artists obsessed by details. The fact that these drawings can be approached in so many ways points to a body of work that has some clout and if you are interested in looking at her work in more detail make sure to visit her website; https://www.louisedespont.com/.

In the meantime you might want to consider the role of templates in visualising what is absent, rather than what is present and about how much templates rely on outline and edges to define what is there. 

See also:

Drawing with stencils

Using spirals in road design

Paul Klee's notebooks

Between art, geometry, emotion and science

 

Ibrahim El-Salahi: Pain Relief Drawings

I have been working for a while on how to visualise 'somatic' or inner body experiences. But of course many have been there before me and I have just discovered another artist who has done some very powerful work in this area. The artist Ibrahim El-Salahi, took a closely related but very different approach to the subject and I have found it useful to compare differences. I have been trying to visualise the pain or inner feeling tone of other people as well as myself; usually looking for an area of commonality, between my own perception of feelings such as physical pain or emotional trauma and the way others may visualise them. This has been a very difficult endeavour and has made me very aware of the problems inherent in trying to nail down visual communication between people, mainly because we have no agreed codes or sign systems for these things, which means that everything is open to personal interpretation. 

Ibrahim El-Salahi: Pain relief image: Unique screenprint on linen 

Ibrahim El-Salahi is older than I am, he is now in his 90s. He gets sciatica and chronic back pain, and says that it is only when making images about his pain that he gets any relief from it. This immediately interested me as it suggested once again that the externalisation of a feeling by making an image of it does help to remove it. 

Between 2016-2018 El-Salahi a Sudanese artist who also has a base in Oxford, created a body of work that he had to make whilst confined mainly to an armchair. However this physical restriction in many ways drove, as it often does (think late Matisse), a high level of invention. He has made around 200 tiny drawings in pen and ink, each one drawn on the blank inside of the many medicine packets that he has had to open during the time of his suffering. These 'Pain Relief Drawings' have now been exhibited at the Drawing Centre in New York.

Ibrahim El-Salahi: Pain relief image: Unique screenprint on linen 

The small drawings El-Salahi made were processed by him as silkscreen mono-print images. Silkscreen stencils were made from the initial small drawings by them being scanned and then enlarged for transfer. However he worked with the silkscreen process in a unique way. Once transferred, the initial drawings, because they are so small are in the process of enlargement 'roughened up'. This allows for further textual intervention, if you are used to making silkscreen prints you will be aware that the photo-stencil is a reverse image, the gaps in the image are the areas that allow ink to be squeezed through the mesh. In El-Salahi's case, the transferred image is reconstructed by him pressing ink through the gaps in the gauze by hand (rather than using the traditional squeegee) onto a woven linen canvas. However because this method is so inefficient it has to be done over and over again, until the thick inky texture he wants is achieved. This both amplifies the character of the original marks and gives a renewed physical substance to a process that could have diminished the intensity of the original drawings. The movement between the photographic process of copying and transforming the drawings and the reinsertion of the hand techniques of pushing ink through the silkscreen gauze has particularly interested me, because I also want to work between analogue and digital modes and have worried about losing 'authenticity' or material gravitas in doing so. 

El-Salahi had this to say about his drawings. “I am surrounded by packets of medicine so I said ‘What a waste. Why don’t I use them?’ and I started opening them and chopping them to size and working on them. I had a number of pens with waterproof and fade proof ink, which the material of those kind of packages takes very nicely. It reminds me of the time when I found paper in prison, and did sort of little images as the nucleus. So I pray and bring peace and calm in my mind that I use as imagery, which can be transmitted to other people when they see my work.” He adds, “A small drawing is an artwork by itself, but at the same time when it is enlarged it works very well indeed. It has a great potential of moving from a small size to a large size – the organic growth of a picture, the work is alive. That is the nucleus. The idea of the nucleus, like the seed, if you have water and enough sunlight it can grow into a larger size. It’s the origin, that’s the main thing.”

 

Ibrahim El-Salahi: Installation of drawings at the 2022 Venice Biennale

I had seen El-Salahi's work at the Venice Biennale and was interested at the time in the way his drawings were displayed in long horizontal vitrines, a method I had been considering of displaying my own work. But most importantly for myself was the fact that his drawings, no matter whether tiny or large scale and printed onto canvas, were attempts to visualise those invisible sensations that we all have but find it very difficult to communicate to others because they remain inside the shell of our internal selves. 

 

Drawings by Ibrahim El-Salahi

Drawing made on the back of a medicine packet

El-Salahi’s drawings are also deeply connected to postwar European modernism, and yet at the same time they are embedded into a tradition of African and Islamic art history. Because of this he also raises our awareness of how hybrid cultures could be used to help the project of global communication. His work is inspired by Arabic calligraphy, as well as Surrealist figuration and geometric abstraction, a blend of traditions that could never have happened before, but in a post-colonial period, it is expected that artists will emerge from cultures right across the world with fascinating blends and mixes of visual modes and approaches. This is I believe something to be celebrated and it demonstrates the interconnectedness of everything and a move towards a much more non-binary understanding of cultures. They are not fixed things, but are constantly evolving processes. 

It is also useful for myself to have images to compare with my own. So here is what I think of as one of the best of El-Salahi's pain relief image silkscreen monoprints.

Ibrahim El-Salahi: Chronic back pain: Mono-print on linen

Below is one of my first drawings whereby I tried to visualise my own toothache. It is watercolour with pen and ink and was an attempt to fuse the 'socket' feeling of teeth, with the pain feeling that eventually seems to shift to being behind the eye. Looked at from a distance I am not happy about my fusing into the image a pained eye, but even so, it communicates something of discomfort and I was fascinated to see that El-Salahi had also invented a sort of 'internal' eye or eyes, in order I presume to suggest that he was observing his own pain. Even when we cant see something we try to 'see' something. For instance when you grasp what someone is trying to tell you, you often say, "Yes, I see." 

Garry Barker: Toothache: Watercolour on paper

The image immediately below is much more recent and it was initially a watercolour whereby different stains were pooled across unstretched paper. The image was then scanned into Photoshop and the element representing the pain's focus had its colour intensified, whilst a layer of more diagrammatic inserts was used to represent the way the pain both passed out of and was also at the same time held within the body. This was one of my first attempts to visualise what I eventually came to understand as a Markov blanket effect. An unfixed area of significance needed to have broken boundaries, because it allowed for percolation between one thing and another. I.e. it stopped me from thinking that there were always hard edged boundaries between things, only a constant transition between them. Perhaps the key issue here was time. If time was slowed down, as in a drawing, an instant of time frozen between the stages of a process could be captured, but in reality this was always part of a process of constant becoming. 

Garry Barker: Throbbing intermittent stomach pain: PhotoShop processed watercolour image

Ibrahim El-Salahi: Sciatica: Mono-print on linen

I had never seen El-Salahi's work before, but quickly realised I was working a very similar territory and that certain aspects of our visual languages do overlap. I get a sense of compression and the permeability of surfaces from the red image printed onto grey linen above. Perhaps he is trying to represent the way that sciatica pain travels from one place to another and as it does the compression of the lower back or bottom, transfers itself into a pain spreading down a leg. An image of a process rather than a thing. El-Salahi had begun with a small drawing made on the insides of a small cardboard box, it had then been digitally transferred and enlarged, and finally remade using a monoprint process. I had also been moving between analogue and digital ways of working. Did I also now need to revisit my own digital images and look at transferring them back into an analogue process in order to ensure they have the 'right' feeling tone? At the moment I'm making my analogue response in three dimensions, usually using clay and glaze technology, as in the images below but it is always a good idea to keep questioning what you are doing. 

Lung votive

Post cigarette lung

Arthritic fingers

See also:

Paul Klee and Markov blankets

Monoprint

Drawing with a computer

Drawing and wellbeing

Visualising energy flow

How to use silkscreen as a graphite monoprinting process El-Salahi uses a similar process, the difference is that he is pushing ink through the mesh and not powdered graphite.