In a hybrid comic language, shapes and line quality can represent emotional thought
In verbal language we sometimes use words to sound like the things that they represent, such as the word sizzle, which sounds like something frying on a stove. Some words that do this connect one sort of sound with another; for instance 'psithurism', the sound of rustling leaves, is also imitative but in being derived from the Greek 'psithuros', links a natural sound to the very human act of whispering and its various associations such as slanderous talk. This is why the word 'susurrous' can be applied to both whispering or rustling; we can have both a quiet susurrous wind passing through the trees, and a susurrous whisper going around the room. The technical term for this use of words is 'onomatopoeia' which is defined as the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named. These types of associations are useful as they remind us that languages evolve, often beginning with some sort of likeness but gradually evolving until the reason for something being called something has been lost and it is now a learnt convention. Also of course this issue reminds us of media specificity, the carrier of all these noise experiences are sound waves and the receivers are our ears and our tongues, lips and throats are used to make sounds and transmit them. Once the idea was developed that we could record sounds made by our mouths as pictograms and other forms of writing, vision came into the frame, something carried by light waves and then received via the mechanisms of eyes; this move being it could be argued, the first trans-media idea, whereby forms initially developed in one medium, (sound) are translated into another (vision). Our present culture is however a fast changing one, and because we are constantly having to respond to new media, transmedia narratives are becoming the norm, see, we might encounter a story first of all in a written form, then perhaps as a comic, a film and then as a computer game or as a virtual reality experience.
The image that opens this post is one that sits between the conventions of a written textual language and those of a particular visual language. (The comic book convention). The shapes are attempts to find visual equivalents to certain feelings. 'Like' in this instance is quite complex, for instance what is the image enclosed within the top righthand speech bubble meant to represent? Confusion, frustration or possibly anger? How can an image represent these things? If it is 'like' a certain feeling, for instance the depiction of icicles around the edges of a speech bubble, to suggest a cold or frosty attitude, could this be seen as a type of visual onomatopoeia?
Objects that are representations of things often partake in what I would call, visual onomatopoeia. We find certain similarities in the materials we use to make the images that echo or reflect something of the quality of the thing represented.
A cloud made of cotton wool
A cloud made of cotton wool is an obvious example. A more subtle use of materials but still relying on an illusionistic visual link between surfaces, is the 'Bag of Aspirations' by Kalliopi Lemos, a sculpture on exhibition at the moment at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. In this case a visual similarity between worn leather and rusting steel is used. Due to the huge size of the handbag, you need to step away from it to get an impression of it as a whole. As you do this the surface looks very leather-like, but as you get up close it becomes obvious that the surface is made of rusted metal.
'Bag of Aspirations' by Kalliopi Lemos
The 'Bag of Aspirations' has both a texture that is implied but not real, as well as a real texture that can be touched physically. This is of course often the case with drawings.
Tanya Wood: Unwrapped foil: pencil on paper
Tanya Wood's drawing 'Unwrapped foil' is made of graphite on paper, when looked at from a distance it has the illusion of being foil, but when you get up close and examine the surface it is possible to see that it is made of pencil marks. This illusion is so common that we forget how magical it is. But it is also metaphorical, we stand back from the world in order to 'see' it more clearly, but we go in close and examine it in order to see what it is made of.
Another approach might be to use metal-point to draw objects that have a tarnished metal finish. Brass for instance has a golden shine on application, but it quickly tarnishes and begins to adopt a somewhat greenish hue over time. You could use it to represent old bronze that also tarnishes into a green finish. Metalpoint drawings often use the nature of metal tarnishing to achieve effects and you only achieve the full effect of the drawing by leaving it to 'rust' over time. However if you want a golden shine in a metalpoint drawing, gold is still the only option, as it does not tarnish. Gold, if used selectively, like in the drawing immediately below, can suggest the opulence of a particular surface, and you can contrast its never changing gleam, with the dull reality of other forms of tarnishing material, or make a contrast with the fast changing very transient mortal fleshy surfaces of human beings, which can be represented in less honorific materials. Gold often represents itself, gold paint representing gold cloth or a golden object but it is probably more often associated with the representation of concepts of purity, concepts that go beyond the earthly material world and that aspire to heavenly things. An angel or saint's golden halo is a reminder that this individual is not of this world.
Drawing with gold leaf: Stephanie Rew
Golden halo
Velasquez
Velasquez is a fantastic painter of surface textures, he can make oil paint look like metals or ceramics. He follows on from a tradition begun by artists such as Van Eyck, who realised very early on that you could make oil paint appear to be almost anything you wanted. As a medium it was so flexible that it could be manipulated in seemingly endless ways, as well as of course always being a real texture which revealed itself to you if you could get close enough.
Detail of Rembrandt: Man with a golden helmet
What am I really thinking about here? I suppose its the way that cutting edge representational image making is an invented language that often works alongside and adds to a conventional one. Artists are aware of the need to keep trying out new ways to use materials to represent what they see, just as speakers need to try out new combinations of words when describing things. A good wordsmith will find ways of putting existing words together to re-think how to describe something, a good drawer or painter will not only use existing ways of making marks, but can add to the possibilities of representation by making newly minted marks out of whatever materials are available. Part of this process is a search for possible correlations between the materials being used and the things being represented. This does seem pretty obvious now I've written it down but sometimes its worth stating the obvious just to make sure everyone is on the same playing field. However the obvious often slides into the mysterious and representation and likeness can become the starting points for a type of sympathetic magic. In a poem you can put words together to achieve a 'sound' in the head that supports the idea in the poem, in such a way that the events seem inevitable. For instance in 'Oh what is that sound?' W H Auden drums up a word storm that suggests the forever onwards march of soldiers that will eventually make their way to your door.
O what is that sound which so thrills the ear
Down in the valley drumming, drumming?
Only the scarlet soldiers, dear,
The soldiers coming.
until of course...
O it's broken the lock and splintered the door,
O it's the gate where they're turning, turning;
Their boots are heavy on the floor
And their eyes are burning.
This is beyond onomatopoeia but sound is still connected via a likeness that arrives via the incessant rhythm that echoes the footfall of a marching troop of men. You can imagine a magical incantation taking on a similar form. The Sumerians were very into magic and they were the first culture to recognise how a certain set of sounds could infect behaviour within a whole language culture and they had a name for it, a ‘nam-shub’. For instance newspapers such as the Daily Mail or the Sun use phrases like 'The swarm on our streets', (The Mail) or 'Jezza's Jihadi comrades' (The Sun) to infect everyday speech in the UK.
At the side of my bed is a book of drawings by Graham Sutherland, an artist I hadn't thought about much since I was at school, but like any art worth its salt when you look at it again after a long time it still has something to tell you. I had found an old copy of his 'Wartime Drawings' in the Leeds City Art Library. (Leeds is a wonderful city if you are interested in studying art because it has several specialist art libraries; the central library has an art library annexed to the city art gallery, the Henry Moore Centre has a library dedicated to the study of sculpture, the two main universities both have dedicated art and design sections within their libraries, and the Leeds Arts University has two specialist art and design libraries, as well as a very good collection of artists' books).
Looking at these drawings reminded me that it is very hard to remain inventive and that artists need exposure to changing subject matter in order to evolve their visual languages. The war had forced Sutherland to expose himself to new subjects and as he faced them he was forced to up his inventive game and go beyond his previous sets of mark languages. However he was still recognisably making 'Sutherland' type marks. Because artists have particular sensibilities, some subjects are more suitable for personal language development than others and Sutherland was very careful to choose experiences that reflected his particular sensibility.
Teeming Pit: Graham Sutherland: Sometime during the period 1940/44
During the second world war, Sutherland was sent down mines and into steelworks, in order to record the way the nation's workers were as much a part of the war effort as the troops on the front line. His previous work had a very rural sensibility, he had already developed a visual language, in particular using etching's ability to render texture, to represent an idea of England as a mythic landscape that still held within itself echoes of Samuel Palmer's visionary fervour and spiritual intensity. Sutherland had been attempting to re-channel the William Blake sensibilities of ‘the Ancients’ and had tried to revisit an idea that was central to English Visionary art, but the exposure to new themes helped him to reconfigure this language, so that it could deal with the harsh realities of the 20th century.
Graham Sutherland: Etching: Mid to late 1920s
Feeding a steel furnace: Graham Sutherland 1941
Tapping a blast furnace: Graham Sutherland 1942
What is going on here is another aspect of representation. Not only is the artist attempting to use the language of mark making to represent how the world looks, but he is attempting to at the same time represent something about how the world feels. This is of course what we normally call 'expressionism' and it has its roots in artists like Van Gogh or if we want to go further back in time, in the spiritual expressive language of El Greco or the dramatic lighting of Caravaggio used to build an audience captivating Christian drama as Catholicism began the fight back against the Protestant reformation. ElGreco in particular finds a language that is both expressive and mystical.
So is there a visual onomatopoeia of feeling? Is a gentle curve representative of a calm feeling tone? Is a sharply angled zig-zag representative of a more manic state of mind? In my own work trying to find ways of representing the unseen world of interoception, I have had to explore a wide range of marks and colours and have tested them out on various people, however I have yet to establish a firm foundation on which to build a dictionary of correlations between what is felt and what is represented.
Old knees in pain
Old knees in pain (Alternative colour version)
Some people will point to the upper image as being more painful, others to the lower one. I have myself decided upon the upper image. The blues for myself suggest a cooling down of the pain, but on the other hand the brittleness of ice is suggested by the lower image and some people find this more appropriate. The complexity of representing feeling tone is complicated and I suspect never ending, which is why it is interesting.
We can also use a material to carry a message by its conjunction with what is being represented and where the material is derived from, which is a more logical process. The process involves a sort of visual etymology, whereby you choose a material because of its past associations. In the case of the drawings in watercolour below, the images are made from pigments that have been sourced from polluted rivers and the images are of children who live on the banks of the rivers that these waters flow through.
Dirty watercolour: an awareness raising project
When we define etymology, we are looking at the origin of a word, in this case of etymological image making we are looking at the origin of the materials used to make the images. Perhaps I'm stretching my association with visual onomatopoeia too far here, but on the other hand this blog is not about logical thinking and analysis, its more a record of a mind drifting around a subject, which is more to do with art than science or logic.
Visual onomatopoeia also like colour, exists at different levels of saturation. The cotton wool cloud you could say bears an almost one to one, or full saturation visual correspondence with a real cloud, to the extent that you might mistake it for an actual cloud. However just as the sound of the word 'BARK' is sort of like the sound a dog makes, you would rarely mistake someone reading it out loud for an actual dog barking. If you look at the chart of architectural symbols used for materials below, you can see a degree of resemblance between these pen and ink drawings and the materials they stand for, but you would never mistake these images for the actual materials, you could say they have a low saturation of resemblance.
This degree of similarity is though very important. It allows the drawer to represent a quality in such a way that there is enough visual connection with the actual material quality, that enables you as a visual reader, to pick one thing out from another. You can then not just establish differences based on these likenesses, you can begin to learn a new language. The jaggedness of the metal image is more metal like than the granular quality of the image that represents sand. For an architect this is clearly an important way to add information about materials to a technical drawing and other architects can learn this language by using an associated key of material symbols.
Sometimes a naturally occurring form may possess a very close visual relationship with something else. In the case of the red hot poker flower, the property it visually recreates for our eyes is one of being red hot in the form of a glowing metal poker.
A red hot poker
To give a popular name, 'the red hot poker', to a plant, is a uniquely human thing to do. But the visual aping of one thing by another is not a purely human concern. The ophrys apifera or bee orchid, has evolved to look almost exactly like a bee. Nature has I believe, made a drawing of a bee shape over millions of years. Countless small touches or marks are made as one flower received more visits than another from a certain type of bee, until the day when one particular orchid had the perfect flower to attract a male bee and so became the template for many more to follow. This feels to me as proof that visual onomatopoeia is simply a process that is used within natural selection as part of life's survival game.
The bee orchid
Once again I begin to question the uniqueness of human invention. Perhaps given a long enough timespan, invention might be seen as no different to the testing of permutations and their usefulness by nature itself, and as part of that nature, we simply inherit this as a natural consequence of being alive.
Our interest in these things, (or at least mine), is rooted in the simple fact that one thing can be taken for another. We react to a mistaken identity in the same way that we react to the real thing. This situation also helps create a belief, one that has been written about extensively and that can be summed up by this statement; “That which is true of a thing is probably true of its like; the degree of probability depending upon the extent and thoroughness of the resemblance.” Richard Steel Imitation, or the Mimetic Force in Nature and Human Nature . Nature 63, 513 (1901).
This principle has been applied by many cultures and belief systems, not least those cultures that still use magic as a belief system. But it has also been thought about as a driver of new ideas. Adorno stated that 'art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth', he believed that as an alternative to everything else, as perhaps a last ditch approach, art could create insights and help change the world. Magic usually regarded as illusory, is liberated by him from the lie of deception, whilst simultaneously forsaking any claim to the truth, in this way art can work in the channels of false perception, but these are channels we know work and everyone has experienced false perceptions on which they have made decisions about actions to make. In fact Donald Trump has mastered the use of this magical art and has demonstrated that you can use it to shape the beliefs of millions of people. Magic operates because of a belief that everything is connected and that any one thing can have an effect on another, as long as there is an identified connection between them. Science however breaks things down in order to understand how things work, but in doing this sometimes it loses the narrative plot, the one that makes sense to many people. Art can be like magic, in that it's objects are full of meaning by association and art objects, like magical ones, (voodoo dolls etc.) are designed to effect other people at a distance. Magic can be used to channel energy and it can operate like a force field that can effect change at a distance. This is similar to the way an image can operate as a site of both energy exchange and as an externalised mind.
A shaman depicted in an Algerian cave painting
The mushrooms sprouting from this ancient image suggest a human/fungal hybrid fusion, the psychic resonance of which can still be felt by modern observers when they come across the image for the first time. The Japanese language has many psychomimes, or words that act like onomatopoeia for emotions, thought processes or states of mind. It's use of sound symbolic or mimetic words, known in linguistics as ideophones, is much higher than in English, therefore I would suggest that as a people they are more aware of these issues. For instance, at all levels of Japanese society there appears to be a pronounced need to collectively gather into clubs or organised groups. Japanese schools host various clubs or “bukatsudo”. Participation is voluntary, not compulsory, however, most students belong to either a sports or culture focused club. Belonging to these clubs are seen as training for the companies students will eventually join when they enter the adult world and company loyalty is highly prized in the Japanese workforce. This loyalty extends to brands, all of which helps to construct social solidarity. Brands have visual identities and these are used to help build this type of loyalty.
This is though not something unique to Japanese culture, Steven Dubin states that 'social solidarity and group identity are not givens; at particular times they must be intentionally cultivated and concretely enacted'. He argues that 'visual onomatopoeia communicates through a close equivalence between a subject and its representation'. He goes on to show that it frames experience in a way that allows a group to see a form to which they may belong, something that perhaps before they had only 'vaguely conceptualized'. Group identity is not a given; it has to be intentionally cultivated and visual onomatopoeia can be used to collect large numbers of individuals together using group insignias, emblems, or other significant symbols. Thereby he argues visual onomatopoeia operates as both 'act and artifact'. It can also be a force that is used to build up false perceptions, or controlled perceptions, so that a group mentality can be forged by lies as much as truths.
The cap badge of Dudley Grammar School 1962
I can see how this works, and one of my earliest exposures to a series of images that were designed to foster a group identity was when I was at school. As a schoolboy I was taken through the various images that made up my cap badge, which were there to remind myself and all the other boys of how we collectively belonged both to the school and to the place we were born into. The representation of Dudley castle keep was a reminder of how the castle dominates the town and how it sits in the shadow of its history. The anchor and miner's Davy lamp signified the history of local industries, the anchor representing the iron and steel industry and the miner's lamp the limestone, coal and iron mines that honeycombed the ground underneath Dudley, and between them is a representation of a trilobite, a fossil animal commonly found in the limestone quarries and locally known as the "Dudley Bug" or "Dudley Locust". The salamander in flames is the traditional emblem of the smith or smith's forge. In European folk traditions, the salamander was regarded as invulnerable to fire and born from the flames; Leonardo stating that the salamander has... "no digestive organs, and gets no food but from the fire, in which it constantly renews its scaly skin". He goes on to state, "The salamander, which renews its scaly skin in the fire, (is known) for virtue." The lion's head is derived from the crest of the Earl of Dudley and the Earl of Dudley's steelworks was where I would begin my working career, initially as an apprentice overhead crane fitter. All of these images were woven into stories that were used to instil within us a pride in our backgrounds and to develop a sort of tribal loyalty. We were 'forged' from the flames of a Black Country furnace, we were cast like pig iron into shapes like anchors, and their chains, solid and dependable people. We emerged out of the ground, our bones were of limestone, coal and iron ore, we were the bedrock on which the industrial revolution was built and our history could be traced back as far as the time of the Silurian seas.
It is easier to see what the individual elements of the Dudley arms are in this old cigarette card
I would argue that the Algerian cave painting of a shaman is a direct ancestor of the image on my school cap and that hats in particular have been used as objects that can carry externalised ideas about tribal identity across many cultures and over vast periods of time.
A while ago I was in the Ashmolean museum in Oxford and made a drawing of a hat or headpiece that took the form of an octopus/bear. Perhaps because of the way it was formally divided into segments I was also reminded of my school cap. A North American indigenous shaman artist had made a hat designed to channel both a bear and an octopus, their respective attributes no doubt at some point enshrined into stories that were designed to get the collective identity of a particular tribe clearly established. Perhaps the strength of the bear on land was to be coupled with the prowess of the octopus in water.
Notebook page
Donald Trump has always been an instinctive user of these types of signs and symbols and he has created his Trump brand loyalty using a variety of images. For instance to become a member of the Trump tribe you need to get your official Trump card. The eagle with outstretched wings is a typical shamanistic image, tribe members being encouraged to think of themselves as being honest and true and that they follow a man who expresses majesty, strength, courage, wisdom, power and who stands for freedom. The image of the eagle is cleverly drawn, on the one hand the outstretched wings have been used as symbols of freedom, transcendence and purity, and on the other hand, the tips are drawn in such a way that they also subtly suggest fire. The wingtip and fire
In Christianity, fire can be symbolic of religious zeal and martyrdom. In Egypt it represents a sense of superiority and control. Many cultures view fire as a symbol of wisdom and knowledge. All of these very positive and powerful aspects are suggested by the image used and they represent a hangover from much earlier animist practices, whereby we 'see' things more clearly when looked at through the eyes of something that isn't us. This doesn't mean that everyone understands these associations consciously, but they are there for stories to be wrapped around them, especially when there is a need to develop a narrative that people can belong to. A drawn image again becomes central to how symbols are used to help foster a sense of group belonging. The visual onomatopoeia here being both the flap of an eagle's wings and the flickering flame that burns up everything before it.
See also:
Translation: Drawing between languages
Drawings as aesthetic transducers
Mimesis
The triangle
Up close and far away
Drawing to an end
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