Every now and again a particular artist re-emerges as being of vital importance to me and because of my interest in visualising the body, by combining the visualisation of inner and outer perceptual experiences, the frottages and drawings of Henri Michaux have come back into focus. I was reminded of his work by a reviewer of a paper I had submitted about my own drawings, the reviewer pointed out that Michaux had explored a similar territory many years before and that I had not referred to this. Sometimes reviewers pick up things that really make you think again and in this case I must admit I realised I had not really thought through certain aspects of what I was writing about and that the paper I had submitted did indeed need some serious revision. Probably the most serious error I had made though, was that some of the particular issues I should have picked out in the paper were ones I had written about before and I had simply left them out, my mind having a 'been there, written about that' response, forgetting that I am probably the only other person to have read what I was thinking about before, and that without some precise information about how drawing can solve certain problems, the writing didn't really make sense.
Michaux became famous for taking mescaline but his drawings were never done under the influence of the drug, in fact he said that drawing was impossible whilst under its influence. However the visions he had of the mind working, were strong and they directly influenced his approach to image finding. His idea, of finding images in the process of making a drawing is not new, but his particular take on the idea was that he was finding out about the structure of the brain itself. This has helped myself when working to sometimes just let images become what they need to be, to allow them to emerge and in that process to look for a synergy with my own inner body language, the language of feeling tone, of stomach ache and backache, of inner excitement, of breathing in and out, of feeling fine or feeling down, all perceivable embodied moments, that can be thought of as interoception. I've also now re-written that paper, 'Drawing the embodied mind' and it is available in edition 5 of the magazine PSIAX.
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