Tuesday, 9 April 2024

Drawing the internal body

Max Brodel: The mouth

Max Brodel: The throat

There still seems to be a worry about the relationship between fine art drawing and illustration. I personally find no real difference between them, both are concerned with trying to represent and communicate visually things that we experience. The fine artist often makes very personal decisions as to what is being visualised and the illustrator is usually more directed by the role they have in solving problems set by others, but whether the problem set is a personal one or set by others, at the end of the day a piece of visual communication is made, that is either one that works well or doesn't. The history of art includes many artists working directly for clients, be these to do with the church, the ruling elites or galleries and many artists have also worked as illustrators or have had roles that didn't separate out the 'artist' from the other functions that someone was involved with. For instance a monk may have also been a fantastic image maker, but their main role as someone in the service of whatever religious order they belonged to, meant that they were never singled out as 'signature' artists; in fact most artists would as far as history is concerned, be anonymous. We can ask questions of an artwork, such as does the work enrich our understanding or awareness, does it help us to get more in touch with our feelings, does experience of it allow us to do things differently? But we can ask these questions of a fine art painting, sculpture or drawing, just as much as we can of an illustration,

I compare my own work with both fine art and illustration. For instance, my interest in interoception overlaps with medical illustration as it attempts to visualise what goes on within the body but I'm also trying to communicate feeling tone, something more akin to music perhaps and therefore closer to artists dealing with expressionist themes, so I'm also happy to look at artists such as Max Beckman or Cecily Brown, both of whom have contributed to the visualisation of the human body's expressive possibilities.

There is a history of medical illustration that is vitally important to how we think about the interior of our bodies. One artist in particular was very influential on the development of the contemporary anatomy textbook and his work is also of interest to myself in that he developed very specific techniques in order to communicate the particular qualities of our visceral  insides. Max Brodel (1870-1941), is considered to be one of the shapers of modern medical illustration. He understood that a drawing was much better than a photograph when it came to showing others what was going on and he had this to say about copying:

"Copying a medical object is not medical illustrating. The camera copies as well, and often better, than the eye and hand, in medical drawing full comprehension must precede execution."

In order to better communicate what he was seeing, Brodel devised a method of using carbon dust to create a two tone technique that could capture the sparkling highlights that characterise the wet visceral look of the interior living body. His particular use of carbon dust involved using special paper coated with white layers of chalk or clay. Carbon dust is then layered on the paper in stages to create shadow and depth. The results are incredibly rich tonal images that not only suggest wet insides but capture the nature of three dimensional form well. He also used erasers to lift out bright highlights and create further three dimensional effects. 

Max Brodel: Illustration of the musculature of bladder and urethra

It is interesting to compare his drawings with 
Alberto Morroco. Alberto Morrocco unlike Max Brodel was an artist better known for his landscapes. 

Alberto Morroco

Morroco produced anatomical drawings in the period following his service as a conscientious objector in the Medical Corps during WWII and never made any other anatomical drawings once he had completed his work for the anatomy textbook. However the drawings he did do are powerful examples of how to communicate complex hard to read views of the interior of the human body. 

Alberto Morroco: The eye

Alberto Morroco was making his images in the mid-twentieth century and medical textbooks were now being printed in colour. This meant that he could selectively add colour to his drawings in order to further distinguish or pick out vital aspects of the anatomy he was focusing on. His drawing technique is better at depicting the bony substrata of the body, whilst you feel that Brodel keeps you much more aware of the slimy visceral nature of the body's reality.

Both artists influenced my own ideas about how we might visualise inner body feelings. 

The pain of separation

The image above, 'The pain of separation' being an image produced after working with someone who had experienced heartache and longing for someone. This was in effect a landscape of their emotions and was as much a response to anatomical illustrations as it was to cross sections of landscape whereby the structure of rocks is revealed as a cross section. 

Geologic cross section of the Flagstaff area, northern Arizona


Slicing into the body's skin

The one thing missing of course is annotation. Because feelings are so hard to point to, sadness, regret, longing etc. are all subjective experiences and therefore although two people might come to some sort of agreement as to what something might mean, this is far from a universal language that is useable by everyone. This is perhaps the fine art/illustration divide. An illustration will need to have an agreed communicative value, but the fine art image is open to interpretation. Hopefully though by working with someone and forging an agreed synthesis of visual/verbal responses, something gets communicated that is greater than the conversations that were had and that something more universal emerges from the conversational drawing activity, that is sensed by others when they see the final image, which is in this case a digital print. 

Reference

Cullen, Thomas A. "Max Brödel, 1870-1941, Director of the First Department of Art as Applied to Medicine in the World". Bulletin of the Medical Library Association. Vol. 33, No. 1, January 1945.

Macdonald. Joanne (2022) How can drawing support understanding in anatomy through the work of Robert Douglas Lockhart (1894-1987)? Aberdeen: Aberdeen University

See also:

Drawing and healing




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