Interoceptual portraits

I have been taking the work on interoception into another area, that of portraiture. I have for many years been fascinated by Oscar Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' a late nineteenth century Gothic novel, whereby the deeds perpetrated by an evil man, are reflected in the changes made to the features of a hidden portrait, rather than to the face of the man who perpetrated the deeds. At that time there was much interest in physiognomy, the art of judging character from facial characteristics and in response to this, Wilde developed an idea based on a sort of reverse engineering, whereby you can measure the depth of depravity that someone is sinking into by watching their face transform over the years. If only this were true. I can still remember the first time I saw the Ivan Albright painting he made for the film 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'. In the 1945 Albert Lewin directed film, the first part had included two colour inserts of a painting made of the youthful handsome Dorian Gray (in reality painted by Henrique Medina) and then later in the film you had two frightening technicolour reveals of Albright's degenerate image of what in reality Gray had become.  Albright's painting would haunt me from then on. 

Dorian Gray by Henrique Medina 1944

Ivan Albright Picture of Dorian Gray: 1944

I thought I saw glimpses of Albright's insight into the human condition in Francis Bacon's work and I was reminded of this when an artist I had been working with in conjunction with an Italian artist to develop ideas for interoceptual portraits, sent me a Simon Shama quote; ‘What Bacon liked about George Dyer was not the assembly of features… what he liked was the inside of him and the way that pressed against the outside, the whole slithery jumble of a person’.

Francis Bacon: Study for a portrait of George Dyer

The phrase, "The whole slithery jumble of a person". struck home, and when it came to my own recent self-portrait, I found myself dealing with disintegrating forms alongside a colour struggle using complementary opposites, both ideas being used to build a psychological idea of an inner duality.

Interoceptual Self portrait

The two artists I have been working with have just sent me some objects through the post, which was a way of getting some sort of physical contact into a situation whereby we have been trying to make images of each other via computer screens. There is something much more authentic about touch and even though we are all three separated by many miles, the few objects that I can hold in the hand and pick up to look at, close those geographical distances right down to the surface of my fingers. Our portraits of each other have been developing over the years. But this time we sent objects and images to act as some sort of catalyst or stimulus to the making. As always these things are as much self-portraits as portraits of others, but the process of an image's arrival is always intriguing. In the case of the image I made responding to the objects in one parcel, I first of all glued down a shirt pattern that was enclosed and then I responded to the same artist's mono-print of a skull. As I was working between several things in the studio, I on purpose didn't think deeply about what I was making, I just kept doing stuff. As Johns put it, "do something and then do something else", or something like that. I.e. keep responding and making things happen and only later go back and see if anything works or not. 

Portrait of myself made whilst thinking of making a portrait of another English artist

Portrait of myself made whilst thinking of making a portrait of an Italian artist 

There is as you can hopefully see in the image above, a strange form emerging from the head of the figure. It is like a shell and has a red rose like form sitting over what would in a more conventional portrait be the brow. It is the product of one of our exchanges, but as always there is very little logic in my image development process. One of the things I was sent from Italy was a small nest like object, it was made of fabric, wrapped in rusty wire and other metal pieces and in its centre was a plaster form, its shape like a pebble brain. My artist corespondent had made a metaphor for her brain. I had sent to her a pair of ceramic legs that I had modelled on an idea of the hut of the Baba Yaga, which is always in illustrated books depicted as a hut carried on giant chicken legs. Without the legs the hut would just be a hut, but with them it became something fabulous. I had sent these legs to both my artist collaborators because I wanted them to think about using the legs to make something of their own fabulous, in the old sense of the word, as something magical, mythical or relating to a fable. When I looked at the nest I realised I needed to put it on similar legs, as I did it became alive and it took over my image making process. It had invoked some form of sympathetic magic.

Portraits of an artist's brain as a mythical creature

Part of my research into the raising of awareness of interoceptual feelings has been to look at the work of illustrators who have been working to visualise its importance. A really good example was the illustrative work of Abby VanMuijen and after looking it, I decided that she had already done some excellent work that focused on the core issues involved and decided therefore that I didn't need to retread the same path, but would continue to push for some sort of visual synthesis between my own more idiosyncratic language and the diagrams of emotional range and pain awareness that I had also been looking at. I was particularly interested in the fact that she kept the same image as an underpinning form and changed the colour to fit the emotional movement.

Abby VanMuijen

I therefore decided to try a similar approach; initially taking my interoceptual self portrait and changing the colour palette to see if I could demonstrate an emotional shift, but combining emotions to see if it was possible to communicate that ever morphing sense of life's instability and constant change.

Surprise and disapproval 

Anger and remorse

Acceptance and sadness

Interoceptual self portraits with colour changes suggesting mood swings

The initial image has a much more nuanced colour range, colours push against each other, my experience being that our emotional range shifts and moves in a complex manner. If like Abby VanMuijen I push the colour range into the primaries, emotion changes but it is simplified, therefore I have decided to look at complex mixes. 

Robert Plutchik, the colour wheel of emotions

I'm gradually bringing my ideas together but as always I'm not quite sure what I'm doing, mainly feeling for something rather that following a logical path. I have looked at Robert Plutchik's work for a while now and although I can see all sorts of problems with it, it does open a door for me, so why not I thought step through it? 

See also:

Body auras

Measuring emotions and colour

Is drawing a language?

To Touch is to believe

Portrait as witness and control

What is a portrait?

The Lamed Vavniks

Drawing out from within

Desire lines

Drawings are made both consciously and unconsciously, and not always with our hands or by humans. Some drawings are traces of repeated activity and desire paths fall into this category. 

A desire path

Richard Long's walked lines are another type of desire path, but this time with an aesthetic intent. However these lines are not just things that humans make.  A game path is a naturally occurring pathway made by animals. 

A game path

A human/animal desire path heading towards water

Desire lines are paths that speak of wanting to get places or do things and the more we realise animals like ourselves are emotional beings that also have desires, perhaps we can develop an understanding of a reality that links together the lives of animals and humans. It’s been suggested that fifteen journeys are all that’s required to designate a fresh desire path, but I would suggest all that is really needed is one animal to go off in one new direction. Once that has happened, others will follow. However the faint trace of another life moving ahead before us, perhaps offers grace rather than instruction; in the sense that grace is a sort of undeserved favour, a path resulting from another's adventurous spirit, being in effect a gift.

There is a certain timeline to the evolution of the road system. Roads have evolved from animal tracks; first the animals wear down the vegetation, then humans follow these tracks on foot. In another era humans will ride these paths on horse-back before eventually widening them as track ways for horse-drawn carriages and then eventually in times much closer to now, they will have become metalled roads for cars. Eventually what were desire lines become fixed by an ordnance survey as roads on a map.

I've recently returned from West Wittering and we foolishly decided to let the sat nav direct us back to Leeds and we had a very strange journey, it was almost as if the sat nav was arbitrarily deciding which roads to take. It reminded me of being a boy and staring at maps and wondering where those roads might take me and what sorts of experiences they might lead to. The idea that following a road can lead to self-discovery or mystical transformation is a common theme in literature and philosophy. It suggests that the journey, both physical and metaphorical, can be a powerful catalyst for personal growth and spiritual awakening, in particular, the concept of the "road less traveled," means that venturing off the beaten path can lead to unique insights and experiences. Following a road may lead us to discover a lost part of ourselves or help us to undergo a mystical transformation. Each desire line when begun, is indeed a newly beaten path, taking its maker into spaces as yet untrodden.

The road systems of England

In our present time, desire paths are made when we step off Google map and let our intuition decide our fate. They seek out connections between where we are and where we wish to be. Instead of being worn into shape by the pressure of passing feet, they are perhaps unique connections being made between information sets, or possibilities being seen for the first time; they’re indications that there is another way. A desire path is also a trace, often left behind because of someone following an impulse; or a desire to find a new territory. 

Animal paths

If we reverse engineer a road, we might at some point come back to its past existence as an animal track. Most animals are territorial. They walk between places to feed, to drink, to rest and to find others. The landscape itself will direct which route to take, as it provides trees and rocks to move around, gentler and steeper slopes, trees as rain cover or grasses to eat on the way. In effect the landscape wraps itself round the animal. The desire lines animals follow are also in effect, like the lines of an animal 'Wyrd', whereby the invisible lines of each animal's psyche are wrapped around the world as they pass through it and as they do the animal's destiny is woven. The word wyrd comes from the Proto-Germanic word 'wurđiz', a noun derived from the verb werþanan, meaning "to become". As we pass through life we become who we are, this is our fate. This Anglo-Saxon concept, still seems to myself to make sense, like all animals, our life lines are inextricably entangled into the world we inhabit. 

Desire is what shapes us; as we are shaped we begin to define ourselves and to do this we use tools, one of which is the mirror. The mirror allows us to see ourselves from the outside, in effect we become part of the landscape we inhabit. Like all the landscapes we traverse, we can change them by stepping off the desire paths we have chosen and starting a new one. One desire line can be our hair parting and by simply changing the 'normal' line of parting taken by our hair, we can in effect change our personality. 

Hair parting lines

There is a widespread cultural belief concerning how hair partings change a person’s looks. The general consensus seems to be that parting on one’s left makes a person look competent and masculine, whereas parting on the right makes a person look warm and feminine. In the Christopher Reeves Superman films when he was acting the Clark Kent character, his hair was parted on the right, but when he was Superman, his hair was parted on the left. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to research this and then to persuade the make-up department that this was an essential part of the character transformation.  

Christopher Reeves

For most people, the way you part your hair is instinctive. But there are times in your life when you feel the need to change, just as when you decide to step off the pavement and head out over rough ground to see if you can get to somewhere else. When you do that, eventually the new direction is worn into your path, you in effect own it, it is a sort of 'signature' path.

Desire lines can of course also be found in the markings you make in your own artwork, some drawings reveal traces of repeated activity, certain forms recurring over and over again. 

Theresa Murdza

The wondering wobbly circles that pass through this drawing by Theresa Murdza, are her desire lines. Just as desire paths are ones we take as we walk towards something, these lines are ones made as she draws towards something. Once decided upon and enacted we tend to repeat our journeys, which is why artists tend to repeat the types of marks they make.

Brenda Holzke

As we repeat a mark quality, it becomes a sort of artist's signature. I often draw using pen and ink, the thickening and thinning and hand speed associated with the application of these marks forming my own work's 'desire lines'.

A page from one of my sketchbooks

Paul Klee

Page from Klee's Pedagogical Notebook

As Klee takes his lines for a walk, he is in effect developing 'desire lines'. 

There is a certain timeline to the evolution of types of drawing within the art canon. Approaches to drawing have evolved from one artist to another; first of all one artist will wear down the thick vegetation that surrounds the prevailing approaches to drawing, then other humans will follow these tracks. As more and more artists ride these paths they will eventually widen them so that they become roadways. Just as in the paths we follow out in the wider world; following these roads may lead us to discover a lost part of ourselves or even help us to undergo a mystical transformation. A line can take many paths, some short and some long, some straight and some twisted and as metaphors for life, lines are asked to act out a huge multitude of narratives. Each line has though to be finally cut, or as Milton puts it, "Comes the blind Fury with th'abhorred shears, And slits the thin-spun life". Each line scissored by the Fate Atropos, when its story is complete and its owner has fulfilled their destiny.

See also:

Tim Ingold's 'Lines'

Lines in the road

The weaving of grids

Drawings as entanglements of life

Stitched, dashed or dotted lines

Diagrams as levers for change

 

Donut Economics: Kate Raworth

I have posted a copy of Kate Raworth's diagram before, it is a diagram that can be read as a lever for change. It recognises that we need to change the way we operate if we are to survive. Kate Raworth points to Donella Meadows (1941-2001) as her guide. Meadows was the lead author of insightful book The Limits to Growth, in 1972, she helped to highlight the fact that exponential population increase that doesn’t reduce consumption levels will eventually lead to a sudden and uncontrollable decline in resources.

Diagrams are forms of drawing that help us to see how things fit together and any system that embraces collaboration, recognises interdependencies, and helps us to understand how everything is interconnected can benefit from being visualised in diagrammatic form.

I can still remember the first diagrams I used in relation to systems thinking. I was undertaking a training course for Further Education managers back in around the mid 1990s. As part of the course I was given a challenge to think about how as managers we could think about the future needs of our sector and implement changes within the institutions that we worked in. I had to come up with a way to convince other managers that my ideas would work, so as a visual thinker, I decided to use diagrammatic drawing as my main rhetorical device. I had seen some systems diagrams based on grids, whereby information came in from one side and was enmeshed into a complex of factors that became entangled, but then reconciled and actions then emerged from the other side. In particular the contextual studies area of my college, (Leeds College of Art was not a university at the time) had for sometime been advocating the ideas expressed in E. F. Schumacher's book 'Small is Beautiful' and students had been introduced via Schumacher's ideas to systems thinking. I was also becoming more interested in the idea of 'flow' and staff on the Foundation course at Leeds where I taught had come up with various 'flow' diagrams, illustrating how real world experience and visual language could become fused together to create new ideas. 

Design for a better art college 1990s

I presented my idea of the educational process as a series of flowing wave like movements to the then new principal. It was heavily criticised as being unworkable and naive and I realised I was seen as a typical arty type by him. I was soon gone from the management team, the then principal criticising me for my constant need to understand why we might be doing things, rather than me just telling people what needed to be done, which is what he wanted managers for. Even so, my early experience of systems thinking did stick and I have remained convinced that diagrams can be used as levers for change.

Systems thinking has moved on considerably since then. The diagrams below offering a few tools that might help someone setting out to think about how to choose an approach. 

Systems thinking 

A diagram can be used as a collaborative tool for regenerative and transformative change. For instance when looking for an ecosocial equilibrium that a society might try to establish, diagrams were used to help people think about how to collaborate. By seeing yourself as part of an overall plan, it gets easier to both have belief in what you are doing and to feel supported in your beliefs by others who have agreed that the diagram works for them too. 

My worry with diagrams is how much annotation they need in order to be understandable. The ecosocial diagram above that uses the triple infinity symbol, needs a vast amount of text to anchor it and give any meaning to it. Even when I read the text several times, I still am not sure what it means. Balance and flow are obviously good things, but the text that is used to show how these are achieved feels too like a hopeful wish-list. 

Diagram of how the Leeds Creative Timebank should operate

I drew a diagram of how the Leeds Creative Timebank operated for the Proto-Publics research project. At the time I was part of the management group of the Timebank and I firmly believed that this could be a way of developing a non cash economy. Looking back on those days, we were perhaps naive  but the diagram still feels as if it has some sort of dynamic agency and that it represents possibilities of how people could support each other by offering their particular skills. However it is not annotated and therefore it is very hard for someone from outside the organisation to get an idea of what is going on. 

Mark Lombardi

Diagrams have also been used by artists to reveal hidden structures and to give people the information needed to effect change. For instance Mark Lombardi's drawings of relationships that illustrated the connections that people in power had and the resultant networks that enabled them to exercise their power. His drawings often reminded me of organic life forms. The patternings of connections between people, were also not unlike the interconnections we make using our own neural pathways. Hans Haacke's, 'Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System as of May 1, 1971', was a diagrammatic illustration of ownership. In this instance the New York properties of a single slumlord, were investigated through charts, maps and photographs. Both artists allowing the diagrammatic form to reveal the hidden interconnections that shape people's lives, rather than dealing directly with the emotional messiness of lives themselves. In this case information set out in a clear, easy to grasp, visual way, became the lever for change. 

Hans Haacke: 'Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings'

Diagrams can also help us confront ourselves and how as we gather new knowledge we need to change in order to be able to deal with it. For instance if we are to change we need to grasp the fact that this is an emotional journey and that it isn't always straightforward. 

All change is an emotional ride, one that I'm beginning to understand as something to either experience as exciting and exhilarating or something to fear and hide away from. Hopefully I can embrace the former and move beyond my fears and worries about what might happen. There are always other people out there who also think in similar ways, other artists that have taken similar paths. In 2023 the Marlborough Gallery in new York put on an exhibition entitled, 'Schema: World as Diagram'. It was an exhibition designed to highlight how artists had often been drawn to the diagrammatic in order to express their ideas. 

Loren Munk: The Ontology of Art: 2016

Thomas Hirschhorn: Schema art and public space: 2016-22

Some diagrams seemed overly simplistic and others almost as confusing as the mess that they were trying to understand, but running throughout the exhibition was a sense that diagrams allow us to render visible what would otherwise remain unseen.

I can see an interesting issue in relation to my recent thinking. When I was looking at how to visualise issues related to getting older, I came up with a diagram that allowed me to communicate ideas about the various stages of ageing. I wanted to at the same time find an overall image that gave the diagram shape and a more mythic context. 

Diagram of the ageing process

In order to get to the final image, I had looked at images based on simplifications of a scarab beetle form. In particular scarab beetle were symbols of rebirth, resurrection, transformation, and growth and I wanted to implant within the diagram an idea that old age can still be a time of transformation, and growth.

As you can see from the image below, at one point the diagram was very scarab beetle shaped, but I wanted a less obvious image and perhaps looking back the scarab design would have been better, as it communicated the idea more clearly.

The struggle to find an image as well as at the same time to make a diagram, reminded me of Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of the fantastic as a literary genre. The image was driving the diagram into another territory of visual thinking, it was becoming an ambiguous image. For Todorov, the fantastic occurs when in the course of reading a narrative one hesitates about how to interpret a seemingly supernatural event. If the event turns out to have a rational explanation, the tale becomes an example of the uncanny. If, however, the narrative explains it in terms of some supernatural occurrence, then we are in the realm of the marvellous. I wasn't sure where I wanted my images to lie and I think they fell between two stools, not quite clear enough as diagrams and not quite strong enough as images. But the idea that I could bring my interoceptual imagery into a format that included more diagrammatic ways of working, still I think holds water.

Perception, reality and the cosmos

The mash-up between diagram and image, can be sometimes confusing, but also intriguing, well at least for myself. In the image above I was attempting to bring together several strands of my thinking together and place them within a more cosmic context. In comparison though, Pablo Carlos Budassi's diagrams are far more cosmic. 

The observable universe: A logarithmic illustration:  Pablo Carlos Budassi

Pablo Carlos Budassi is a musician as well as an illustrator, he is probably rarely thought of as a fine artist, more an infographic designer, but his work has made me think a lot about how different scales can be found to mesh together and although it could be argued that he often deals with clichéd imagery, the beauty of his constructions has convinced me that he is an authentic artist, very worth looking at, especially if you want to get a feeling for how everything might possibly fit together. I still do like my own idea though, perhaps simply because it includes my coffee cup, masquerading as a devil, as well as that spiral, that keeps reoccurring over and over again.

See also:

Shusaku Arakawa's Diagrams for the imagination

Faraday's lines of force

The diagram as art and spirit guide

Diagram as art form

Between art, geometry, emotion and science. 

Geometrical psychology 

Kurt Vonnetgut diagrams the shapes of stories

Drawing out from within

In 1945 farmers digging in the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi, discovered some long lost texts, that were found in unearthed ceramic jars. Amongst these texts were 114 supposedly secret sayings, that were attributed to Jesus. These short texts were about spiritual knowledge and they were understood to be from the Gospel of Thomas, a non-canonical text that is not in the Bible, but which scholars were aware of because of the existence of previously discovered fragments. However, this was a complete manuscript written in Coptic. Of these sayings perhaps the most well known is; "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you".
For someone trying to visualise interoception, this phrase has often come to haunt me. Interoception is defined as the sense that allows us to perceive internal bodily sensations, such as emotional change, heart rate, respiration, hunger, and pain. It's often described as the body's "eighth sense," playing a crucial role in our moment-to-moment awareness of our physical state and influencing our emotions, self-regulation, and decision-making. Chen et al (2021) point out that definitions of interoception change and that they were initially to do with a creature's 'internal state', then by the mid 20th century it had become a way of referring to the dynamics of a body's homeostasis and only recently has it been seen as a communication process by which the nervous system both senses and integrates information about the inner state of the body.  They highlight 'the complex interplay between the brain and other organs necessary to monitor and regulate internal states'. (Ibid p. 4) 

The anatomical boundary that separates interoceptive from exteroceptive experiences has historically used the skin as a dividing border. Chen et al (2021) point out that interoception was focused on signals generated from within the body, sensations occurring below the skin, but as I have already become aware, it's not quite as simple as this, there being no clear division between internal and external realities. Even so, I like to feel that the images I make can 'get under your skin'.

Perhaps this is why that old Coptic text of St Thomas still strikes a chord in me. 

Although most of the current texts on introception rely on discoveries in neurology, as an artist, I'm still fascinated by psychology and its early acceptance of a subconscious/conscious dialogue. In fact the inner/outer duality of interoception/exteroception, stirs within me Surrealist yearnings and I'm prone to make responses to what I think I might be feeling, by relying more on instinct and chance than any sort of rational process.

The psychology of interoception works with body awareness and an ability or inability to use this awareness, can affect psychological issues related to mood and other emotional factors. The work I do in trying to help raise awareness of somatic feelings will hopefully help others enhance their ability to control emotional regulation and well-being, but I don't expect my art as such to change anything. The process of being involved and listening is probably the most important issue in relation to the fostering of wellbeing, the artworks themselves are stand alone entities, that emerge from a fusion of the process of listening and the process of image development. Part of the process therefore of an image's development, may well be therapeutic, but the final images are creatures in their own right, things that can carry whatever meanings they can, but they are not in themselves therapeutic images. 

I have been working with other artists to try and resolve some of these issues, as well as people who are not at all connected with the art world. Sometimes because of the close affinity I can feel with fellow practitioners, especially those that see drawing as fundamental to their practice, I can begin to see an almost epic dimension to the work. In conjunction with two artists that I have known for several years, I have recently been making much larger drawings, these are attempts to capture some of the essence of another person's life experience. We have spent some time preparing for the sessions, each artist making objects or drawings that can be shown alongside themselves, things that are used to animate the situation that we each draw from. The difficulty is we are all isolated from each other and we use the medium of the computer screen to communicate. We have though been doing this for a while now and we have tried a variety of ways to break through the barrier of the screen and try to 'touch' each other with our 'inner' as much as our 'outer' appearances. Above all we talk when it is our turn to be the subject. Conversation is such a wonderful thing, our sometimes awkward and at other times poetic attempt to put into words the things we are thinking and feeling, is right at the centre of what it is to be human. This alongside an eternal hope and expectation, that others will get some sort of awareness about our inner thoughts from a dialogic process. When you do this with people who are also practiced at another form of conversation, that of direct drawing from experience, the conversation is deepened. You are in the company of those that can feel the limitations of verbal conversation; as artists they of course value the poetry of communication, but they also, like myself, sense that so many things are unsaid, mainly because they can't be 'said' using words. We look at ourselves in the mirror and see a something that is as much the person inside as outside, our outward appearance a cypher that has to be decoded in order to engage with inner thought. A stance may indicate illness, mental state or environmental threat, the speed of a body's movement tells us so much about the physical and mental state that it encloses, the smoothness or erratic track of someone's hand gestures speaks silent volumes. 

Portrait of an Italian artist by an English artist: The inner and outer of an interoceputual experience

The three of us have recently been working on a particular project, focused on trying to extend previous ways of making portraits of each other and on my part, I have also been trying to re-define for myself what it is to make a portrait of another human being. This overlaps with the work I have been doing in the hospital, but in the protective bubble of artists communicating with other artists, I feel that I can begin to let go of my normal reserve and reveal aspects of myself that don't normally emerge in everyday life. I sense that that is also the case with my fellow artists. Perhaps this is art as a form of counselling, I don't know, but I do know that emotionally this is a very hard body of work to be engaged in and that it really stretches my ability to make emotionally resonant images.

 

Portrait of an English artist by an English artist: The inner and outer of an interoceputual experience

As I make the drawings, which are 5 feet (h) x 8 feet (w), I also photograph them and then make prints from the drawings, which are what I'm putting up for you to see on this blog. The prints are more screen friendly, I don't think the translation of large drawings into screen images works at all. The scale of the originals is such that you need to step up to them and then pull away, in order to get a sense of how they work. I'm also making all of the work done from the hospital available in digital print form, so that it is available to everyone concerned, patients and medical staff, and therefore I am becoming more attuned to the relative values of digital versus analogue imagery, seeing them both as capable of carrying feelings and emotional registers, but in very different ways.

An important issue is surface. The hand drawn initial images clearly show the traces of material changes and human interactions. There will be now dry water diluted coloured liquids, pen marks cut into the paper, areas of wiped away colour still holding a memory of the wiping in their stain, frozen brush strokes and fingerprints from when I have had to support myself as I have leaned over the drawing in order to make marks. The hand is remembered because the scale is one to one with the body, the paper size forming a flat theatre of possible re-enactment of every gesture made in the image's making. The digital version is very different, but as a print it carries a set of values compressed into a form that is equally powerful as a communicating surface. Paper and ink are fused together in a different way and if the right paper is chosen, (in this case Hahnemühle German Etching mould made paper and the inks all at maximum intensity, i.e. the printer is properly working and laying down colour as dictated by the digital colour files), the surface can be rich and seductive. Differences in handling in the original are now translated as changes in granular texture. The thickening and thinning of paint or ink as it moves across a surface can be captured by photography and tonal differences enhanced by using a digital filter that operates in the same way as now long discontinued lith film*. As this filter has only has black or white options it will produce a black and white granular texture as a translation of a smooth movement between light and dark. Therefore a brushstroke may now have a more three dimensional appearance or a new texture, due to the 'pushing' of the contrast. 

This way of working is a hangover from my time as a print technician. When I used to make silkscreen prints, I would often use what we called at that time, black and white 'lith' film', which came in rolls, so that it was large enough to make A1 size photographic exposures. Once made these positives of developed film were in effect 'burnt' by light into an emulsion that had been applied to the surface of the nylon screen, thus making a negative, through which ink would be squeegeed to make the positive on the paper that was to be printed on. High-contrast lithographic film was a specialised type of orthochromatic film designed for graphic arts to produce stark black-and-white images with maximum density and stark separation between tones, using a process that required careful control of developer strength. The film was specially produced for silkscreen printing, as any stencils; photographic, painted on or hand cut, had to allow for the printing of flat colours by pushing ink through a fine nylon screen. As technology moves on, it often carries memories of a previous technology embedded within it. For instance the first cars were at one point known as horseless carriages and their box like shape was a reflection of this. In a similar way the early filters designed for Photoshop, tended to reflect the types of photographic film and associated processes that existed before digital processing. 

I'll try and explain how I use this in the development of a digital print. In the detail taken from a hand made original below you can see the thickening and thinning of paint and inks, as well as tonal diversity. 

Detail of a large drawing

In the black and white image made from the detail above, a stark separation between tones has been achieved by using a 'stamp' filter on Photoshop. I have to decide the percentage of white to black, so I ask myself, do I need more black or more white in order to achieve the emotional effect I need? The most interesting textures are always those that evolve in the between areas, not clearly white or black and just as the old lith film did, this filter breaks down in-between areas in quite unpredictable ways. 

Image converted to black and white and using the 'stamp' filter in Photoshop

I can selectively highlight any area and make each selected component of the image darker or lighter, so may make four or five different black and white exposures and then collage them together to make a final textural layer. 

Once I have a surface similar to the one above, I can use this as a layer that can then be placed on top of coloured layers, often as in silkscreen printing, making the layers transparent, so that colours can both intensify each other and create often unexpected new colours as they overlay. I can then build the image up, layer on layer and as I do I can push some elements into the background, heighten others and remove anything that doesn't support the overall emotional tone. 

Detail of print

As you can see the final image made for print, is very different in surface feel to the original drawing. All the layers are compressed down before printing, their colour intensity when translated into ink, giving the image an impact that for myself, can be as powerful as the one made by the size and textual surface of the original drawing. Deciding dpi and output size is also of vital importance to the look of the final image. When printing these images, they are in effect squeezed out onto the paper surface and as they emerge back into daylight, this very compaction gives them a certain traction that allows them to stand up alongside images made in more traditional ways.

I have digressed I know into technical matters, but they are all a necessary part of the process of drawing out the interoceptual aspects of an experience. Technology is a vital aspect of drawing, a word that has ancient connections with the word 'drag', in the sense that you can drag a plow through the ground, thus scoring it, leaving a line of exposure as the earth is turned over to reveal the colour of the soil below. I am in effect trying to use drawing to drag out of myself and others, some sort of response to the feeling tone of interpersonal communication and whether this requires analogue or digital processes to do this, doesn't I feel matter, what does matter is whether or not some form of communication is made. 

Finally some thoughts about the drawing out from within that touch more upon the poetry of that inner/outer flow. In Philip K Dick's science fiction novel 'The Divine Invasion' he develops a wonderful description of what space and time is like for God like beings and I transcribed his description of a particular journey taken by one of God's prophets into my own words, in order to get some sort of traction on the poetic possibilities of a mind seeing both inside its own body and at the same time being able to escape the confines of a body and move out into the cosmos. This is what I wrote at the time when I attempted to imagine myself as one of Dick's characters:

My mind began to travel in an outside mode, my consciousness ceasing to be something, instead becoming a process, evolving into accretional layers, inhabiting a timescale of the outer world. From there or when, they are now both of one indivisible form, I could at last see the inside forms of my somatic body from another reality and as I rose above myself, I became a process of Hermetic transformation. I saw my body not as a mass but as transparent pictures permutating at an immense velocity, images made of forms outside of space, being fed into the body to become reality. As this image froze, time ceased. Slowly, by degrees a transformation began to take place, I saw outside of myself a pattern, the print of my own brain, I was within a world made up of my brain, with living information carried here and there like little rivers of shining red that were alive. I could reach out and touch my own thoughts in their original nature, before they became thoughts. Space filled with their fire, it stretched out, the volume of my own brain becoming external to myself. 

I now began to introject the outer world, so that it became contained within myself. Now having the universe inside me and my brain outside everywhere. My brain extended into vast spaces, far larger than the universe and I knew the extent of all things that were myself and because I had now incorporated this world I knew it and controlled it. 

What is within you, is also outside you; what you bring forth will both make you and disguise you.

References

Chen, W. G., Schloesser, D., Arensdorf, A. M., Simmons, J. M., Cui, C., Valentino, R., Gnadt, J. W., Nielsen, L., Hillaire-Clarke, C. S., Spruance, V., Horowitz, T. S., Vallejo, Y. F., & Langevin, H. M. (2021). The Emerging Science of Interoception: Sensing, Integrating, Interpreting, and Regulating Signals within the Self. Trends in neurosciences, 44(1), 3–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tins.2020.10.007

Dick, P. K. (1981, 2008) The Divine Invasion London: HarperCollins

See also:

The inner and the outer    

Drawing: Analogue and digital processes

Escaping from the cage

Macro and micro embodied networks