For a while now I have been contributing to an on line project called 'Drawing a Life'. We began the project because some of us had been part of an earlier online experiment concerned with drawing the body. Drawing Correspondence ran a six week program, 'THE BODY I AM IN' that lasted from the 19th October to the 23rd November 2021. The participants were from the UK, as well as various parts of Europe. After the sessions were over some of us wanted to continue, so a new group was formed and because of wider interest new people joined, whilst others for a variety of reasons didn't continue.
There was a lot to think about. In particular, what type of knowledge about other people and their bodies, could you communicate through drawing, especially if the information was accessed via the computer screen? This question has sustained us for a while but it has gradually been apparent that simply seeing people on screen and drawing them isn't enough. A few of us had similar questions and we have been undertaking projects designed to test out how we could take some of the ideas further. I think, for myself, it’s about the nature of the hand made portrait in a post selfie world. How can a growing awareness of the narratives surrounding other people's lives be visualised and woven into an image that evolves out of contact with that other person. As we have evolved as a group, we have been changing how we communicate, initially it was simply about spending time looking at each other via the computer screen and making drawings in response to what we saw. But then the more we talked, the narratives that surrounded the images started to become more interesting, the issue now being how could the narratives shape the imagery, without having to resort to simply adding text? We began exchanging things, making things such as puppets, thinking about animal forms that we could inhabit and above all telling stories about ourselves. The image below emerging from a complicated session, whereby I began by working on two joined together large sheets of watercolour paper, an image which I then took into digital print in order to intensify the colour and find more coherence between te image's parts.
There was a lot to think about. In particular, what type of knowledge about other people and their bodies, could you communicate through drawing, especially if the information was accessed via the computer screen? This question has sustained us for a while but it has gradually been apparent that simply seeing people on screen and drawing them isn't enough. A few of us had similar questions and we have been undertaking projects designed to test out how we could take some of the ideas further. I think, for myself, it’s about the nature of the hand made portrait in a post selfie world. How can a growing awareness of the narratives surrounding other people's lives be visualised and woven into an image that evolves out of contact with that other person. As we have evolved as a group, we have been changing how we communicate, initially it was simply about spending time looking at each other via the computer screen and making drawings in response to what we saw. But then the more we talked, the narratives that surrounded the images started to become more interesting, the issue now being how could the narratives shape the imagery, without having to resort to simply adding text? We began exchanging things, making things such as puppets, thinking about animal forms that we could inhabit and above all telling stories about ourselves. The image below emerging from a complicated session, whereby I began by working on two joined together large sheets of watercolour paper, an image which I then took into digital print in order to intensify the colour and find more coherence between te image's parts.
C
The image below, was made after a the member of the group gave a theatrical presentation about their life. As in the image above I worked across two large 5 by 4 feet sheets of watercolour paper, as they presented aspects of their story. Initially working on two separate sheets and then joining them together.
L
A new narrative emerges
Working in this way reminded me of why I had decided to join 'THE BODY I AM IN' project in the first place. It was because I wanted to make myself more aware of that 'body I am in'. I was thinking about what it must be like to make a self-portrait if you had never seen a mirror or any other images of yourself. You would know what others look like and would be aware that you were a human just like them. You would also know that everyone had a different external appearance and that these differences in appearance lay within the bounds of a certain ‘human’ template. No one was over a certain height, noses were nearly always set between two eyes and heads were always within a certain set of proportions in relation to bodies. However, you would also be aware that you had a feeling tone that was you. Your optimism or pessimism index, your sense of bravery, your introvert/extrovert levels and all of those other feelings that make up a sense of yourself, such as whether or not you are in love, in pain or feeling lonely. What Jacob von Uexküll called the 'unwelten' or phenomenological world of any particular creature. This 'unwelten' being dependent upon the body form that perception was housed within. Therefore, a portrait ought to be able to assess these things as part and parcel of the process of depicting a human being. Internal feelings, (interoception) being perhaps even more important than the external appearance of someone. However, there is a powerful paradox in the middle of this and that is that we can never be sure about what another person is thinking or feeling. They may lie, they may have facial expressions that are very inexpressive or not easily linked to internal feelings and many of us are to one extent or another autistic, often high-functioning, therefore not noticed, but nevertheless, something to be aware of.
Interoceptual portrait
The observation of perception considered through drawing, is a research project held under the umbrella of the University of Porto, my role is to use drawing to explore the role of interoception as part of our perceptual experience. Because the world of seeing is like an ever expanding dictionary of what has been seen, things that are not visually seen but which are still being experienced, such as pain or anxiety, are when drawn, usually drawn in such a way that certain aspects of what have been seen are used in those depictions. Metaphor and analogy are important, because meaning is made by making connections with other things. A pain might for instance feel very sharp, or be more like a dull throb, in each case we have an implied form, one sharp, bright and pointed, the other lumpy, grey and soft. From such a basic starting point, a language of form can be developed.
A throbbing pain felt within the body
But feelings can also be associated with more figurative imagery. A memory of a particular soft, cuddly toy might be brought to the fore, every time someone needed a mental cuddle. My felt understanding of ‘leftness’ involves a feeling of pain in my left arm, coupled with an image of a carbuncle that grew in the crook of that arm when I was a small boy. I still see that image whenever I have to think about the difference between left and right. It is part of my internal language and makes no sense to any one outside of my body.
An image I made when involved with 'The Body I am in'
Sometimes therefore in order to give more information an image of an inner feeling might be located within a simple drawing of the body. In the case below a stomach condition effecting the chest area.
The longer the ‘Drawing a life’ group stays together, the more I gather insights into the worlds of the other people in the group. The fact that 'L' has decided to tell the group a story whilst applying layers of clay to her face and painting it, opens new doors, ones that suggest to me that perhaps we ought to have a period of time when we exclude vision and rely entirely on sound to communicate. Then gradually we might bring the senses together again in order to construct portraits that don’t just rely on external appearance. If only we could touch and smell and taste each other too.
L
When we went to our daughter's final exhibition in Wimbledon, I met Adam Pearson, he had been life modelling for the students there and was also an actor who lives with neurofibromatosis, a genetic condition that causes non-cancerous tumours to grow on nerve tissue, the result of which is that he has severe facial disfigurement. He is also like our daughter and her sister an identical twin, his brother having the same inherited condition, but without the facial disfigurement. (There is a film about their life available at: https://vimeo.com/315774991)
We went for a drink after the opening and we talked about what it was like to be so clearly different to others. Eventually he had to go to get his train and he asked me to walk with him as a form of protection. He had been attacked several times in the past when walking alone, simply because some people just couldn't bear to see him and wanted to literally remove him from the family of forms that make up the possibilities of the human animal.
Adam Pearson
As we talked his features became 'normalised' it was as if the more I saw him as being just another person interested in why people are like they are, the more his external appearance didn't matter, perhaps didn't matter is the wrong term, the less difference it made. I was again reminded of the issues the novel the Picture of Dorien Gray and its various film versions, brought forward, something I wrote about in an earlier post, Adam was I thought, like a first man, bringing forth a whole new series of thoughts about what it is to follow the template of being human.
Typical image of Dorian Gray's portrait
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