Maggi Hambling and Touch

Back in September 2016 Lund Humphries published the first book to focus on the drawings and prints of Maggi Hambling and it was called 'Touch'. The book was designed to accompany an exhibition of Hambling's works on paper at the British Museum and had a text written by Jennifer Ramkalawon. 

Dancing bear

Elephant without tusk

Laughing

The book's text opened with three quotes by Rodin, Derrida and John Berger, all of which are thoughtful reflections on the relationship between touch and sight.

What is this drawing? Not once in describing the shape of that mass did I shift my eyes from the model. Why? Because I wanted to be sure that nothing evaded my grasp of it … my objective is to test to what extent my hands already feel what my eyes see. 

AUGUSTE RODIN

A draftsman cannot but be attentive to the finger and the eye, especially to anything that touches upon the eye, to anything that lays a finger on it in order to let it finally see or let it be seen [donner à voir]. 

JACQUES DERRIDA

Her fingers touching the paper with a stick of charcoal or graphite pencil or rubber. Yet is that all they are doing? Are they not touching the face too, the face, the nose, the hair, the eyes – so that they shut a little, the corners of the mouth? What is the relation between tracing and stroking, between an erasure and a caress? 

JOHN BERGER

Maggi Hambling was quoted as having this to say about drawing; ‘Drawing is an artist’s most direct and intimate response to the world. The touch of charcoal, graphite or ink on paper is full of endless possibilities. I try to distil the essence of a subject and capture the life-force of a moment.'

I first became interested in Maggi Hambling when she came to public notice because of her portraits of Max Wall. She was interviewed several times on TV and I thought she was an artist well worth following, as she seemed to take seriously the business of finding mass in space. She was searching for something and in asking Max Wall to be a subject I could see her looking for the drama of a life. Wall was both a comedian and a dramatic actor, especially when taking on Samuel Beckett. I had seen Wall's TV version of 'Waiting for Godot' and he used an awareness of his own physicality, to give the role a tragicomic depth. I presumed this was what Hambling had seen in him, a face and a body that were very physical, that had spent a lifetime on stage and that projected a unique theatrical presence. I felt that Hambling was presenting to us the theatre of the body, even if the only member of the audience was her own cat, Onde.

Max with Onde: 1981

She is particularly good when faced with mortality. Her drawings of her father below, reveal a delicate search for that life spark that we all have, even when it is dimmed with age. 

Father

Hambling's drawing of her mother when dead, is another attempt to find what lies beneath the surface of appearance. As Hambling herself put it, "The challenge is to touch the subject with all the desire of a lover" 2016.

My mother dead: 1988

Hambling has a rather theatrical personality, or at least it appears that way from the various interviews I have seen with her. Her cigarette often being used like a marl stick, a support that operates as a conversational prop. I read this as a type of nervousness, being very aware of my own anxiety as soon as anyone asks me to talk about my work. Most artists are visual thinkers which is why they stumble when it comes to translating what they do into words. (Except for David Hockney, who is always beautifully articulate.) 

She also looks a lot at the sea; she lives close to the coast and often draws and paints waves and spray and the hard to see shifts in form and energy that constantly come into and out of vision, as that huge body of water does the things it does. 

Hambling says this:

‘Most people know the life and death feeling when they look at the sea, it is so huge. Water is a metaphor for life. A wave approaches, then becomes solid before it dissolves, that’s pretty sexy. Someone once asked me why I keep painting waves and I replied I go on painting them because they are orgasms!'.

She recognises that we are all energy, that is all there is. The traces of charcoal or paint seismically record the energy of looking, as well as the energy of making and the energy of being. Perhaps because she is a popular artist, she is sometimes underrated, but I hold a special place for her in my heart and love her unremitting confrontation with that élan vital which she finds both in people and in the sea's waves. She has made a body of work that has communicated to me at least, her great joy in visualising life's experience and you cant ask much more of an artist.

See also:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p02t7k03/making-their-mark-six-artists-on-drawing-maggi-hambling

Where stains and traces meet: To touch is to believe

Drawing as the trace of a touch

Drawing by touch

Paper, mobile phone screens and fingertips

Andrew Lister Drawing

Kirby dots and Kirby crackle

 

Jack Kirby

In my last post on invisible rays I mentioned the fact that Jack Kirby had devoted much of his career to the depiction of both physical and psychic energies. I have also decided to devote a full post to this issue because a blog on drawing at some point has to acknowledge the influence of Jack Kirby on any artist who read American superhero comic books when growing up in the 1960s. I have in the past referred to Steve Ditko's surreal visionary landscapes, that made up the backgrounds of Doctor Strange comics, but it was Jack Kirby that developed visual languages that gave me an insight into the possibilities of depicting invisible energies.  

An explosion of Kirby Krackle

Jack Kirby in cosmic visualisation mode

I'm not alone in recognising Kirby's importance when it comes to visualising cosmic energies, Jeffery Kripal has stated;

 'For Kirby, the human body is a manifestation or crystallization of finally inexplicable energies... What Mesmer called animal magnetism, Reichenbach knew as the blue od and Reich saw as a radiating blue cosmic orgone becomes in Jack Kirby a trademark energetics signaled by "burst lines" and a unique energy field of black, blobby dots that has come to be affectionately known as the "Kirby Krackle" ... The final result was a vision of the human being as a body of frozen energy that, like an atomic bomb, could be released with stunning effects, for good or for evil. These metaphysical energies, I want to suggest, constitute the secret source of Kirby's art'. (Kripal, 2011, p. 286 ) 

Kirby Krackle is also known in the comic book trade as Kirby Dots, when depicting a directional energy ray rather than an energy field. These overlapping dots are a way of visualising a crackle of energy such as a lightning bolt or what has been called in comic book jargon, 'a battle aura', This is a visual sign that lets the comic book reader know that the hero or villain is psyching themselves up for battle. They are drawn as emitting a coruscating, Kirlian-like glow around their bodies as a sign of great inner power. 

The technique consists of drawing a series of overlapping spots or dots along the edge of the energy effect being created, and as you do so you create a white negative space that begins to optically oscillate. 

Bridget Riley

The Op artist Bridget Riley was using a similar effect at the same time, but Kirby was more organic in his approach, which allowed him to be more suggestive in his metaphoric impact. When I was teaching, an interesting visual exercise for Foundation students, was to take a regular grid and begin to set out dots within it. Then to distort the grid and to make the dots follow the distortion. You can do this within a grid made by using curved perspectives if you want to be spatially playful.

Once you have begun to achieve something like the forms directly above, you can start to copy elements and overlap or push some of the dots together.

There now exists a CGI tool for automatically creating Kirby Dots, and an analogous technique called 'particle emission' is used in video game graphics for rendering particle emissions and energy fields. 

Screenshot from a 'particle emission' CGI showcase

Kirby Crackle

The illustration above was adopted from an online Kirby dot tutorial. The negative space around the dots is vital and you can see how they can either represent moving, directional energy or the porous edge of an energy field.

By combining the dots with lines, especially if the lines were in a deep perspective, Kirby (and other artists working with him) was able to give an idea of a sudden blast of energy, as in an explosion. 

Kirby and Sinnott: Captain America

I was first introduced to this idea of spots as a visual language by my school art teacher, Paul Rudall and I reflected upon it in a previous post on Dots and spots. Both of these approaches to using spots or dots as visualisations of energy, came into my life during the mid 1960s and they have stayed with me, becoming more personally meaningful as I get older. 

Live objects breathing and embedded within an energy flow

References

Kripal, Jeffrey J. (2011). Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. pp. 286–287

Foley, Shane (November 2001). "Kracklin' Kirby: Tracing the advent of Kirby Krackle"Jack Kirby Collector. No. 33.

Pencil Jack online tutorial for Kirby Krackle

See also:

Parascientific visions and Rayonism

Dots and spots

Stitched, dashed or dotted lines

Visualising energy flow

Lines as symbols of invisible forces

Crosshatching as energy carrier

William Blake after Fuseli, Head of a Damned Soul, c1789-90

When looking closely at some of the images in the 'William Blake's Universe' exhibition at the Cambridge University Fitzwilliam Museum, I was entranced by the various uses of cross hatching. In particular Blake's rendering of the image chosen for the exhibition poster, had me gazing closely at its surface and as I did my gaze became lost in the movement of one surface into the next, as the cross hatching overlapped and its curved lines not only made form but produced energy at the same time. 

Hendrick Goltzius 

Some time ago I put up a post on cross contour drawing but when I did I failed to open out how powerfully some artists had used cross hatching to energise surfaces and create energy fields. Some artists in particular, such as Hendrick Goltzius, who was the leading Dutch engraver of the early Baroque period, specialised in using these techniques. Rembrandt for instance encouraged his students to copy Goltzius engravings as a way to learn how to cross-hatch. Notice how the engraved lines both follow the form and give an indication of tone. However it is in pen and ink and chalk drawings that we see the technique used at its most subtlest.  

Head of Mercury: Hendrick Goltzius 

Goltzius had developed his engraving technique by exerting a change in pressure as he pushed the graver through the metal. This meant that as it cut through he could 'swell' the line in order to make it give a better impression of a rounded three dimensional form. He then began to emulate his engravings in pen and ink, the 'Head of Mercury' being an amazing example of expression and control, welded together If you look at the drawing closely, the flow of energy made by surfaces as they follow masses moving, in and out of shadow is quite exhilarating. 

Rubens

Rubens: Detail

If you look at the Rubens drawing above, you can see how the pen strokes create compacted energy, their slight curvature suggesting the soft curves of the body, the depicting of the movement of light to dark necessitates points of overlap, suggesting a constant flow of one field of energy into another. 

Durer uses this technique to both suggest mass and texture. The hair texture dances to one set of rhythmic dynamics, whilst the planes of the head are suggested by another set of rhythmically set out lines. What appears at a distance to be a solidly modelled head, on closer inspection becomes a series of energy fields. 

Durer

Durer: Detail of energy movements

Jean-Baptiste Greuze's drawing, 'The Ungrateful Son', is a very good example of how planar reinforcement using hatched lines, is not just a powerful explainer of how masses work within a complex solid such as a head, but can also be a way to demonstrate how energy fields can interact and overlap.  

Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The Ungrateful Son, ca. 1777

Greuze, The Ungrateful Son: detail

Greuze has a very strong grasp of three dimensional form, each line reinforcing the head's planar structure, but we can also see that complex rhythms are made as these contour hugging lines overlap. The movement of marks as they define the brow, the eye socket, the cheek and the nose, chin and mouth, is not unlike currents or eddies in a stream flowing over rocks. These marks also link one facial form to another; if you begin by looking at the bridge of the nose, you can drop down its side and slide over the cheek, falling towards the mouth and then visually tumble down towards the chin and neck. An idea of the body as landscape emerges the closer you get to the drawing. 

The body's energy field

I have begun to think about how these various energy fields overlap. Perhaps this was triggered in my head by listening to obituaries of Professor Higgs who died last week and the various accounts of the Higgs field. This is a field of energy that is accompanied by the Higgs boson, used by the field to interact with other particles, such as electrons. This interaction gives weight to the particles and hence 'mass' comes into being as well as energy. 

Mapping the energy of a concrete block in the sea wall

Gradually my thoughts about the energy of seeing are becoming fused with the energy inside mass and how it sits within the space that surrounds it. 

Perceptual study of a toy dinosaur found in the woods

I am still working on how to visualise the inner body, so will be trying to add in these thoughts about energy mass, as I try to fuse the ageing awareness of a body into the landscapes that it remembers. But for now this is where that particular strand of thinking has settled. 

The ageing body and a memory

Aways so much to do, always so many things to reconcile, but as always so many exciting things to get involved with.  

See also:

Cross contour drawing

Visualising Energy Flow

Visualising energy flow part two

Signs of life in flowing line drawings

Quantum entanglement