Self portrait drawings

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut was always interested in drawing and he had a clear grasp of its potential to help himself think by using drawing as a visual problem solving tool. He used an idea that all stories have shapes as a way of developing story diagrams. There are many kinds of narrative and another one that Vonnegut was interested in was the self-portrait. In the one he made of himself, (above) you can see his awareness of abstraction and how a minimal amount of information is needed to suggest an individual. Most artists that have been interested in representation have at some time or other made a self-portrait. Drawn self portraits are interesting because they can be stripped down, they tend to be more economical and closer to the essence of how an artist saw him or her self. 

Paul Klee

Käthe Kollwitz

Max Beckmann

Picasso

Matisse

Gwen John

Bonnard

Franz Kline

Myself in expressionist mode

However these typical 'expressive' portraits are only now found in more conservative institutions such as the National Portrait Gallery or in competitions that still focus on issues of rendering likeness such as the BP Portrait award or TV's Portrait Artist of the Year. 

Isobel Peachey: BP travel award winner

The old tradition of portraiture has been questioned extensively within fine art practice and approaches to what it is to make a self portrait are many and varied. A typical approach is one that focuses on what it is to leave a 'trace' of one's existence. This can be a direct physical trace as in some of the work of Jasper Johns or research into how traces of our existence are manifest in the production of other things such as certificates, account details, data collections and numerical accountings. 

Jasper Johns: Untitled 1964-65

David Hammons in the late 60s and early 70s created a series of images of himself which are direct impressions left on the world in the same way that other things in this world leave impressions, such as leaves and animals. I was particularly interested in his approach because it seemed to me that this levelled the playing field between people and other things, everything leaves a trace of its existence in some way, and usually that trace is made when one thing makes contact with another. 

David Hammons

David Hammons is an interesting artist in that he uses the myths and fables that have accrued around his persona to make points about misconstrued notions of black identity. These body prints for instance, were made by coating himself with grease and then adding black pigment. He is making a statement about his presence in a white dominated art world. Compare his image with the one Johns made, he is much more there as a presence, Johns is emerging out of a welter of 'art marks' embedded within the signs of his practice, but Hammons is still partly having to hold on to some sort of street credibility. His work being also about black history as well as being about his own story. 

Thinking of other stories, how do other 'prints' made by geological forces enter into this debate? Can their images be seen as evidence of other non human stories and can these stories be told with as much of a poetic resonance as all the other images made by one thing acting upon another?

Hiroshima

Can these images be seen as types of portraits? Can a flower have a portrait, or a fish? We know that dogs can.

William Wegman

Data can be used to build up your identity and Amazon will have already built up a pretty accurate picture of you by now. A far less sinister approach to data drawing was the analogue data drawing project as developed by Georgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, whereby they posted postcards of visualised data to each other for over a year, each week looking at different aspects of their lives and converting these things into data as well as associated codes for the data's translation back into 'real world' language.

Georgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec 

Lupi and Posavac's work demonstrates how a self portrait can be determined by many different factors and none of them need to be anything to do with how somebody looks. Their work also demonstrates the power of drawing to visualise information abstracted from the world in many different ways. 

Laurie Frick

There are many artists using data to develop imagery but perhaps Laurie Frick is a useful artist to look at in that she holds an interesting edge between the use of technology to access data, such as her Fitbit for collecting self-tracking data and the construction of objects and large-scale installations using common often found materials such as cardboard. Frick used her Fitbit and combined it with location data from the online program OpenPaths and her iPhone’s GPS to draw a track that tried to capture the experience of walking through Brooklyn.  It is in this area where data meets innovative visualisation processes that I believe fine artists have a powerful role to play. 

Frick refers to some of her images made from data collected about herself as self portraits, a clear demonstration that if you don't want to there is no longer any need to be working with those old models of facial recognition, unless of course there is an approach to thinking about image capture that causes us to think again.

The idea that an optically travelling image can leave a trace is fascinating. We have long had image capture stories surrounding death, the last image someone sees being somehow 'burnt' into the eye's retina. Optography is the process of viewing or retrieving an optogram, the technical term for an image existing on the retina of the eye and this process was at one time believed to be a scientific reality. The laboratory investigation surrounding this much miss-understood concept is itself a horror story in its own right. In the late 19th century the physiologist Wilhelm Kühne, inspired by Boll's discovery of rhodopsin or visual purple, a photosensitive pigment present in the rods of the retina, wanted to prove that images on the retina could be fixed, in exactly the same way that a photographic image could be. Therefore Kühne developed an experiment to test out his hypothesis. He fastened the head of a live rabbit into a clamp, so that its head faced a barred window. He then covered the rabbit's head in a black lightproof sack, so that there was time for undisturbed rhodopsin to accumulate in the retina. He then took off the eye cover and allowed the rabbit to 'expose' the rhodopsin by looking at the barred window for three minutes. Then he quickly decapitated the rabbit and sliced its eyeball in half, placing the rear half into an alum solution to fix the now bleached rhodopsin. This resulted in a distinct image of the barred window. 

One of the barred window images

Of course he now wanted to perform the same experiment on a human subject, eventually persuading the powers that be to let him have the eyes of a convicted murderer. 

Wilhelm Kühne: Drawing made of the image found on Erhard Gustav Reif's retina

The child murderer Erhard Gustav Reif was executed and his eyes given to Kühne who cut the eyes in two and fixed the bleached rhodopsin, making the drawing above from what he found there, which is the only known image of an actual optogram. The story is a powerful one and it continues to be told, especially within science fiction and detective genres. Jules Verne's 1902 novel, The Brothers Kip, contains a reference to optography as a key element of the plot. The Kip brothers are imprisoned for the murder of a ship's captain. When the victim's son examines an enlarged photograph of his late father's head, he discerns in the eyes the faces of the true murderers—two of the captain's shipmates—and the brothers are exonerated. Verne explained the scientific basis of the conclusion in the book's final chapter: 

For some time now it has been known—as a result of various interesting ophthamological experiments done by certain ingenious scientists, authoritative observers that they are—that the image of exterior objects imprinted upon the retina of the eye are conserved there indefinitely. The organ of vision contains a particular substance, retinal purple, on which is imprinted in their exact form these images. They have even been perfectly reconstituted when the eye, after death, is removed and soaked in an alum bath.

It is fascinating to see how quickly failed science can become some sort of popularised truth. 

I seem to have once again wandered off the plot and have left the self portrait idea well behind, the point I was beginning to make was that by looking at something from an entirely different angle you could refresh an old idea. For instance what if Kühne was the last thing seen by the rabbit? If he was an artist could Kühne then use the resultant retinal image as a self-portrait? This becomes the start of a story and some artists use stories as art. 

For many years Mark Manders has been in some way making a self portrait. It is better perhaps to have him explain how he works in his own words. 

Mark Manders: Self-portrait as a floor plan

MM: I made this floor plan in 1986 from all the writing tools I had at the time. These served as the basis for a written self-portrait, which was to be formed collectively by seven imaginary persons in a building. It was to be a book without a beginning or an end, one that I would always have to keep working on. I thought it was interesting that it was a dry, formal floor plan, in which no movement whatsoever could be observed. I wanted to project a mental self-portrait into this floor plan, one in which everything would take place only in language. Making a self-portrait seemed to me the most fundamental thing to do. However, while writing it I found I did not like the idea of using written sentences to dictate to the audience exactly what they should think. I did not want the self-portrait to become really personal—it had to remain abstract. I became more and more fascinated by the physical manifestation of the floor plan: how I stood there before it as a human being; how tall I was in relation to the things on the ground; how the changing light transformed a ballpoint pen so dramatically; how I could bring my eye closer to an eraser and what then happened inside my head. This zooming-in created a breathtaking cinematic experience: I could move over these objects, and they dictated my thoughts with their color, language, form, and their indescribable physical coherence. I concluded that making a self-portrait in language was not the right thing to do. The world itself is more complex than the world of language which has been embedded in it. I decided to write the book not with words but with objects, and to embed the self-portrait in reality as an imaginary building.... If you write a self-portrait using objects, it will be read in a totally different way. Viewers—or readers—of the objects construct their own new thoughts, and the result is a self-portrait that is suspended between the maker and the viewers.
This floor plan was never really meant to be an artwork, it was more like a strange kind of writing machine. Now it is a work of art. It is used as an artwork.

Mark Manders

Manders often uses drawings of ground plans to develop ideas for exhibitions, his drawings reflecting an idiosyncratic approach to personal meaning, a sort of private language being developed to talk about his approach to the processing of life's experiences. These 'life experiences' may not be real, but they may be, a self-portrait is an idea and as an idea it can take many forms, some of which might be fictional. 

Mark Manders: Several drawings on top of each other: 1990-20015

Many of his works become installations, the one above suggesting a long process of making private drawings that eventually become physical substitutes for the artist's life, which in turn becomes another self-portrait. 

De Kooning: Self portrait with imaginary brother

The self portrait can also be a place where you explore other aspects of your life, in De Kooning's case the need for an imaginary brother. 

Ivan Albright

In the last year of his life Ivan Albright drew himself as if already a ghost of his former self; on completing the drawing he passed away. When he was seriously ill the Scottish artist John Bellany drew himself as a way to fight through the pain, confront his mortality and try and last a little longer. It must have worked because he lived long enough to make etchings from the drawings he made. 

I hope to be more like Bellany than Albright but you never know how you will react to those end times. The one thing I do know is that drawing can be a friend right until the end. 

See also:

Further ideas related to concepts of drawings as traces of events or contact with other objects or things. 

Stains and traces

Imprints and traces

Narcissus in the studio

Portraits and control

What is a portrait?

The imprint and the trace

A few people have asked me to put up some information about the idea of ‘the trace’, this is my first post on this issue. Do remember that if you want me to open out an idea you have to let me know by commenting in the comments box.

In Nicolas Bourriaud’s introduction to Foucault’s ‘Manet and the Object of Painting’, he points out that like other philosophers of the time Derrida was a writer that explored the interval between the sign and the trace, the space between things rather than things in terms of singular objects, the event rather than the moment.

 Traces are usually traces of moments of surface contact. For example the imprint of feet as someone walks across a sandy beach, wet soles of shoes marking a hallway, a hand-print left on a steamy bathroom mirror. However traces can become more permanent, a tyre track left in mud can become ‘cast’ in hard baked clay as the mud dries out during a hot summer. A dead body sinks into a tar pit, becoming slowly materialized until revealed millions of years later as a fossil. A car runs through a pool of spilled paint, its tyres now leave a permanent print on the road.

 Traces are incomplete records of events, but ones that can often be read as signs. Traces of crumbs left on a table, can be signs of a recently eaten meal.  A deer leaves ‘traces’ of its passage, hoof-prints left in soft ground, velvet from its antlers, brushed off and held by low lying tree branches.  These traces can be read as signs, as a language that can be used to understand the deer’s life. A complex understanding will evolve as we learn to read the traces of its passage more accurately. We can work out which direction the deer was going in by close examination of its hoof-print, we can ascertain its height by measuring how far from the ground a twig holds a scrap of antler velvet, we can guess its weight from the depth of the hoof-track etc. We may even try to ascertain from the traces of its passage its mental state; was it rushing away from an enemy or calmly wondering through the woods?

The trace can be seen as at the root of the sign. The possibility of language embedded within our ability to interpret traces. Interpretation lays at the inception of the sign, it could mean this or that, but once interpreted as one thing, this can stick. Through inductive reasoning we shift the trace towards becoming a sign, i.e. we decide that something is probable based on the evidence before us, the probability leaking eventually into a generalization.

Traces are often imprints and therefore we can open the dialogue of meaning out into associated words, such as prints and touch. We might also include the idea of the cast, which could be seen as a three dimensional print. However some of the most compelling issues surround the fact that a trace or print taken from a three dimensional body is flat or two dimensional. 

At the core of much painting and drawing theory lies the paradox of trying to reproduce images of a three-dimensional world on a flat surface or two dimensional plane. (See Greenberg) However most three dimensional objects can be thought of  topographically as types of continuous surfaces, and if so, these surfaces can be flattened out as ‘diagrammatic’ ideas. For instance a cube can be visualized as six squares laid out in the form of a cross.  However the cross-like plan or net of a cube implies a ‘time of unfolding’, it suggests that it could be returned to three-dimensionality by refolding.

The interesting issue, and one that was highlighted by Abbot’s book ‘Flatland’ is that a two dimensional understanding of a three dimensional world is always lacking. A pyramid slowly passing through a flat plane initially appears as a dot, then as a triangle that is slowly increasing in size, but never as a fully realised three-dimensional object. One way therefore of thinking about a ‘trace’ is as a two dimensional piece of evidence of a three dimensional object. If so, we can develop an account of how the incomplete nature of this trace, in relation to the totality of the object, leads to an ambiguity of read. For instance the ‘imprint’ of a box left on the sand, doesn’t tell us anything about its height or whether or not the top of the box is at right-angles to the bottom.

Traces are dependent on events happening between objects or things. For instance a bird flies into a window and leaves a trace or imprint of its collision. 

A trace of a bird that has left its imprint on a glass window

A trace or imprint in a drawing or painting reinforces our awareness of the paper or canvas as a flat material plane. It highlights the idea that a drawing can be an object, a thing in the world that acts upon it and can be acted upon, rather than being an illusion or window on the world. In this way a drawing can be seen as a record of facts after the event.  However an imprint can also be a representation, for instance a handprint not only captures a moment of touch between the paper and the hand, it operates as a representation of a hand. Drawing has this ability to operate in two ways at once. It can be simultaneously a copy or illusion of reality and reality itself. It can be both image and information, arena for action and/or window on the world. Every drawing could be seen as a collection of traces, marks left over from the hand’s passage, but as we step back from the image, some of these markings might look like landscapes, or portraits.

As has already been mentioned, traces are often imprints of three-dimensional solid bodies left on flat planes. Therefore another word we can use is ‘touch’. These traces are memories of what happened when one object ‘touched’ another. One of the oldest images we have is that of a human hand ‘printed’ onto a cave wall, the artist literally touching the surface in order to make an image.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines touch as “That sense by which a material object is perceived by means of the contact with it of some part of the body.” We can by analogy ‘touch’ one object with another. When my coffee cup is put down on the table it can be seen as ‘touching’ the table and a record of this touching might be the ring stains of spilt coffee that have run down the sides of the cup.

One of the key issues about touch is that it is both immediate and unmediated. There is no time-delay, no medium between the subject and the object, the sensing organ is in direct contact with the sensed object. Similarly a print from the surface of an object is a record of a direct contact, a one to one relationship.  Touch is also identified with the real. If you can’t believe your eyes or ears, and believe that taste is subjective, you can still argue that to touch is to prove.  In this way we come to another area of meaning surrounding traces, that of the direct imprint, a print off an original that suggests that what we have is a more authentic record than a drawn or painted copy because this trace or print maintains some form of original surface contact with an original.

Associated with touch is the idea of a ‘print’, defined as “to press upon a substance or surface, so as to leave an indentation or imprint” We conjoin the two terms touch and print of course when finger-prints are taken. Our most sensitive organs of touch are also our most unique attribute, the ends of our fingers having swirls that are always singular to ourselves. The most common parts of our body to be used to print with being those we associate with intimate close contact with others, the lipstick prints on millions of cups and mugs, perhaps in sheer numbers being higher than the millions of fingertip prints taken throughout the world’s police offices. 

Susan Collis

Artists working in this area include Anna Barriball, her graphite rubbings are intense enough to eventually become as perceptually dense and solid as the originals; Dan Shaw-Town uses rubbing, erasing and sanding as well as folding techniques, Alice Channer has developed a body of work around skin, prints and stained surfaces, Susan Collis makes crafted versions of traces such as paint spills, Sian Bowen has worked with archaeological sites and is interested in touch, Dieter Roth’s ‘worktables’ were drawings that are actual traces left over from his working process, local Leeds artist Hondartza Fraga has done some interesting rubbings of old maritime books as part of a residency in Hull, the Ian Kiaer recent exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute displayed some of his traces of practice pieces, Max Ernst explored ‘frottage’ techniques to stimulate his imagination, these techniques nearly always consisted of taking rubbings from textured surfaces, Jasper Johns’ image ‘Study for Skin, 1. 1962’ is a direct imprint/trace of himself and Gyotaku or ‘fish rubbing’ printing is an established tradition in Japan. In popular culture the legend of the Turin Shroud highlights the emotional impact of the body as an imprint and one aspect of archeological practice was to take Lottin de Laval type rubbings of inscriptions, a response to these saw a terrific exhibition at the Henry Moore Centre in Leeds. As these were two dimensional casts from the surfaces of three dimensional buildings, they could be re-presented as both two and three dimensional representations.

A Lottin de Lavel rubbing taken from an Angkor Wat temple

Anna Barriball 'Door' Graphite rubbing on paper

Dieter Roth 'Worktable' 1979 Worktable top with stains

                             Ian Kiaer Black tulip, offset, stain, 2012: Tape, cardboard, aluminium, coffee and tea stains, glitter

Finally an accidental image, that is definitely a trace and is made by human beings but is it a drawing? Whatever it is it is a powerful image.

The imprint of a crashed Zero fighter plane on the side of a destroyer.

Books mentioned

Abbott, E (1992) Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions New York: Dover

Foucault (2011) Manet and the Object of Painting London: Tate

The debate surrounding Derrida and his understanding of how the trace becomes the sign is fleshed out in:

Critchley, S (2005) The Ethics of Deconstruction London: Motilal Banarsidass

In particular see page 37

‘The present is constituted by a differential network of traces.’ (Critchley, 2005, p.37)

‘The sign is what Derrida calls a trace, a past that has never been present.’ (Ibid)

‘The sign represents the present in its absence. It takes the place of the present.’ (Ibid)

See also:

The Chicago School of media theory has a wonderful blog which can be used to open out more theory behind these things, see for example:

Touch

Print

Artists

Dieter Roth

Hondartza Fraga

Ingrid Calame on tracing

Where stains and traces meet
Drawing as the trace of a touch

Rubbings and frottage