Collaborative drawing

Marcel Dzama and Raymond Pettibon

Sometimes working with someone else can help trigger new and unpredictable responses to the process of image generation. We all get stuck at one time or another and our own working processes can become too well known, so when that happens it can be really rewarding to work with someone else. Working with other people is also a really useful way to try and minimalise the dreadful 'I'. Being a unique individual is such a hard ask and is perhaps the worst capitalist idea of all, because in many ways it forces us to become our own product. "I am unique therefore I can be sold." One way to try and get out of this trap is through collaborative drawing. For instance Marcel Dzama and Raymond Pettibon have been combining their work, their individual narratives coming together to make compulsive almost convulsive imagery, that brings the implications of each artist's language to the fore.

Marcel Dzama and Raymond Pettibon have also collaborated with Amy Sedaris, sometimes a three way collaboration can throw up even more unexpected results.

Once you get the idea of collaboration it can be something wonderful. Marcel Dzama in collaboration with Bryce Dessner has produced a ballet called 'The Most Incredible Thing', which is an adaptation of a Hans Christian Andersen story. It has a score by Dessner and costumes and sets by Dzama. The collaboration then goes further; Amy Sedaris made a film of the event, at times playing Dzama and also acting out the part of the choreographer, Justin Peck. Roles become blurred and each participant could be a producer, a maker or an actor, Sedaris is also a comedian and the anarchic nature of her comedy, stirs up Dzama's existing visual language of people and things, so that it becomes more unexpected and new hybrids of both shape and purpose are formed. As more people become involved we focus less on the individuals and more on what has been produced.

The Most Incredible Thing

I have tried working with other artists myself and over the last few years have collaborated with a range of different artists in the 'Drawing Dialogue' project. Because this project involves working with artists at a distance, the collaboration has been facilitated by the postal service, a drawing being made and then sent on to the next artist. When working via post you can't return to the imagery, and you can't protect it either, so you have to let it go, which is another good thing. I have recently been working on some new images that have been sent to me, you can see the before and after from some of these below, the drawings have now gone on to a third artist and we both await to see what will have happened to them.

The first image I was faced with was texturally very rich. The base layer looked as if it was a blue cyanotype, which had then been worked on with a layer of watercolour. I used white oil pastel to carve out a space for a drawing of a running bird/human, I had to find an inhabitant that somehow felt right. No real logic, all done by intuition, but that is fine and takes the idea right back to the original 'exquisite corpse' drawings. 

The second image (all three are from the same artist), was I think, made as if the brushstroke surface was a sky, but I turned it through 180 degrees to make it a sea. 

I painted a white gesso rectangular insert and then worked in pen and ink into that, with an image suggestive of some sort of sea monster. The insert was an idea about how to deal with more than one time in an image that I nicked from Richard McGuire’s ‘Here’.

I found the image above really hard to respond to. Mainly because I liked it a lot and didn't want to deface it.  Eventually I found a way to bring in an image of my own that suggested it was a secondary addition to the first image, like a child coming into the room and standing alongside its parent. 

I shall be very interested in how the third artist responds to these images, (there are 12 drawings I'm working on at the moment, 4 images from each artist), because I think they are particularly rich and will require very sensitive or conversely quite dramatic interventions by the next person who works on them. 

I'm also working with another artist on some ideas where we are collaborating using ceramics and textiles. Early days yet but again useful ideas are emerging and they are ones that I would never have arrived at on my own. 

If you were making a film it would require all sorts of collaborations, from actors, via sound and video technicians, to the people that sort out catering, and out of that complexity very sophisticated pieces of communication can emerge. Working in collaboration is something that can be very hard to do as you have to let go of some of your controlling instincts but on the other hand you can find things out about yourself and your work that may surprise you and may really help you reinvent yourself when you go back into the studio. 

My own awareness of these issues has been growing rapidly because of my work with the Leeds Creative TimeBank. The LCT consists of creative people from all types of sectors, including actors, dancers, musicians, designers and artists. By working alongside these other creative practitioners I have become much more aware of how my own working methods and ideas are a product of my fine art training and that I can learn a lot from how others approach their own disciplines. Dancers and musicians are always having to consider how to respond or improvise within a team of collaborators and their total acceptance of this is something that has caused me to question my own view of how the studio operates as a place for solitary contemplation and reflection. 

I'm working through the fact that the shadow of Romanticism is still cast over me and it is something that still seems to be there in the back of peoples' minds when I talk to them about why they want to be artists. Romanticism in many ways celebrated the personality of the entrepreneur, a role whereby individual liberty, coupled with a creative mind, is rewarded with material power. We don't normally place the artist alongside the business entrepreneur, but when you look at their essential characteristics they are in fact the same. A typical example of this in fiction would be Ayn Rand's novel 'The Fountainhead', her character Howard Roark, the architect who totally believes in his own unique vision, being a classic portrayal of the modern artist.  

So why is this? There are some essential tropes associated with romanticism, such as; individual imagination, intuition, individual rights, liberty, creativity, the importance of subjectivity, originality, inspiration, the artist as a brilliant creator, humans at one with and a part of nature, a celebration of nature's power, pride in national identity and spiritual renewal. When you look at these tropes there are several conflicting and perhaps difficult entanglements with what 'Romanticism' represents, some of which, such as 'a pride in national identity', now feel hard to reconcile with 'a celebration of nature's power', but if you look at the Nazi German narrative of native German soil (Heimat) and love of nature, and the use of traditional folk tales to both heighten an awareness of landscape as 'home' and of an ideal, you can easily see how a concept can be constructed that subverts and overturns ideas of individual rights and replaces them with a notion of 'certain individual's rights', or as George Orwell put it, "All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others".  The idea of genius can be easily added into other narratives such as eugenics whereby one race is seen as inferior to another. Add to that Ayn Rand's concept of the philosophy of objectivism, as Darryl Cunningham pointed out in his wonderful graphic novel 'The Age of Selfishness: Ayn Rand, Morality, and the Financial Crisis', you can see that both the economic policies that led to the destruction of the planet and the current idea of artists and the art world stem from the same root. 

Collaboration doesn't mean that there is an escape from commodification, Larry Gagosian knows a good deal when he sees one. Both Warhol and Basquiat are sold by him and putting the two together multiplies their uniqueness by two. At one point when Basquiat was going through a really bad time in relation to his drug addiction, Gagosian paid to fly Basquiat and several of his friends from New York, first class to LA for an opening of Basquiet's work. "I've never seen anything like it on a plane," Gagosian later joked. "It was like these four kind of rough-looking black kids hunched over a big pile of coke, and then they just switched over to these huge joints, and sat up there and smoked them. It was wild. They had their big, hooded ski-glasses on, and big overcoats..." Basquiet's early death brought on by excessive drug use, in many ways ratcheting up the prices for his work. It is easy to forget that Basquiet, as Katharine Arnold, the director and senior specialist in charge of post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s states, "was given space by the gallerist Annina Nosei and was able to create fully realised canvases with the same intensity and vitality as his street art.” The process of transferring his 'street-art' onto canvas, being one that effectively transformed worthless non art world stuff into art world gold. The tricks of the trade of marketing are now so sophisticated that we don't even realise how we are manipulated to 'like' these ideas of uniqueness and difference. Capitalism feeds off the idea of the unique thing that everyone needs because no one else has got it, its like a drug and I have been subject to its effect, like so many other artists. 

However there are other models, most of the anonymous artists that have existed in other times and cultures have operated to make objects that work as a type of invisible glue between people, ideas and things.

Here are a few:

Woman carrying a fertility doll

Backpack with strawberry doll

Someone has found a nail artist who can help them express their nationalist leanings

Henna artist

All of these anonymous artists will have had to work in collaboration with others, its just that we don't tend to think of them as artists, and if we do, society doesn't at the moment value their contributions, but what if the art market didn't exist?  Is there space for a rethinking of what folk art might be and what the purpose of art is?

See also:

The original collaborative proposal (Now out of date)

Support for collaborative drawing

Walking and drawing, art in the streets as well as in the landscape

Drawing as entanglements of life

Clouds

Clouds are vital to the imagination. My first imaginative experience of them was as a boy lying on my back in the long grass looking straight up into the sky and getting lost in looking for images as clouds passed over me on a hot summer's day in Dudley. Peering up past long stalks of grass uncoupled the clouds from any reference point beyond the now giant grass stalks that surrounded my head and this allowed my thoughts to drift and take me away from my home town and into somewhere else far more exciting.
A personally very significant cloud moment was watching the film 'The Agony and the Ecstasy' on the TV. This was the film version of Irving Stone's book based on the life of Michelangelo. There was a scene where Michelangelo, played by Charlton Heston, looks up at the clouds and sees for the first time a vision of his painted images covering the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and he now knows what he is going to paint.

Charlton Heston matted into the frame looking at the painted clouds

This is the image of clouds as painted by Emil Kosa jnr.

At the time I hadn't realised how the images were constructed and was convinced that if I looked long enough at the right cloud formation I would find fantastic images of all the things I wanted to draw. This was just about the time it was dawning on me that I wanted to be an artist and this film gave me a very unrealistic Romantic idea of what life as an artist was like but like many untruths, hidden inside was a truth that stuck with me. 

Godzilla?

I like the fact that this photograph of a cloud formation was seen by many as Godzilla. It suggested to me that things that are designed to appeal to our imaginations, like Godzilla, are much easier to read than objects based on reality. For instance a real dog is seen in all sorts of positions, but a cartoon dog is nearly always seen from the side. Like the dog, when Heston sees an image of God it is also from the side. 

Dog like cloud

I'm sort of drifting off the point, seeing things in clouds or similar amorphous suggestible things, such as blots and splurges of paint is a type of apophenia, or the tendency to perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things, technically the sub category is 'pareidolia', or a tendency for the incorrect perception of a stimulus as an object, pattern or meaning known to the observer, such as seeing shapes in clouds, seeing faces in inanimate objects or abstract patterns, or hearing hidden messages in music. Humans that are attuned to see other humans in everything perhaps though need a retuning, so that they see other possibilities in things and take at least one step away from a tendency to see human values as running through all eventualities. (This is an OOO objection, most psychologists would say that it is perfectly normal for people to see other people in random patterns, because that is what they are mainly interested in; which for me is where the root of certain problems might lie).

This tendency to see more than one thing at once is interesting as it creates action within a static image. It forces the mind to constantly question what is there, which is what normally happens when you see something in movement. It takes a few moments for the brain to sort out a collection of percepts. Add into that time of questioning a peculiarity of language, that for instance these percepts indicate that there is a 'rabbit' within the surrounding complexity, and you have a moment whereby 'chaos' is suddenly clarified and 'fixed' by a noun. The doing or perceiving becomes a thought. The drawings above echo that perceptual problem and show the potential of switch between one possibility and another to give energy and 'life' to a still image. 

If you didn't know what rabbit looked like you might miss it

The photographer has already drawn our attention to what is supposed to be interesting in the above image, which brings me to another issue about contemporary lens based culture. By constantly referring to photographic imagery, sometimes I wonder whether or not we are becoming more and more reliant on technologically mediated images and that we now feel more comfortable with these than we do with ones that are the result of confronting the world directly. For instance this shot of a rabbit was chosen because in profile the rabbit is more recognisable, a fact that allows us to pick it out from a very similar coloured and textured background, however the photographer would have chosen this image from several   possibilities, and would have picked out the one that was deemed to be the most clear or understandable by the audience. I.e. the photographer is doing all the work of picking out and defining what is of interest, so all the audience has to do is receive the image. I have worried about this issue before, so will park the thought for now. (But there is no escaping that rabbits, dogs and God have some profiles more recognisable than others)

If you are interested in clouds as a subject matter the artist most people would turn to first of all is John Constable, a man who lived through the period 1776 to1837. 

Constable was very much an artist of his time and was responding to a wider awareness of the romantic nature of landscape, as well as a growing belief in the power of science and objective reasoning. Clouds in particular suggested both something uncontrollable and indefinable and something that could be studied by close observation. Constable at one point below a drawing of clouds quoting Bloomfield’s lines from his poem 'Winter'.

As when retreating tempests we behold,
Whose skirts at length the azure sky unfold,
And full of murmurings and mingled wrath,
Slowly unshroud the smiling face of earth,
Bringing the bosom joy: so WINTER flies!...
And see the Source of Life and Light uprise!
A height'ning arch o'er southern hills he bends;
Warm on the cheek the slanting beam descends,
And gives the reeking mead a brighter hue,

Constable: A sunbeam descending through clouds

Nature is seen as a place of drama and romantic thrill, and in some ways an extension of the human, tempests have skirts, and murmur and the earth is un-shrouded, revealing its smiling face. So it could be argued that Constable was looking for other things in his cloud studies, things suggestive of human temperament as well as meteorological exactness. 
His tiny sketchbook studies are a lesson to us all in brevity and a reminder that when trying to make notes a conjunction of words and images is sometimes better that just one or the other. 

Constable cloud studies

Constable used the word 'skying' to describe this practice of drawing clouds, as in, ‘I have done a good deal of skying’. A description I would suggest links him to a phrase from our own times, 'blue sky thinking'. 

It is illuminating to compare Constable with Cozens, an artist I have referred to before. 

Cozens: cloud studies

Cozens was interested in how to turn the process of capturing cloud forms into something that could be a marketable teaching aid. His 'how to do it' approach reminding us that Capitalism was becoming the dominant economic force in England during this period. Cozens had already realised that ink blots and paint splodges could be used as marketable tools that could help the amateur painter come up with new ideas, the idea of the amateur being something that was also at the time new; like hobbies, these were activities only available to those rich enough and with spare time on their hands. 

Cozens: ‘A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape’ 1785

This was a time when workers were being forced to sell their labour in an increasingly competitive urban environment; because people who traditionally had made their living from the land in agricultural trades, were increasingly being dispossessed of their traditional cottages and rural homes, as land owners turned to new industrial means of production and removed no longer needed people from their lands. The powers that ruled wanted a disciplined obedient class of wage workers who would work for a pittance, and the idea that everything could be turned into a commodity had become more and more entrenched as a model idea. The problem of creating a disciplined and regimented workforce was though difficult. After living in the countryside and leading a life led by responding to the various changes in the conditions of nature, submitting to the routine of going to work daily, for a set number of hours, usually inside a dark noisy building, was an alien concept. The working day under a pre-capitalist agrarian system would have been shaped by hours of light and darkness, as most work took place out of doors. The intensity and length of labour being dictated by seasonal considerations, such as planting or harvest periods and the sky was the main indicator of these things. 

Here for me lies the paradox. As people were driven off the land, city living becomes the norm and the new industrial class of owners and managers become the people that can afford to buy Constable's paintings and who can take up Cozen's courses in art. Understanding the sky moves from being something everyone could do, to a specialist preoccupation only followed by artists and scientists. At the same time that Constable's 'Hay Wain' was receiving plaudits from the Parisian art critics, agricultural workers were being driven into the city only to find themselves homeless and starving because their skills (such as being attuned to the different cloud patterns and the weathers they foretold), were no longer needed. 

I have to be careful as I write because as the words emerge, like a drawing, what I find myself saying wasn't what I started off thinking about. But this economic divide does worry me because it still exists and fine art is often seen as only for the well heeled collector. 

So what use are these clouds? The fact that their forms are in constant metamorphosis is a wonderful stimulant for invention. At the core of image making is the fact that you don't know what you are going to do when you start. The reason you leave a drawing unfinished and in an amorphous state, is to let your unconscious take over. At some point all drawings on their way to becoming something pass through a 'cloud' of unknowing stage and that is why clouds are so important to our collective artistic imagination. This 'inventiveness' is useful for anyone, not just artists and is an essential part of how we respond to the rest of the world and accept the serendipity of interconnectedness. Clouds are also things that are 'undomesticated', they are nature at play and suggest a world other than the built forms that humans come up with. The more we live indoors, the more time spent typing on computers in dark rooms, the more clouds become a symbol for imaginative escape. Back in 1802, (click here) Luke Howard's 'Essay on the modification of clouds' had an enormous influence and created an appetite amongst the educated classes for images of clouds. In a similar way we can download from the Internet the latest advances in science and go beyond the clouds, out into space or down into the spaces of the quantum universe. However even in these 'sublime' territories Romantic clouds still exist. Images from the Large Magellanic Cloud and cloud chambers now inhabiting our visual vocabularies just as powerfully as storm clouds did in the romantic visions of the 18th and 19th centuries. 

Large Magellanic gas clouds 

Cloud chamber trajectories 

I've used cloud images myself in several different ways, sometimes as in the ceramic versions below to reverse expectations, in this case making light airy insubstantial things out of an earthy solid clay material and exhibiting them on the ground, so that they resemble coprolites. 

Ceramic clouds

Coprolites

In the two watercolour images below I used clouds as a device to obscure what would have been central to the image, as if those clouds that stopped you looking at the earth from your passenger plane window, had begun to follow you around and to always get in the way of your ability to see the world for what it is. 

Clouds as obscuring devices

Clouds are always with us and are fundamental to our visual vocabulary; different cultures will return to them over and over again, but each time with perhaps a slightly different intent.

Xia GUI: Mountain Market, Clouds, Clearing Mist (1127–1279)

Cory Arcangel: Super Mario Clouds

Gal Weinstein: ‘el al’, 2017, acrilan, styrofoam, graphite, felt and steel wool
 

Stains and blots Monoprint as a way of stimulating ideas
Seeing things for the first time
Clouds in the drawings of Patrick Hall
Drawing water
Drawing water part two

Why Proust still matters

The Tattoo: drawing and the body

Some of the oldest drawings we have evidence of were done on human bodies. Tattoos have been central to the way humans communicate meaning through drawing for tens of thousands of years and have been used by cultures across the world. So perhaps it is about time this blog looked at such a fundamental area of drawing. It is interesting in terms of my own self-awareness that I have not posted on tattoos before. Perhaps I'm still at the back of my mind suffering from that old high/low culture divide and an art form that if I look around me is ubiquitous, has somehow been not taken as seriously as it should have been, because at some point in my past it was introduced to me as an art form only taken up by criminals and sailors. It is in fact one of the most vital and living art forms around; it supports the making of wonderful images and it clearly works as a communication tool.

Scythian mummy tattoo, Pazyryk, Russia. 200 to 400 BC

Drawings of other Scythian mummy tattoos

One of the oldest examples I am aware of is this Scythian mummy tattoo from Pazyryk in Russia from around 200 to 400 BC. It is a very rare thing to find a tattoo as old as this, and what interested me was how zoomorphic junctures, or the mixing of one animal with another is central to the design. I have been thinking a lot recently about our position in the world and if we see ourselves as another animal like others, perhaps we might be more sympathetic to our fellow creatures and less likely to treat them simply as things to do with as we may. One reading of this tattoo is that it represents the fluid nature of animal identities and that there were no clear distinctions between them and people in the mind of the person who had been tattooed. The world of the shaman, often dissolved the differences between people and animals or landscapes, moving beyond empathy into a positive energy giving relationship that gave people meaning. I would like to think that these tattoos were part of the communication to one's self and others of something of that nature. Animism and other early pre-organised religious ways of coming to terms with the world, seem to me to link these very early ideas of how we relate to the world and each other, with contemporary thinking in relation to how we are responding to an awareness of the Anthropocene. (The name we are all becoming more aware of for the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment)

I think it's fascinating that someone in Leeds can walk into a tattoo parlour and ask for a Maori tattoo design. These designs use 'Manawa' lines which represent your life, or life journey during your time spent on this Earth. This idea which seems so similar to the idea of the 'wyrd', a Northern European tradition from pre-Christian times, feels as if it is really needed in a society where so many people feel uncoupled from the world and anxious because their lives lack meaning. Branching out from the 'Manama' lines are 'Koru'  lines and these can represent both people and new growth. Their shapes originally deriving from the tiny spiral growth shoots of a New Zealand Fern plant. As 'Koru' or growth lines are added, important people are linked into your life journey, such as mothers, fathers, children, loved ones etc. 

A contemporary tattoo based on a 'koru' form

It could be argued that taking an idea from one culture and using it within another is a debased concept. But I'm not so sure. If something is needed in one culture and an answer for that need can be seen as part of another culture, I see no reason to argue against it. I would rather celebrate it and help to communicate a wider cultural awareness of what the symbolism might mean. For instance if a Fern type image represents new growth and new relationships, shouldn't this be part of a ritual that celebrates the fact? 

People that involve themselves in tattoo culture are part of a unique collaborative art form. The person that has their body tattooed will build a close relationship up between themselves and one or several tattoo artists. It is a relief to see that each image does not come associated with a tattooist's signature, there being some sort of recognition that this is a proper collaborative art form. 

A full body tattoo combining a variety of styles.

This full body tattoo combines eastern mysticism with western Op Art and old style symbolism. Bi-lateral symmetry gives overall compositional coherence to the imagery and the effect is very powerful. 

Eastern symbolism 

Eastern symbolism dominates this torso, but other images such as a picture of Big Ben are also used to give a global worldwide cultural expression to the projected image. 

The all over animal

The old animist urges are still around and I was surprised at how many tattoos are designed to create some form of metamorphosis between human and animal forms. 

I am only just beginning to research this area of drawing and the more I do so the more interesting I think it is. Especially in the cross fertilisation of tattoo images from various cultures. Homi K Bhabha's 'The Location of Culture' could be rewritten in relation to the way that various traditions have now been morphed into totally new forms (what Bhabha termed at the time, "hybridisation"), because of the need for contemporary cultures to find expressive forms that can do justice to the various needs that people have within them. I have been recently doing some work with a jewellery designer who has long been aware of the power of body decoration, so I have been making my own drawings for the body. I shall in the near future put up more posts on my growing awareness of body decoration as time goes on, but for now I just wanted to break through an old mental barrier, one that had me thinking that tattoos were something for other people; outsiders, not things that are central to nearly all world cultures, and which in some instances, seem to be the dominant form of inter-personal communication.

Auschwitz number tattoo

Tattooing was introduced at Auschwitz in the autumn of 1941, and this may be why I have avoided looking at tattoos before now. I had long associated tattooing with branding, with a way of numbering people, so that they were demeaned and reduced to a disposable thing. I need to both never forget this and yet at the same time respond to the fact that many people  find the tattoo a way of deepening their ability to make meaningful inter-personal communication. 

The tattooist Inaki Aires is an interesting example of an artist that has decided to use the tattoo as his selected platform and his spiritual diagrams are very clearly of an interest to a growing community of the tattooed. 

Inaki Aires 

I have been working on ideas myself but they are not yet properly realised.

See also:

The fine art of the tattoo
Paper and skin