Art and Religion

Votives

I have been thinking more about the relationship that exists between art and religion. For instance the objects I have made that operate as votives, are linked to a need to work with a belief in their effectiveness. Even though these are what I describe as non-religious votives, or secular votives, people still seem to find them effective, as they allow the envisaging of change. A model of a frozen shoulder, allows someone to imagine their frozen shoulder pain, travelling out of their actual shoulder, to now inhabit a new shape, one designed to work as a pain receiver or taker away. In being able to now more actively imagine the pain moving out of their body, somehow this loosens the hold that pain has on the person with the problem. However, in order for the transfer to take place, it has also been found to be far more effective if some sort of verbal ritual is designed to accompany it. Even something as simple as: 

Pain, pain, go away

Move on out of me today

Pain pain, in my shoulder

You are banished to a holder

This simple rhyme, seems to operate not dissimilarly to a spell, it can be chanted in the mind or spoken out loud with others and in some way it seems to help by giving some sort of agency to the pain and with that agency a choice. But if I'm working with votive type objects, what does this have to say about the role of related disciplines such as magic and religion in all this? 

The longer I continue to make art that in some way I see as being able to operate as a way of transforming  a situation, by allowing people to work with an idea that has emerged out of the body/mind and is now an externalised thought, the more I wonder if the making of images would have been inseparable from the way communication with the 'spirit world' was maintained and established by early humans. In particular animist societies would not have had a divide between the two worlds, as they had a belief in the ability of the spirit to move between alive and inanimate things. There would have been no problem for an image to operate as a vessel or substitute for a body. It might become a portal or carrier, working to operate as a doorway into an alternative state of consciousness or as a messaging service, whereby information was passed between the physical and spiritual worlds. In fact visual images can simultaneously operate in all of these various ways and that is one of their unique properties. 

Bison: The Cave of Altamira in northern Spain

For instance an image of a bison could represent the spirit of an animal, become an entry point into the 'animal' as a spirit,  be a message about how the tribe wanted to think about a relationship with that animal, perhaps to establish a communication channel with the many dead animals that had been part of successful hunts, or to make sure the bison was going to continue to be seen alive again during the following hunting year, so that future hunts would be successful. But perhaps the image could be a portal through which a human could pass to become a bison. To be a bison is to know a bison and to know a bison is to be able to hunt it much more effectively. The bison is also a powerful beast and may have been envied as to its strength and resilience, perhaps in some ways it also becomes a figure of worship, an entity whereby a human may want to establish an invisible communication channel, down which the bison entity could pass on aspects of its strength and virility. For a hunting community a bison was their lifeblood, its life was interwoven with theirs as was its death. The mystery of a bison's reappearance each year, probably at similar times and places would have to be explained somehow, also any bison glut or scarcity would have to be responded to, and humans had imagination. Therefore they would imagine why a bison might not reappear. It might be simply fed up in that it had not been appreciated properly last year or it might have encountered a much fiercer predator, in imagination perhaps a creature much more lion like. Gradually a link between ideas, perhaps thoughts communicated around the first warming night fires, would help give form to the materials surrounding early peoples; initially a shape like a bison might have been seen in a rock form lit by a fire, then at another point in the shape of some clay fingered whilst people talked around that fire, or outlined in burnt wood, as a stick was taken out of a hearth.

The Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel 

 The Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel is a very early example of an animal / human hybrid and it would take hundreds of hours to carve images of that sort, therefore the idea must have been long established by then, that material objects could be used as important intersessions in the relationship between humans and what I shall call the spirit world. Whether the lion man carving operated as a doorway, a substitute, a communication channel or in other ways we will never know, but as a physical object it carries an idea of transformation and hybridity that clearly connects humans and lions. Perhaps it was used to channel down a lion's strength and ferocity before setting off for a hunt, or to give to a member of the tribe as an award of some sort, anointing them with the title of 'lion' because of their prowess in battle, the lion-man being part of a symbolic transfer of power. Rulers like to be seen to be anointed and appointed by a God of some sort and this might have been an object taken from a very early example of a ritual process whereby power was both acknowledged and passed on. In all of these cases the image/object lies at the centre of the process and allows for thoughts to be shaped and held in certain forms. I'm also sure that a narrative would have surrounded this object, its function would have been 'talked out', amongst those present. Whether a shaman held court, or it was more a collective experience, who knows, but some sort of ritual collective experience would have been woven around the object, its significance understood by all present. This could be what we would eventually think of as religion. 

My questions in relation to this, are in what way is the visual materialising of thought related to the structures within our brains that help visualise information and are these structures and the processes they support in some way responsible for our religious feelings? If so there would be a necessary connection between the visions made and the spiritual feelings invoked. 

In his book, Paleopoetics, Christopher Collins tries to trace our collective history back much further than when the lion man was being used. He begins by observing that before verbal language, early humans must have had ways of dealing with complex understandings of the world. He refers to Jacob Von Uexküll's idea that each creature's own 'unwelten' or phenomenal world is different. This implies that living beings perceive their worlds in terms of species-specific, spatio-temporal, "self-in-world" subjective reference frames. So if we go back to the special nature of our perceptual systems, visual information is passed from each eye into the brain via the optic nerve. Once information reaches the visual cortex, (Ungerleider and Mishkin, 1982) argued that it is then split into two neural streams, one going to the parietal lobe, (the dorsal stream)  the other the temporal lobe (the ventral stream). The dorsal stream being associated with spatial perception, the ventral stream being associated with object recognition. The ventral stream essentially transforms visual information into representations that hold form or shape, in such a way that things emerge out of the undifferentiated colours and shapes of our complex environments, the brain's processing giving importance to things that hold significance to us. For instance although in our early history there would be no word for ripe fruit yet, the brain would still need to be able to associate the changing colour of fruit with its readiness for eating. That old natural symbol is still in operation and I believe it may have something to do with why we still need to make art, part of our old brain is still stimulated by visual alerts, even manufactured ones like paintings and drawings, triggering our ancient neural pathways, a process that we now call tacit knowledge, instinct, intuition or gut feeling. 

Higher order visual pathways

However the dorsal and ventral streams don't operate separately, they work together. They are like two highways that have multiple connecting roads between the two. As the brain develops, more connecting roads form as information gets exchanged. As more information gets exchanged, the system becomes increasingly efficient at identifying and interacting with objects in the visual world. The dorsal stream never acts alone, nor does the ventral stream. Instinct and rationality become entwined. 

The interconnections between dorsal and ventral pathways

In fact, where, what and how are intermingled and cross reference each other, (Sheth and Young, 2016), one element of the picture is always being checked out by another, until a 'something' emerges out of the complicated moving background jumble of scanned perceptions. The visual materialising of a thought, as in a drawing, could be regarded therefore as following a similar process. Could, I begin to think, certain types of drawings be regarded as models of how visual perception itself operates?
What if you see a shaking of the leaves of a tree. Sometimes it's obvious what is causing the shake, but at other times it's not. Is it a creature moving along a branch? Is it the wind? But what if you can see no animals and you feel no breeze? Your imagination will quickly come into play. It's complex but simple at the same time. Interconnected in parallel with the “what” of the ventral pathway, is the dorsal stream, the vision for action stream of "where” and “how”. The guidance of actions is decided upon alongside having to locate associated objects in a space. Do you want to grab or avoid these objects in space, i.e. stay and see what's going on or run away? In fact all of the brain’s lobes participate in vision, and multiple visual centres are located throughout the brain, but all of them are as they become attuned to each other, subject to bayesian inference, that statistical method that updates the probability of a hypothesis as more evidence or information becomes available.

Instinct is the stuff of chimpanzees as well as humans, so how does it relate to the forming of religions? I think its got to do with trust and belief. In order for all that dorsal and ventral pathways stuff to work at the speed it does, we cant actually think about it, we need to trust in our instincts. Gut feeling for one reason or another seems to work for us. But what happens when we develop higher order thinking mechanisms such as inductive logic? They are slower, but in their step by step logic, they can stand up to scrutiny and you can decide whether or not the logic is 'true' or not. Hence we have scientific reasoning. Of course this works well for us, but as we have seen in the past it can also lead not to war, but to an ability to wage war with an efficiency that becomes inhuman. As a necessary balance, I believe that art still in many ways allows us to use instinct or an internal sense of rightness, when either trying to solve non scientific problems or to simply re-engage with the world. As an artist you develop a belief in your feelings for materials, in the particular way your body moves, for certain sounds or ways of making images, but you don't have to know what these things mean; you operate using tacit knowledge.

Ramsey Dukes: Diagram of the relationships between disciplines

Looking at the magic researcher Ramsey Dukes's diagram, you can see the relationship between art and religion, both emerging from a belief in intuition, but religion has to work with more thinking than feeling, i. e. it needs structures within which to work, such as codes of behaviour as set out by the various religions or the stories told by a shaman to make sense of the spirit world that shamanic practices might help you enter. Hence religion needs a certain amount of inductive logic, so that followers can be shown reasons for the truth of their beliefs. Art still operates as a more 'open' portal into intuitive logic, which is why it is both useful to religion and at the same time a problem; because all visual images are open to interpretation. According to Dukes, magic is simply 'what works', using any combination of logic, symbols, rhetoric, atmosphere, influence etc. to effect an impact on others. Art in many ways 'bleeds' into both religion and magic, its edges of 'effect' being formed by whatever surrounding narratives are being told. 

For instance the image below is a meditation on paper, made by people who were Indian tantric mystics. The image operates as a portal for the mind and is for individual contemplation.

Indian tantric art

The black square by Malevich, below, was hung high up in the corner of a room, the traditional spot for a sacred Russian Orthodox religious icon, signalling a shift from religious worship to pure, secular artistic devotion.

Malevich

The 'Ultimate Painting' 1963 by Ad Reinhardt, is an example of 'Art-as-Art' or 'Art for Art’s Sake'. Reinhardt insisted on separating art from everyday life, trying to erase any content other than the art itself. He described the work as "a pure, abstract, non-objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting"

Ultimate Painting' 1963 by Ad Reinhardt

However Reinhardt's paintings have been interpreted as meditations on death, the ultimate end of things and have also been seen as portals into other worlds. Show any group of people a black square and ask them what it means and you will get a wide range of answers, its meaning to each individual being dependent on its use value. 

I have recently completed a commission for a church, the work I installed created a situation that I was able to evaluate in real time, as I was taking tours of the graveyard within which the work was set. 

St Michael's Church installation (Details)

I had made large ceramic ears, installed as portals, many of which were embedded into trees, so that people encountering them could both listen to nature and talk to the trees. But some were free standing, such as the one above, a two sided form that now replaced a former stone cross that had been broken off many years ago. One, (left) was designed to echo the form of the virgin Mary, the other side a more  'normal' ear. It was interesting to hear what people said as they encountered the work, those with an already Christian disposition 'saw' the virgin in the ear, those who had to be shown the idea, mostly then 'got it'. I made the ear as a portal, or ear trumpet, that could enable people to speak to the dead. When we attempted to speak to Alice via the ear below, we were all aware that the graveyard had been covered by brambles for many years. Alice's memorial was broken; no one had put flowers on her grave for many years. Alice had died young and she had had no words of comfort given to her since her grave had been abandoned. To then 'speak' of her, to address her directly was an emotional moment. Some people were brought to tears as a few words were said. A few words of comfort to let Alice know that she was being acknowledged by people who had never known her, but who on this day, in the Autumn of 2026, were minded to try and comfort her. 

An ear for Alice

The fact that an object could be a portal between the mundane world of today's busy city and the spirit of a long dead child did seem to work, an idea as ancient as the one whereby an image of a bison, allowed early humans to communicate with its spirit.

Ref.

Collins, C. (2013) Paleopoetics London: Columbia University Press

Mortimer Mishkin, Michael E. Lewis, Leslie G. Ungerleider, (1982) Equivalence of parieto-preoccipital subareas for visuospatial ability in monkeys: Behavioural Brain Research, Volume 6, Issue 1, Pages 41-55, ISSN 0166-4328,

Sheth BR and Young R (2016) Two Visual Pathways in Primates Based on Sampling of Space: Exploitation and Exploration of Visual Information. Front. Integr. Neurosci. 10:37. doi: 10.3389/fnint.2016.00037

See also:

Joseph Campbell

What is embodiment?

Abstraction and non figurative drawing

Indian aesthetics

Embrace insignificance 

An exhibition of votives

Imagined and neurobiological maps

 (c) Lee lab

I am often creating imagined maps of the body. But I'm also very aware there are other approaches to visualising the internal body and one I'm often thinking about is the mapping process that neurobiological scientists are constantly developing as they attempt to follow the complex interconnections that the body's neurological systems undertake.

Wei Chung Allen Lee of the Harvard Medical School research team that are looking at mapping the body's neurological systems has this to say, “The brain is structured so that each neuron is connected to thousands of other neurons, and so to understand what a single neuron is doing, ideally you study it within the context of the rest of the neural network. In essence, the structure of how our neurons are wired is our “self,” and connectomics is the key to understanding this structure." My lab is interested in... how those neurons are active within the functioning circuit. We do this in the context of behaviour, ranging from making decisions to executing actions."

However it is the fruit fly that is providing the material for the research and initially what we are looking at is a map of drosophila.  

The fruit fly: Drosophila

As an animist, I wondered what it must be like to be immersed into the fruit fly's umwelten or subjective reality. The project had revealed that complex behaviours and motor control were driven largely by distributed local neural circuits throughout the body rather than a single top-down brain command centre. I began to wonder how similar we might be to a fruit fly, how many of our own behaviours were the result of distributed local circuits. 

As a result of all this work the first complete synapse-level wiring diagram of the entire adult fruit fly central nervous system, uniting brain and nerve cord connectomes has been published and the images are wonderful.

The Male CNS dataset covers the fruit fly’s brain and ventral nerve cord.

Artificial deep neural networks, computer models inspired by the human brain that use multiple layers of interconnected processing units, to learn complex patterns from raw data, are used to extract information about cells and their connectivity from massive datasets. That being so, I do think there is room for some doubt on how the final pattern works, as the computer models will be looking for certain patterns and perhaps not others, but it does all seem pretty impressive.  The fruit flies, pretty impressive in themselves, are not the only animals used, mice also provide models used to help study the basic principles of how neural circuits are built and operate, thus helping to find out how neural networks are connected to each other to perform the different computations that underlie behaviour. People, flys, mice and artificial neural networks, all deeply interconnected, as they weave a new set of patterns. 

As I read about these things I was reminded of my time in Gothenburg, where I became very aware of how monkeys were used in the development of new spinal injury treatments. At the time I wrote about how Bruno Latour used the image of a constant fermentation that arises as a physical/chemical/quantum/emotional/psychological and economic mix, all being part of the currents that flow within vast energy seas of interconnected information, but the bit we think we swim in tends to be experienced as being very shallow and we easily forget its depths.  Therefore we need to be reminded that amongst many other things, we are beholden to dead animals, who have given their lives for our research. As a child in the 1950s the short prayer we had to say before meals, whereby we thanked God for there being enough food to eat went,

“For what we are about to receive,
may the Lord make us truly thankful. Amen.”

That small moment, whereby as a child I had to think about where the food came from was important. It would seem to me that we need something similar as a recognition of the role of other creatures in providing us with information that helps us to think about how we are ourselves constructed. The images below are provided curtesy of a mouse and we can think of them as visual prayers or simply that they look magical.

3D images of two neuron types in the mouse cerebellum. (c) Lee lab

An image of two granule cells (light and dark blue) connected to three mossy fibers (red, pink, and yellow) in the mouse cerebellum.

As a small token of appreciation, I have written a short poem; like the one about being grateful for the food we have, it is targeted at children, my 1950s brain, still wired in a particular child focused way and yet at the same time I'm mindful that magic practices often require a rhyming spell in order to make them effective. Even Sooty had to chant, "Izzy wizzy, let's get busy!" before his spells would work, all of which is part of the life soup, or witches brew,  that consists of the physical/chemical/quantum/emotional/psychological and economic mix that Bruno Latour was thinking about. 

All creatures of the earth and sky,
Of tiger, monkey, fish and fly.
Please listen to my humble prayer.
My endless, heavy debt of care.
For creatures of the land and sea.
Who've given up their lives for me.

So how does this mapping of body's neurological systems relate to what I'm doing as a creator of imagined interiors of the body? Studies have shown that within an area of the brain known as the somatosensory cortex there exists a map of the body, with different regions corresponding to different body parts. These maps are responsible for processing sensory information, such as touch, temperate and pain, as well as body position. For example, if you touch something hot with your hand, this will activate a particular region of the brain; if you stub your toe, a different region activates. For decades now, the commonly-accepted view among neuroscientists has been that following amputation of a limb, neighbouring regions rearrange and essentially take over the area previously assigned to the now missing limb. But this has presented a conundrum. Most amputees report phantom sensations, a feeling that the limb is still in place, this can also lead to sensations such as itching or pain in the missing limb. Also, brain imaging studies where amputees have been asked to ‘move’ their missing fingers have shown brain patterns resembling those of able-bodied individuals. I.e. the body itself has an imagined map, one that remains in place, even if parts of the body are no longer there. In my own imagination therefore, the imagined body map I internally possess myself, becomes merged with the imagined body that I am over the years constructing and externalising, not only of my own interoceptual feelings, but of other people's. 

Pain map made in response to a conversation 

Sclerotome pain referral patterns 

Diagram from a Hermetic practice

The mystic interior

The more I talk to people about their pain, the more I realise it is a complex issue. For instance, sclerotomal pain is typically felt as something deep down or dull and it is poorly localised; people often describe it as “achy” or “boring”. In contrast: dermatomal pain, that connected to an area of the skin linked to sensory neurons from a particular spinal nerve, can be sharp and burning and well defined, as when a spinal nerve root is compressed, irritated, or inflamed (such as from a herniated disc, spinal stenosis, or a viral infection like shingles). This is closely linked to myotomal pain, as felt by a group of skeletal muscles supplied by a single spinal nerve root; the pain symptoms occurring when a nerve root in the spine is compressed, irritated, or injured. This time a pain might feel crampy and be associated with restricted movement or fatigue. There also exist maps of acupuncture points that treat deep connective tissue pain as well as sclerotomal maps that assist clinicians in tracing the origin of pain that doesn’t follow a typical dermatome or myotome, such as pain around the shoulder blade from lower cervical irritation or deep pelvic pain from sacral sclerotome involvement. I. e. where pain seems to be in the mind map, is not necessarily, where an actual problem lies in the body.  It is as if the body can tell lies or at least stories that are hard to read or understand. These issues chiming with my own continuing struggle to visualise the sensations I have when inhabiting this old body of mine. These other maps all operating as parallel forms of awareness, that lie in that area of associated attempts to visualise the internal body from the point of view of other disciplines. My imagined interoceptual maps acknowledge their existence and participate in diagrammatic dialogues with the observer but the area of overlap is one of intuitive feeling and never one of scientific verisimilitude, as much about diagrams taken from magic rituals as maps of Yorkshire's underlying geology.

Interoceptual body map

Ref.

Caruso, C (2023) A New Field of Neuroscience Aims to Map Connections in the Brain: Scientists working in connectomics are creating comprehensive maps of how neurons connect to one another Harvard Medical School Reseach News January 19, Accessed from https://hms.harvard.edu/news/new-field-neuroscience-aims-map-connections-brain 17 Oct 26. 

Schone, HR et al. Stable Cortical Body Maps Before and After Arm Amputation. Nature Neuroscience; 21 Aug 2025; DOI: 10.1038/s41593-025-02037-7

See also:

A Highway Code for pain

The search for an image

Pain relief drawings

Visualising pain

What lies beneath

When I walked out this morning

Potternewton Park

This morning I went for a walk as I often do, to clear my head and get ready for the day. As I entered my local park, I looked out across the bowl of its space and I was gripped by a feeling of almost religious significance. White mist lay in the central dip, a bright low lying sun, was breaking through the autumnal trees, the mist giving the resultant sunbeams the form of soft focused searchlights. The glow of light was transfixing, the mist moved in the valley, the shafts of light following me as I walked across the grass towards the mist and for once in my life I decided to take some photographs. I have argued many times that I cant work from photographs but I had no drawing materials with me and I wonted to remember this morning. Perhaps because I had been ill and my morning's experience was reminding me of how wonderful the world is, I just took my mobile phone out of my pocket and did what I see so many people do, I used it to record the event. I also tried hard to remember the details of the experience, including how my feet were getting wet as I walked across the grass, needing to get off the tar laid paths in order to walk into the view. So here are the 5 images I took. As someone who still remembers having to load film into a camera and develop it in total darkness by winding it onto a spiral that was then loaded into a container that was then filled with developing chemicals and then having to look at the tiny negative images produced through the enlarging projector, all before going to print, I still think of how important it is to value each shot. 

I have just finished making a series of images about my feelings associated with having a severe urinal tract infection. This post is a reminder of the amazing nature of the external world and is a necessary balance. 

Potternewton Park: Autumn morning sunshine

Over the past decade I have developed a drawing methodology in which inner reflection as well as conversation with others generates visualisations of embodied experience, and I have explored how drawings taken from landscape can be related to embodied memory. I have also developed a body of drawings that stands on its own as a response to landscape. Perhaps this morning's experience will help me to revisit my quest to find some sort of synthesis between all of these approaches. Above all it is a reminder of how wonderful it is to be alive. 

See also:

Drawing and photography 

Speculative grace

Contemporary landscape drawing

A drawing of beaked hawks beard

Drawing plants

In praise of the dandelion

The search for an image

Urinary tract infection

The image above was put together today and it arrived out of a complex series of decisions and experiences. The most pressing was an attempt by myself to respond to a very painful urinary tract infection before I began to lose my memories of what had been felt. One of the most startling aspects of having the infection was the sudden appearance of blood in my urine. I was needing to urinate while in a hospital waiting area, eventually finding a toilet and instead of getting the relief of urinary pressure, I was shocked by the sight of red blood against the white of the ceramic toilet. I had had and still have pain in my left testicle, although due to antibiotics kicking in this is much reduced. This is linked to pains in my lower back. But the worst conjunction of pain was a combination of constipation and ache caused by the infection, alongside a need to both urinate and defecate, neither of which I could do. I have been making drawings and trying to respond to my feelings about this, and have been attempting to find an image that is for myself a summation of what I felt, something that compresses several days pain and worry into itself. Eventually I found that I could bring together two previously existing images to create a new one, mainly due to the fact that I enjoyed the surprise for myself of the conjunction of a red soaked form with a black and white one. I had been using linocut recently, for the first time for years, so that the language of lino was still something I was in touch with or feeling inside. This was an image made as a guide or study for a lino print and was constructed digitally, and working on a computer was more of a necessity because I was working from bed. I needed an image that at some point within it squeezed everything into a narrow channel, an image that felt as if it was too full, an image that was spiky with pain, but above all an image that was about the dangling nature of an in the mind, damaged testicle. So there you have it. I will at some point make a proper linocut of this, but that will be dependent on access to facilities. But is it a good image? In fact, what is a good image? Does it do the job? Can it communicate in such a way that it seems to make sense, without it being simply an illustration? What as an image does it bring to the table? What is the 'extra' it offers?

Edward Hopper carried in his pocket a slightly altered quotation from Goethe. It stated, "Art is...the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me." My own interpretation of this being that our inner feeling tone creates a sensibility by which we filter out a particular view of the world. That is what I am doing both when I'm exploring the possibilities inherent in trying to depict our interoceptual understanding of ourselves and/or when I'm trying to visualise how I see any other aspects of my experience. But not always, sometimes I think I work backwards or upside down. I'm an artist driven to look for images that for one reason or another hold attention and break through to people, even in a world already 'image soaked'. But what do I mean by this? Again I suppose I'll have to circle around the idea in order to begin to tease out some sort of understanding, as these things are never straight forward. Perhaps I'll begin with Barthes.
Roland Barthes in his 1980 book 'Camera Lucida', used the word 'punctum' to describe an unintended, sharp detail in a photograph that unexpectedly pierces, wounds, or deeply moves the viewer on a personal level. I was very taken by this when I first read it and have often misused the word 'punctum' as a way of asking myself and others why any image, not just a photograph, may stick in the mind, or become memorable in some way. Barthes uses the word to refer to a specific element that "jumps out" of an image and 'pricks' the spectator's conscience or emotion. This is for him something unplanned and unexpected, as it relies entirely on the viewer's private history, memories, and associations. For instance a small detail in a photograph may cause you to remember an incident from your past that was very meaningful to you, but perhaps would not be to anyone else. Barthes contrasted this to what he called the studium; the polite, educated understanding of what the photograph is about and what the photographer intended, the punctum in comparison being the disruptive element that breaks through our detachment and striking the viewer with visceral, emotional intensity.
This is one aspect of the search for an image that I'm interested in but it is just that, an aspect, for instance some images hold your attention because of a intellectually stimulating conjunction of image and idea, such as those produced by Mark Tansey, others are simply uncanny (das Unheimliche) having that unsettling psychological feeling, as when something simultaneously feels deeply familiar and strangely alien, such as Meret Oppenheim's 'Object', her fur covered tea cup from 1936, which even after all these years of being exhibited as a classic surreal object, is an image that sticks in the mind. 

Meret Oppenheim 'Object',

However I cant use the tropes of Surrealism any more because they are of a type, or what I would now call if using the term beyond the world of photography, the 'studium'; the educated understanding of what the image is about. Finding an 'image' is a hard thing, because it is doubly hard to surprise yourself, especially when you are like myself someone who has been in the art business for a long time, and have therefore seen a wide variety of approaches. Perhaps it is easier to be a naive artist, or perhaps not, as people sort of expect naive artists to behave in certain ways, thus beginning for myself, to eliminate the unexpected before I've even seen the work. When I recently went to look through a magazine focused on outsider art, my first thought was that it all looked like 'outsider art', somehow outsiders had begun to know what they should be doing as outsiders. I want to be an insider who can at a chosen time turn inside out. 

That old idea of Goethe's that art is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, can of course be inverted, the reproduction of the world that is inside me by means of the world outside me, is a pretty good description of how I sometimes work when I'm trying to visualise interoceptual experiences. Again I'm looking for something that sticks or pricks that image of 'normality' or expectation. It's perhaps the opposite of 'like'. It is not 'nice'. An image is always 'uncomfortable' in some way. Therefore it has to have an element of surprise. 

In order for the unexpected to be be revealed you have to get lost. To get lost implies action. You are doing, and this is very important, you need to do stuff in order to makes things happen, but you also don't need to 'know' what you are doing. Jasper Johns said, "Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that." This is good and a starting point, but it only gets you so far. You also need to be able to pull out of the process in order to notice when something has happened. Johns also said, "I'm not sure what 'coming out right' means. It often means that what you do holds a kind of energy that you wouldn't just put there, that comes about through grace of some sort." I think this is more like it, something is found "to hold a kind of energy", an energy that is created by some sort of active juxtaposition of the elements that make up the image. There being some sort of friction that as it rubs off against itself, it sparks some sort of energy into life. If you can hold on to this, stick it down in some way, without smoothing it out, without finishing it off, well, then you might have an image. 

I was talking to my old friend Steve Carrick about this not long ago and he recommended that I read 'Unknowing' by Rebecca Forman, a book by its very title I could see that it was touching on the subject, but as yet I've not been able to find it. Perhaps he gave me a false trail, but if he did, it did lead to a thought in my head as to what this book could be about. 

I have followed the work of the painter Adrian Ghenie for a while, and have found him a very good example of an image maker. He 'stalks' his images in various ways, sometimes needing to use collage to stir things up and give him glimpses of the unexpected, but he can also use traditional drawing. 

Adrian Ghenie: Detail

Adrian Ghenie: Mobile phone user

During the time of Covid19 like all of us he was isolated, so he drew and one thing he drew were people with mobile phones. He drew them over and over again, rubbing out, redrawing, looking for what they could be. Strangely as the drawings progressed the one constant, the mobile phone in a hand, became the least interesting thing, it was what was doing the listening that was interesting; the who it was who was interacting with the phone had become a discovery. I realised it was as if he heard a phone ringing, and even though it wasn't his, he picked it up and used it as a portal to find an image for a portrait drawing. You sometimes have to do stuff like that to catch an image off guard. 

Urinary tract infection

These are the first 7 drawings I made in response to how I felt about my urinary infection. They are on small A6 sheets of thick paper, again small so that I could do them from bed, this time sitting on it's edge, using a large A3 sketchbook as a table. As is often my want, I was using a dip in pen and ink to establish the idea.

I then followed that session with another using a brush and various coloured liquids, this time slowing down and concentrating on initially one image. 

Coloured image

This was too complicated but pointed to some thoughts about flowing liquids. 

Testicle weight

I went back to the earlier images and picked an idea out that suggested more testicle weight. I started to react to the horror I had when seeing blood in my urine. So I took another tack.

Ist step peeing blood

At this point I returned to using the computer and began processing in Photoshop. 

The first image that seemed to be on its way to being an image

The image immediately above was the first one to intrigue me, this was the last one to emerge directly out of the drawings done as an attempt to capture the feeling tone I had in my body/mind about the situation I was experiencing. I had been in a lot of pain, I was worried as to what it might all mean and the sight of blood in my urine had frightened me. 

I returned to some images working by hand and others I began to edit on the computer. At this point I'm not worried as to the authenticity of working on paper or computer, I'm simply searching for an image.

Pain and heat

For instance I might as in this case, go back directly to a hand made image, scan it and then look to see what happens if certain colours are changed. In this case the coloured image above, is adjusted so that the warm colours are brought out around the groin area. The warmth of pain is one aspect I'm trying to visualise. 

As I was now working on my computer, I had easy access to older images, and began to look through some of them, knowing that I had made some before that might work. What I didn't realise was that I had already made separate images of the final elements I would end up using, but by letting these first sets of drawings go where they needed to go, they had established in my mind an idea of what was needed. Their materiality had allowed a thought to jell and they had triggered memories of recent images. I eventually found one which was of work done to prepare for a linocut, (this seemed a better resolution of my stomach/body) and the other of a shape that was at one point a cutout that I inserted into a much larger image, The point being that it was of an extension, something that I was feeling the testicles were. Notice no penis, in the night the blood seemed to flow directly out of me. Drawings of interoceptual experiences are not to do with any sort of accurate anatomy. The resulting images are neither literal representations of the body, nor simply illustrations, they are materialisations of a process of encounter. I'm now going back to images made on paper.

Peeing blood

See also:

Hopper, Seurat and the study

The preparatory sketch

Using viewfinders

Mathematics, rightness and underlying beauty

Composition within landscape painting

The drawings of Henri Michaux