Friday, 31 July 2026

Venice Biennale 2026: Part one

My focus when visiting Venice Biennales has usually been on drawing, but this year there are a lot of exhibitions devoted to the ethnic traditions of the artists involved, and drawing is not always central to those cultures. I have therefore decided to simply show more of what I felt moved me or gave me pause for thought, especially as the biennale selection process does redress a Eurocentric balance and I would like to support the work in attempting to do that by the sadly dead before it opened curator Koyo Kouoh. The 61st Venice Biennale is entitled 'In Minor Keys' and it focuses on quiet, overlooked, and non-centralised voices. It was fascinating to watch videos of artists talking about their obsessions and so many of them saw art as central to their lives, without it, one artist from Kenya stated, they would have no need to carry on living. It was a relief to see so many alternative voices, even if I questioned one of the premises of the biennale which was to show that the world of the art market was not the only art world. There are many curators, buyers and art gallery owners who would I thought be going to see this Biennale and who I'm sure would be thinking about contacting those artists still alive and who were showcased in Venice, who they felt were 'under represented'. The careers of these artists might then take a step onto another level as they are shown on the world art market stage.  Something that I realise is nothing new, on the plane over to Venice I was reading Martin Gayford's Venice: City of Pictures and he writes about artists such as Bellini having to balance two worlds. The desires of the church to have meaningful images made of significant Biblical moments and the needs of a new rising class of rich art cognoscenti, who wanted the best money could buy, for their own private collections. They wanted to be able to show off to others that they had the purchasing power to have paintings made just for them. Going into one church, I saw this what I think the church literature said was a painting by Tintoretto, but which doesn't look like his style, that for me summed up the tension between the need to re-create a religious moment in paint and the need to satisfy a patron. 

Tintoretto, perhaps not

In this painting by Tintoretto or someone who was painting in Venice around the 16th century, you can see the tension between two needs.The painting was obviously completed as an image that was to visualise a moment from a religious text and then the donor must have insisted his portrait was put into the image, causing an awkward disjointed picture to be produced, in which the two figures in the painting bear no relationship between each other, except that they both stare out at whoever is looking at it. 

This time in Venice I felt far closer to many of the artists showing at this Biennale, than I do to the art stars of galleries such as Gagosian, even if some of those art stars are ex students of mine. I could look at some of the work this year and think, oh yes that is achievable with the resources I have available; in fact there were times when I looked at certain work and thought, "I've dealt with that idea myself and my work could sit in the company of these other artworks without shame". I'm already harping on about myself I'm afraid and this is very much a reflection of the fact I no longer teach. My earlier reports on biennales were to help students who undertook the drawing strand of fine art, find a way through the mass of work they would be confronted with, but I no longer have that responsibility, so have the luxury of simply reflecting on things that helped me organise my thoughts in one way or another but teachers never stop teaching, so there will always be some reflections on how work seen can help generally with art practice.  

The two main exhibition spaces are the Arsenale and the Giardini but there are also collateral events that you bump into all over the city and I will begin with one of those, simply because of a sticker I saw on a lamppost right next to the place we were staying. 


The sticker suggested that "cultural wars numb and disarm us" as Capital gets on with reality. So was I just fooling myself going round these exhibitions and thinking that art could effect some sort of social change or believing that it could raise awareness of the difficult issues that confront us all, at a very difficult moment in the world's history. 

The Venice Biennale doesn't happen in isolation, there are ongoing wars, famine, civil upheaval, global warming and many other issues going on at the same time. Therefore 
I find it difficult to separate out the art from an underlying awareness of the world's general 'unease' with itself. There are small flyers pasted up all over the city and several of these ask direct questions as to whether or not I should be there, as the biennale was a conflicted vehicle, many pavilions representing governments that had poor track records in human rights, or who were engaging in war or were being accused of genocide. So perhaps my first post on this year's biennale ought to be one reflecting on a chance encounter in a repurposed church of the work curated by a PussyRiot member, an exhibition devoted to giving a voice to those people in Russia who have been often rendered invisible to the many us who live in Western Europe. 

The Pavilion of (DIS)SENSE was held in the ex-church of San Leonardo. A place that at first I thought was a comment on the status of art's greatest star, Leonardo da Vinci, but my brain was racing ahead of itself. In the entrance to the pavilion was a poster depicting Putin riding the Venetian winged lion 


In the foyer was a copy of an exhibition catalogue of a Pussy Riot curated show dedicated to political prisoners, illegally detained in Russia, 'Resistance Imprisoned'. 


Resistance Imprisoned was an exhibition bringing together drawings, texts, embroideries, photographs, and objects, all of which had been created by political prisoners. Among them being Nadya Tolokonnikova, co-founder of the feminist collective Pussy Riot, who is now an international figure of resistance to authoritarianism, imprisoned in Russia in 2012 for daring to sing against Putin in a Moscow cathedral, since her release, she has continuously transformed her experience of incarceration into an artistic weapon.

I have posted before on the uses of paper in prisons. At the time I wrote, 'In jail, the everyday things we take for granted have their values changed. Paper, in the form of books, magazines, letters, toilet paper or simply rubbish becomes valued not only for what it is, but for what it can become.' Pinned to the exhibition wall were a series of small images made by Russian political prisoners and these images brought me to tears, not necessarily because of their artistic power, but by demonstrating to myself how art can be made about the human condition in almost any circumstances and that as a form of communication it can thrive under the most harsh conditions. These small drawings were made on torn off sections of prison sheets, information flyers, envelopes, notebook pages and other scraps of material. As the curator, Nadya Tolokonnikova, states, the cell becomes the studio. 


The text becomes the cell of imprisonment out of which someone needs to escape

The text above is about toiletries and is issued by Correctional institution FKU T-2 of the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) for the Lipetsk Region. It identifies a standardised issue pack for women entering or held within the Russian prison system. The identification numver ТУ 15.12.12-001-08828158-2020 is a Russian technical specification number, similar to a manufacturing standard and it relates to a particular toiletries kit that contains: 

Toothpaste, 30 g – 1
Sanitary pads – 10
Toilet soap, 100 g – 1
Toilet paper, 25 m – 1

All of these images were simply pinned to black paper and below each image the text was set out as below:

Name:
Born:
Sentence:
Crime: 

Like so: 

Some more of the images from the exhibition:















I am not going to critique them as individual works of art, these are works of resistance, but they are still artworks and as such deserve being looked at and reflected upon just as much as the images that would have been on the walls of this church before it was deconsecrated, or the many images that I will be showing of other contemporary art work I saw when I was in Venice. 

Where the alter would have been in the church, on the floor was a photo-collage entitled 'Victoria' by Katia Margolis, an image that pays tribute to a Ukrainian cultural figure killed by Russian aggression, the late writer and researcher Victoria Amelina. 

Katia Margolis: Victoria: 2022

A 'T' shirt available in the exhibition stated the obvious but it still worked. 

Death in Venice

So my first report on Venice this year is a political one, but one that hopefully puts the rest of the work I will be talking about in a proper perspective. It also is a reminder of the fact that drawing is the most democratic of the visual arts and that in times of crisis, it can be used as a powerful tool for the communication of individual trauma within political repression.

See also:


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Wednesday, 22 July 2026

Decor Art

A painting from my parent's house

My step mother died last year and it took a while to sort out her affairs. However, her niece contacted me recently to tell me that everything was now in order and that a couple of items that she believed had come to her aunt from my dad needed to find a home. She had found a couple of cross stitched copies of paintings made by my mother as a distraction when she was dying with cancer and two small paintings. It was agreed that my sister would have one of the paintings and a cross stitched image that was based on a Rembrandt painting and that I would get to have the other two images. I didn't remember ever seeing the painting I received, but my sister did remember hers, as it was on the wall of one of the houses she lived in when she was a girl. I am though a lot older than her and my parents, who tended to move house every two or three years, had lived in several houses after I left Dudley.  However, the more I look at the painting, the more I become intrigued. 

The painting's signature 

The painting is signed, with a name that could be Kine, Kinn or Klien or something similar. I found out that paintings signed with the "K" last name were often painted by what were called "Decor Artists". There were many European and American painters in the mid-1900s who painted cheap, commercial oil landscapes and signed them as "Kine", "Kinn" or similar, which were sold in furniture and department stores. These mass-produced "factory paintings" were also by the late 1980s made in overseas workshops such as Dafen Village in China. Skilled but uncredited painters used their skills to quickly create and reproduce works. I also found the following statement about this type of painting.... "while many vintage decor paintings from the 1950s–1970s possess a certain charm or historical value, they generally hold little to no long-term monetary or gallery value". This use of various types of value systems of course intrigued me; historical value in this case was there, but no monetary or 'gallery' value. In the art market, gallery value is the standard retail price an artwork commands when sold through a commercial art gallery. It typically represents the base "Artist Price" doubled to cover the gallery's commission and operational expenses. As these paintings were sold in furniture stores, they were obviously thought of as 'decor', however I have seen people go into galleries and ask to look at paintings that would go with the interior decorative scheme they had implemented for their house. The use of the word 'charm' when researching qualities associated with these paintings, opened another aesthetic conundrum for me. For instance there is such a thing as 'curated nostalgia'. It draws from vintage or cottagecore* themes; such as cozy country cottages and whimsical florals. This creates a comfortable, safe and deeply familiar visual environment. The cozy feelings evoked are deeply emotional, and I realise that these paintings are perhaps far better at communicating certain types of emotion than the work I'm supposed to be developing in relation to my research into the visualisation of interoceptual experiences. 

There is one particular artist who is celebrated for his work in this area. Thomas Kinkade, is renowned for cozy, idyllic cottage scenes. His signature style features glowing windows, sun-dappled pathways and vibrant gardens, his paintings capturing a nostalgic and for many people welcoming warmth. His paintings are celebrated for evoking deep feelings of peace and a loving home.

Thomas Kinkade

Kinkade’s paintings depict an idealised, nostalgic escape from modern anxieties. By utilising luminous painting techniques, easy to read symbolism and familiar, therefore safe imagery, his works are like a comfort blanket. The feelings expressed in these images are related to the feelings that my parents wanted to have evoked when they purchased the painting I was sent. Knowing my dad he probably bought it second hand from a salesroom somewhere, maybe part of a job lot, bought sight unseen. He liked that sort of adventure. 

But there is another approach to this type of image and that is its stereotypical nature. A stereotypical image is an oversimplified and often fixed visual representation of a particular idea or concept. If decor artists were to make images by the thousand, they needed to have a clear idea of what people wanted and therefore would need to work with stereotypes. 

I decided to look at what was offered in similar outlets today. Wilco had landscape prints,


Idyllic Country Scene 

Wilco accompany their presentation of two 'Idyllic Country Scenes' with this statement: 'Bring a peaceful countryside charm to your home with the Idyllic Country Scene Framed Art. This beautiful artwork features an assortment of serene rural landscapes, perfect for creating a calm and cosy atmosphere in any room. Set in a classic frame, it offers a timeless charm and makes a great addition to living rooms, hallways, bedrooms and even offices.'

Posterlounge the Fine Art print company is slightly up market of Wilco, it asks, "Are you inspired by atmospheric landscape prints? Countryside Cottage by Dominic Davison being a contemporary offering by them of a by now familiar theme, the difference is that Davison is a digital artist. This is how Posterlounge introduce Davison's work.
'Pure romance, a grandiose attention to detail, warm summer evenings and an idyllic holiday feeling… All these things mark British artist Dominic Davison’s digital masterpieces. The biggest source of inspiration for Dominic’s wall art is his chosen home, Buckinghamshire, featuring picturesque cottages, green meadows and quaint forests. His unmistakable style is inspired by artwork of all kinds.'
Countryside Cottage by Dominic Davison

Both companies tell us that these images are 'idyllic'. The Oxford English Dictionary informs us that "Idyllic" is often used to describe a scene, place or experience that is peaceful, charming, and picturesque and is associated with a serene, flawless, or stress-free rustic environment, it can refer to anything from a beautiful countryside landscape to a perfect, carefree childhood memory. This idea is an old one, the OED goes on to explain that...'the word "idyllic" derives from the Greek word eidyllion, meaning "little picture" or "short poem." Historically, it refers to an "idyll," which is a literary or artistic genre used to depict an idealised, peaceful vision of pastoral or rustic life.' However, this romanticised outlook, where nature is innocent and untainted, has been intentionally constructed and passed down through centuries of literature, art, and philosophy. The Roman poet Virgil’s Eclogues depicted idealised shepherds philosophising in meadows, while in reality shepherds had to deal with a harsh difficult to negotiate landscape that included wolf packs, disease and extream poverty. During the 18th Century Marie Antoinette had a fake rustic hamlet built at Versailles, so that she could play at being a lady peasant, at the same time the real French peasants were starving. Farmers today struggle with debt, climate change and corporate takeovers, the countryside can be a very harsh environment, often far away from comforts such as local hospitals or cultural outlets such as theatres or art galleries.
It would seem that the more industrialised and urbanised we become, the more we romanticise the countryside. Hence the 'idyllic' stereotype. 

Back in the 1990s Komar and Melamid set out to find what most people would like if a painting could be made exactly to their wishes. Intending to discover what a true "people's art" would look like, the artists began the process which resulted in America's Most Wanted and America's Least Wanted paintings, which were exhibited in New York at the Alternative Museum under the title "People's Choice."

USA Most wanted painting

France most wanted painting

Turkey most wanted painting 

They went on to conduct surveys in several other countries and as you can see from the three samples taken from their research, what people wanted was very similar in each case. Michael Govan had this to say about their project.
In a way it was a traditional idea, because a faith in numbers is fundamental to people, starting with Plato's idea of a world which is based on numbers. In ancient Greece, when sculptors wanted to create an ideal human body they measured the most beautiful men and women and then made an average measurement, and that's how they described the ideal of beauty and how the most beautiful sculpture was created. In a way, this is the same thing; in principle, it's nothing new. It's interesting: we believe in numbers, and numbers never lie. Numbers are innocent. It's absolutely true data. It doesn't say anything about personalities, but it says something more about ideals, and about how this world functions. That's really the truth, as much as we can get to the truth. Truth is a number.
-Michael Govan, Director, Dia Center for the Arts
Govan's statement was I found worrying. Faith in numbers is I find problematic, but I could see what he was getting at. I was more interested in what this group of images represented in terms of visual psychology. It has been argued that people love landscape images because of the prospect and refuge aspects of evolutionary psychology, such as the safety instinct whereby we are biologically drawn to landscapes that offer a vantage point to survey surroundings (Prospect) and sheltered areas for protection (Refuge). Images featuring lush green colours and accessible water (like lakes and rivers) are meant to be universally pleasing because they signal survival, food sources and seeing water, that even in pictures or video projections, signals safety, relief, and replenishment, and in turn it produces wakefully relaxed brain waves. This is a process also called "soft fascination", whereby water engages us in a gentle reflection that quiets the mind, allowing the brain's cognitive networks to recover from stress and anxiety. Landscapes can also serve as blank canvases for the viewer's imagination, acting as a form of visual therapy, giving the mind a space in which to mentally inhabit a space far away from daily stresses, a place that is a serene, idealised environment. It is argued (biologist E.O. Wilson,1984) that humans are evolutionarily wired to respond positively to natural, adaptive environments (like water and vegetation) and neuroaesthetics supports this by identifying the exact neural pathways that light up during experiences of beauty. Neuroaesthetics can be used to identify the exact neural pathways that are used when we experience certain feelings or sensations. It has been found that when viewing natural scenes certain particular neural pathways are indicated as being used and these same scenes when examined using stress reduction theory research, show that viewing these natural scenes immediately engages the brain’s calming, restorative responses, lowering cortisol levels and blood pressure. Therefore there is a direct connection between aesthetics and the brain's production of chemicals to control emotion. Landscape scenes that evoke the Golden Hour, use warmer tones combined with lower colour saturation, mimicking the sensations we get from experiencing early morning and evening light. The feelings invoked by those times of the day are often felt by people to be both spiritually uplifting and emotionally warming. Landscapes serve as blank canvases for the viewer's imagination. They act as a form of visual therapy, allowing the mind to mentally escape the traumas of now and transport someone away from their daily stresses into nostalgic, serene and idealised environments. I do wonder however, how much of this has been culturally manufactured. Perhaps nature and culture are in this case interwoven, but its also useful to remember that people who live in the Amazon view their environment not as a "wilderness" or an "idyll" but as a living, sacred entity.

In 1984 Roger Ulrich published a ground changing paper, 'View Through a Window May Influence Recovery from Surgery'; patients that had a view of a landscape through their window were discovered to heal more quickly that those who did not. It would appear that not only does exposure to landscape views effect people's mental state, but that it can also be beneficial to their physical health.

Wittenstein would look in these situations at 'use value'. He believed that languages act as sets of tools, "meaning" being determined by their practical use within specific social contexts. Therefore in terms of 'use value' a painting of this sort may be used to benefit someone's mental health. It could be argued that we often get mixed up when trying to think about the 'value' of an image and although the painting I have been sent has no monetary or gallery value, it may well have been used by my parents as a window into a nostalgic, idealised environment, that allowed them to escape the everyday realities of their lives in Dudley.

So what does this mean in relation to what I'm normally looking at in terms of visual imagery? Perhaps a bit of a wake up call in relation to who uses what imagery for what purpose. Most people like images of landscapes, because these images make them feel better. I sense by most people I'm talking about the majority of people who have hard lives, especially those working in towns and cities, where nature is rarely experienced as a raw elemental force, more as a breathing gap or space for leisure and an escape from work. The rich can afford to buy abstract paintings that often are not that different from Komar and Melamid's 'Least Wanted' paintings. They can afford to like difficult things.

America's Least Wanted painting

Harsh colours and spiky, abstract forms, are, Komar and Melamid found, the least wanted shapes and colours to have in a painting. Probably because of what they represent. Harsh, bright colours and spiky shapes represent danger, tension, and aggression. These visual elements trigger heightened cognitive arousal and mimic natural cues associated with threats or intense stimulation. Spiky shapes, sharp, jagged and angular forms remind us of aggression and pain, because they resemble thorns, teeth, or claws. These forms trigger primitive survival instincts and raise alertness. Harsh, bright colours, high-contrast hues and highly saturated colours demand immediate attention, as psychologically they represent warning signs, urgency, and intensity. There is also a certain amount of synesthesia at work, whereby a perceptual phenomenon stimulates one sensory or cognitive pathway and involuntarily triggers an experience in another. Such as when spiky, jagged shapes are triggered in the mind by sharp, explosive sounds. We instinctively associate jagged shapes with the twisting and fast bodily movements that are often made in response to sharp percussive noises and in turn these movements can be visualised using forms that like a frenzied dance movement, sharply zig-zag from side to side. 

Because I'm often working with people in pain, it is this area of visual form that tends to dominate the images produced. But as it seems clear from the above, these images are the least wanted in terms of 'pictures to live with'. 

So what in my case is the 'use value'?

I have tended to think of the use value of my research as raising awareness of interoceptual sensations and feelings. I have also thought of the work I do as art. Some of the images that have emerged from the process are I think powerful in their own right and when put into a gallery context are open to interpretation, just like all the other images seen in galleries. Once removed from their initial 'use value' context, they slide into a further use as imaginative images of the body, that help me to visualise ideas about the cosmic body and my thoughts about how we use images of our bodies to visualise the wider world. 

Most importantly, this post allows me to find a connection between what my parents might think in relation to using a visual image in their life and what I do as an image maker. I have for too many years thought of myself as someone 'different' to my parents, but the reality is I am very similar. 

*Cottagecore is a lifestyle and design aesthetic that romanticises rural, simple living and harmony with nature.

References:

Ross, A., (1995) Poll stars: Komar & Melamid's" The people's choice". Artforum.

Ulrich, R.S., (1984) View through a window may influence recovery from surgery. science, 224(4647), pp.420-421.
 
Wittenstein, L. (2012) Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. London: Simon and Schuster.

See also:

The zig-zag
Emotional landscapes
Drawing and wellbeing
Portrait as stereotype

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Wednesday, 15 July 2026

Drawing consciousness Part two

Writing my last post on qualia and visualising consciousness reminded me that I had already looked at some of these issues before. The previous time I was thinking about drawing consciousness I finished my post with a reflection on the landscape drawings I had been making in West Wittering. In particular I was thinking about how landscape drawing could inform and build my personal visual dictionary, from which I could draw imagery when I was looking for forms and shapes that I could relate to interoceptual experiences. I have recently returned from another visit to the same coast and whilst I was there I decided to revisit the same locations I drew from last time, to see if I could find in my approach to the drawings better intimations of walking through a cosmic body, whereby the forms I encountered, suggested that  I was passing through a huge entity, in a similar same way to a blood platelet passing through a human body. 

I had in my earlier post on drawing consciousness reflected upon the idea that I was also when drawing somatic feelings, at the same time illustrating something about how consciousness itself might be visualised. My consciousness being part of what Jacob von Uexküll called the unwelten or phenomenal world that is specific to my human nature. My ability to sense my own embodiment, is something I automatically transfer into the way I see landscape as I draw, which is itself an activity unique to my particular human shaped organisational structure. My conscious awareness of self, being a forming principle based on an organisational structure, that itself shapes imagination, perception and interoception.  

I'll use some sketchbook drawings to try to explain. 

I took with me two sketchbooks that I had decided to use for landscape drawing and a third to use when making visual notes visiting cultural sites of interest, such as Chichester cathedral. The sketchbook drawings I'm using to illustrate my point about drawing consciousness are all taken from an A4 size sketchbook that uses Indian rag made watercolour paper. As usual I'm using a dip in pen to draw with, supplemented by diluted inks and in this case the occasional use of liquid graphite.  

The first location I sought out was one where on my previous visit I had drawn from a beach littered with the broken concrete remains of what were I think sea defences. This time I took with me coloured inks, making the drawings directly in red ink and then using dilutions of the ink to reinforce a visual connection to my background awareness of human anatomy, such as ribs emerging from a broken body. I had just before leaving for the coast had to deinstall my work that was on exhibition at Salt's Mill. 'The Cosmic Body' was partly made in response to the Zen Buddhist Japanese idea of Kusôzu, in particular the 5th stage of decay, which was often illustrated using an exposed rotting ribcage. The cosmic body suggested that our idea of the universe itself can only in reality be one that is based on our embodied consciousness and that although science states that it can think outside of this box, the fact that consciousness is embodied, I would argue means we can never escape the fact that all the visualisations we make, have to in one way or another reflect that phenomenal world that is specific to my human nature.

Sketchbook drawing 2026

Sketchbook drawing 2025
The Cosmic Body 2026

The 5th Stage of decay

As I drew the various sea eroded remains of these concrete structures, I imagined that they were the remaining vestiges of a huge under the earth giant, a creature that had at some time in the past inhabited this part of the world. I was thinking of Gog and Magog, who were portrayed as giants in British folklore and Arthurian legend, where they were imagined as the surviving remnants of the people of ancient Albion. A story that had its roots in the Bible, where Gog and Magog represent evil armies that would have to be defeated in a final apocalyptic battle by the armies of Christ.




As I drew these concrete remains, I noticed that there were thin vein like structures that ran through a surface I was looking at. This together with a rusty spike that protruded out of the centre of the structure, triggered another association, that of sliced ham. 

Ham on a meat slicer

I remembered the ham having to be pushed onto a spike, as part of the stabilising process before you could begin the slicing. Once this image was in my head, I carried it with me as I returned to draw yet another broken sea defence. This time the organic concrete form, below, looked as if it was part of a dismembered giant's body, from the moment I began the drawing.

Sketchbook drawing: Concrete form/body part: 2026

As I moved on to draw from another coastal area I was again thinking about Kusôzu images.

A Kusôzu image


Sketchbook drawings 2026

The way that seaweed drapes itself over old wooden posts or fallen tree branches, reminded me of the way that Altdolfer drew trees; somehow he managed to draw them so that you were reminded of Christ's Crown of Thorns and rotting flesh, peeling off a decaying body. 

Altdolfer: Spruce tree: 1550

Sketchbook drawing 2026: Seaweed over tree branches

Altdolfer was very much in my mind when I drew the image above of seaweed hanging from tree branches. 

At one point I was looking at a sea worn island of a remaining bank of soil that had fallen onto the beach after erosion had undercut the coastal walkway. I decided it now protruded from the beach like the head of some sort of dinosaur. As I drew it, I remembered images from Godzilla films, the creature's giant head rising up out of the ocean; popular culture now filtering through, as I re-immersed myself in a landscape that has become an important shaper of my visual language.

Sketchbook drawing: Beach form/dinosaur head: 2026

As I drew a tree, its roots being exposed by erosion, I was reminded of a body being operated upon, an image in my mind of exposed veins and arteries, causing me to use red ink to visually pull the tree and its roots out of the landscape and to insert it mentally into the landscape/body I was looking for. 

Sketchbook drawing: Tree roots/arteries: 2026

During the time I was in west Wittering I filled the sketchbook with coastline images, all of which were in one way or another, attempts to find a syntheses between what I was observing in the external world and what my internal world was telling me . Hopefully the ideas that they conjured up in my mind as I drew them are communicable and that as a reader you can see how when I'm drawing from perception, I'm at the same time drawing from imagination and that observational and imaginative approaches to drawing are fused. 

In my previous post on drawing consciousness I pointed out that like myself, Regis and Brigitte Dutheil agree that the mind creates the sensations we become aware of. In this post hopefully I have been able to give a flavour of how I think this works from an artist's point of view. In doing so I also believe that these drawings operate as images of consciousness and that if this is the case, Altdolfer's drawing of a tree would also have to be read as an image of his consciousness too. It is not like any spruce tree I have ever encountered, but it is like other drawings by Altdolfer I have seen. The sensibility that comes through a handmade image, being like a glimpse into another human's consciousness. 

See also:

Drawing consciousness

Qualia and visualising consciousness

Invisible worlds

Scale

More thoughts on drawing the coast at West Wittering

The geometry of consciousness

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Thursday, 9 July 2026

Qualia and Visualising consciousness

 

An embodied thought

If structuralists are right, our perceptions of experience depend on how we have perceived all other previous experiences. When we encounter red, in order to define it or hold it in our heads as a distinct category,  we contrast it with other colours, as well as compare it to entirely different perceptual categories. For instance, red is sort of like orange, but distant from blue, and nothing at all like pain or joy. Contemporary neuroscience has used this contrast and compare qualia situation to develop classification schemes of experience, often couched as abstract geometric shapes. “Our approach is to categorise all possible relationships between qualia,” says psychologist Nao Tsuchiya at Monash University and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, who leads the Qualia Structure Project.

The Qualia Structure Project is regarded as being fundamental to an understanding of consciousness and it has at its core a mathematical approach that uses a geometric analysis enabling researchers to boil data down to shapes.  For instance, based on his experiments, Tsuchiya estimates that we experience at least seven dimensions of colour. A report on the project states that it "has turned some of the classic philosophical thought experiments into actual empirical experiments. For instance, "is my red the same as your red?" ...The project invited participants into the lab for intensive testing. Four were flagged as colour-blind on a standard screening test, four weren’t flagged but volunteered that their colour vision seemed different and three had typical colour vision. Within each group, people made the same judgements about the resemblance of colours, but between groups, these assessments diverged. By doing a geometric analysis, the researchers boiled the data down to a shape. That of the second group – the self-reported colour-blind people – had features of the shapes of the other groups. “It’s an intermediate shape,” says Tsuchiya. In the structural way of thinking, what we take to be red is defined by its position within this shape. So, people within a group were entitled to say, “My red is the same as your red.” But what was red for people in one group might effectively be green for those in another. Tsuchiya describes the intermediate, second group as a “bridge” between atypical and typical colour experience, able to grasp the colour experiences of both." (Togashi, 2026)

Recently the project has been studying emotion. They have been showing participants pairs of videos that are supposed to elicit emotional responses. The early results are that both highly sensitive people and far less emotionally literate people experience emotion interoceptually in similar ways, but some people are more able to communicate this experience than others. I thought this chimed with my own work. Most people seem to have some awareness of their interoceptual experiences but they differ in their ability to articulate this. My work is mainly to help people become aware of these experiences, whilst this scientific project seeks to measure them; a typical art/science divide. 

From a series of images trying to visualise heartache

Tsuchiya says, “Experience is all about relationships,” He has used category theory to develop a descriptive language for these relationships, hoping that science will then be able to explain experience. If he is successful, he would like to build something similar to the periodic table to show how qualia work. However Loorits, in the paper 'Explanatory Relevance of Ineffable Qualia', states that the unanalysability of qualia is an important feature of human psychology. He brings in our experience of art to support this, stating that we often perceive experiences of art as unanalysable from the first-person perspective, until at a later stage we begin to adopt critical distance. I think this varies from person to person. I know some people that launch into analysis from the moment they experience art. I find that very difficult and am usually too overwhelmed by the experience to be able to break it down and analyse it, its only later, perhaps three or four days later, that I begin to think about what it might mean. 

This debate goes on whilst at the same time I continue with my own visual research. I still talk to people and ask them what feelings might look like and I still draw shapes and colours and textures that are attempts to connect a feeling with a visual form and run workshops to see how people can develop their own visual language to represent internal feelings. If it is true that experiences are all relative to one another, then even one viewed by an individual differently will effect how all the others are seen by that individual. Professor Dr. Holger Lyre states that 'people with synaesthesia, taste words or smell colours and therefore perceive these connections directly, but all of us, he states make them, therefore he proposes that, “To a certain extent, we are all synaesthetes.' (In Musser, 2026) This statement by Professor Lyre reinforces my decision to use the kiki / bouba sound shape connection example as a starting point for visualising interoception workshops. I also think that it is fascinating to watch what type of geometric analysis the Qualia Structure Project will come up with, but my feeling is that it will still not be able to solve the conundrum of consciousness. I am though as an artist happy to use my conscious awareness to develop visual responses to unseen events. There is enough mystery in the processes involved in communicating the un-communicable to keep me interested for some time yet and hopefully at some point my work will be used as a sort of instinctual counterbalance to the work being conducted by the Qualia Structure Project.   

A slide from one of my presentations on interoceptual awareness

Anger mask

Many years ago when I was at art college we had to look at the work of J. L. Austin, his book 'How to do things with words', was seen as seminal by my then tutor Keith Arnatt. We looked at illocutionary acts and in particular I remember being very interested in Austin's thoughts on the nature of pretence. Austin broke communication down into three parts, Locutionary Acts: The literal, physical act of communicating something, producing the sounds and constructing the words or making in our case, the art; the welding, drawing, painting processes. Illocutionary Acts: The performance of a communicative function in saying those words (e.g., using the words within the context of a warning or a promise), or presenting the artwork (framed perhaps by the gallery blurb as a warning, as an aesthetic experience or as an investment) and finally the Perlocutionary Act: The actual effect or consequence the utterance or exhibition has on the audience (e.g., persuading, comforting, alarming, or annoying them). Consciousness in Austin's terms was more to do with how we used language, but what if we were pretending? Pretending in relation to art seemed to myself to be to do with mimesis and mimesis was one of the art raft's central planks. Austin made a distinction between pretending to do and pretending to be. Pretending to be something, such as an angry person requires carrying out a string of related behaviours associated with that identity and eventually the pretence behaviour will become assimilated. I. e. you will eventually become what you pretend to be. This was the point of the anger mask. In order to think about how it feels to be angry, sometimes we need to assimilate the related behaviours associated with anger. As we do this, we can be more aware of what we are feeling. But what if you are pretending to see a colour?  “Colour blindness” was not scientifically recognised until John Dalton’s seminal report in the late 18th century. (Taniguchi, et al, 2025) This delay implies that atypical colour vision may have long gone unnoticed because people communicated without difficulty using a shared colour vocabulary, grounded in largely overlapping phenomenology. An alternative possibility is that a shared linguistic system itself shapes colour experience in a way that renders their qualia similar. The act of using language to cover up the fact that you were pretending to see, being gradually assimilated, so that in effect people can see, even though they cant see what others do see. This belief that you can see what you cant see, was something I came across several times during my career teaching foundation students. I encountered several students who were colour blind but they had never realised it and had had no problems communicating colour experiences before. It was only when we were exploring colour mixing that this became evident. Once it was evident and we gave them a colour blindness test, most of these students then admitted that they had felt something was wrong, but had purposefully behaved as if their perception was the same as other people.  

Perhaps all masks are like that, in wearing them we reshape our consciousness. If so an awareness of consciousness is perhaps another form of pretence behaviour, something that we hide behind, because without it we might lose our sense of self, which may itself be yet another mask. 

References

Austin, J. L. (1975) How to do things with words Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press

Musser, G (2026) The simple questions cracking the hard problem of consciousness New Scientist https://www.newscientist.com/article/2519288-the-simple-questions-cracking-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness/

Loorits, K. Explanatory Relevance of Ineffable Qualia. Acta Anal (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-026-00682-6

In press: Robust individual alignment of color qualia structures: toward a structure-based taxonomy of divergent color experiences. Yu Togashi, Yuko Yotsumoto, Chihiro Hiramatsu, Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Masafumi Oizumi
bioRxiv 2026.02.13.705699; doi: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.02.13.705699


See also:

Surface and inner body perception in the age of CGI
Drawing textures

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