The Cosmographical Diagrams of Opicinus de Canistris

Opicinus de Canistris was a thirteenth century Italian priest, mystic, writer and cartographer who created fantastic cosmological diagrams that literally, turn the world on its head. Unlike our present science whereby we strive to dig down until we find the tiniest element that might lie underneath everything, he was trying to give to his society a picture of how everything fits together. In order to do this he gives non human forms, both spiritual and human attributes. I think we can still learn something from his approach.

Comparison of the Natural Versus the Spiritual world in Relation to the Church of the Spirit

 Diagram of the days of creation: With Africa as infidelity, speaking to Europe as Faith

Commentary on a Passage from Aristotle on the velocity of the planets

I had been thinking about how images could be used by an audience or perhaps more accurately how I would like the images I make to be used. In the minds of certain mystics imagery could be simultaneously informational, pedagogic and meditative in function and it is this complexity that I am aiming for when developing ideas for my art work. 

I like the idea that images can be looked at again and again and that their meaning could be unravelled slowly over time. As always I'm looking for antecedents and in Opicinus de Canistris I  found a precursor who used a combination of visual and written approaches to explore his very personal ideas about the cosmos, self-knowledge and God. He made a series of intricate cosmographical diagrams based on late medieval maps and charts of the Mediterranean and other drawings and diagrams of what were then contemporary ideas, whereby the spiritual and the material worlds were understood as interacting and intermingled. This fact was I thought very interesting, as it reinforced my own belief in an entangled experiential happening and that what was perhaps needed was an art form that could be used as a support for some sort of meditative experience. 

Opicinus de Canistris was often found reflecting on the microcosm within the macrocosm and was concerned to renounce sensory experience, during a 'cleansing of the windows of the soul, so that the light of spiritual reality would transform his understanding'. Which is for myself a powerful indicator that he was taking this work very seriously, but not only that, he used diagrams as an aid to a process of self-reflection and analysis, something that I have also come to see as another aspect of visual awareness that reoccurs often in contemporary drawing practices. However I would like to embrace sensory experience rather than renounce it, as I believe that it is sensory experience that is vital to our experience of life. 

The map of Europe as an idea containing several bodies

If you turn the image of 'Comparison of the Natural Versus the Spiritual world in Relation to the Church of the Spirit' on to its side, you can easily see a quite contemporary looking map of Europe centred on the Mediterranean. As this was drawn in the mid 13th century, it is a pretty good contemporary vision of the best mapping available at the time, but the personification of the landscape is something that has emerged out of much older traditions, ones that go back to ancient myths of the Earth's genesis; myths that pre-date the Bible. 

Babylonian Map: 6th century BC

In the stone map made in Babylon above, you can just about make out the outlying regions, which are the triangles that project out past the edge of the circle. We still have the descriptions of regions three to seven, all of which must have been strange distant places in relation to the people of Babylon. So many of the stories about far off places would in those days have been more myth than reality, but you can sort of guess what is being referred to. The third region is where "the winged bird ends not his flight", the fourth where "the light is brighter than that of sunset or stars"; the fifth, due north, lay in complete darkness, a land "where one sees nothing" and "the sun is not visible"; the sixth, "where a horned bull dwells and attacks the newcomer" and the seventh, "where the morning dawns". In such maps we can see a fusion of reality and fantasy. As maps become more attuned to the realities of politics, they change shape and can reflect other ideas such as the fact that we need to pass through the landscapes of the world if we are to interact with them. We pass through one place after another.

A linear tube map

Maps can operate in a variety of ways, just think of how our London tube maps are simplified into linear forms that can be printed up and placed over the doors in train carriages. This is an old idea, one the Romans used to use.

From Iberia in the west, to India in the east: an ancient Roman road map

Map of the cursus publicus 

The cursus publicus was a system that allowed for the flow of power to operate. Rome needed to set up a complex communication system to allow its agents to travel throughout its territories unimpeded. Each identified town, village, site or area would have been responsible to the needs of any travelling dignitaries such as magistrates; providing horses, food and safety for public servants as they passed through. I was interested in the maps of the cursus publicus, as they don't look like the ground from space as current Google maps do, they are very much the product of information, one area of responsibility having to follow the next one, similar to the way names are placed on tube maps, so it is very clear what places a traveller would have to pass through. However there was no need to show how this relates to some sort of accurate geographic positioning. As long as the traveller knew that on leaving area one at some point area two would take up the responsibility for their safety, all was well. This I realised could be used by my own visualising of the interior of the body. I am trying to express something about emotional shape and colour; something that I know exists and that it does so within some sort of inner body map, but that map doesn't have to be located in any sort of one to one correspondence with the interior of the body as laid out in contemporary anatomical diagrams. I am reassured therefore that my idea of taking a long journey through an imagined body/landscape, might after all be a viable one.

Two tests from part of a journey through an imagined body/landscape

Interoceptual portrait

I would like to feel that there is a connection between my own attempts to create an Interoceptual portrait like the one above and images made by Opicinus de Canistris, such as his diagram of the mystical body of Christ. The overall shape can be enough to state that this is an image of a human being. Embedded into the image is partly the idea of a map, partly the idea that a body could represent something much more than itself and partly the idea that any individual can go off on a tangent and discover something mystical about both themselves and their vision of how things might be and that is always something wonderful. 

Reference:

Opening to God: The Cosmographical Diagrams of Opicinus de Canistris

See also:

Diagrams: Visualising the invisible

The diagram as art and spirit guide 

Emotional landscapes

Glass painting

There is something of the spiritual about glass and even though it is expensive for myself to get access to the specialist kiln equipment needed to fire it, I am drawn back to it like a moth to a flame. I have recently been revisiting glass painting and looking at how some of my existing drawn images could be translated and redeveloped using traditional glass painting techniques. I have in past blog posts looked at some of these in detail here and here, but there is always something new to learn and this was again the case. 

One of the areas of my work that I am always looking at improving is that of expressive mark making. Therefore one of the things I took into the workshop was an existing image where I had tried to visualise an interoceptual awareness of an acid reflux attack, an event that caused both heartburn and stomach sickness. The visualisation, made using inks and watercolour on paper, didn't work well enough, it was too confused and although an image was arriving it wasnt quite there yet, but the translation of the feeling tone, that of the burning sensation in the throat, that was coming from an acidic stomach, was I felt at least coming into view.

Acid reflux: ink and watercolour

In the original image I had tried to express the relationship between the stomach sickness and the heartburn by juxtaposing blue and orange complementaries, the orange flowing out of the blue of an imagined twisted intestine. The expressive quality of the application was an attempt to suggest the emotional nature of an event that also woke me up and had me gasping for breath.

I worked very closely from the original, as it was made on the same day as the event I was trying to communicate and I didn't want to lose that immediacy. However this time the various drawn textures had to be thought through much more in depth, each one the result of trial and error and the application of various amounts of lavender oil and pre-treatment of the glass surface. For instance oil rubbed into the glass beforehand enabled a very different texture to be achieved in comparison to the glass that had not been pre-oiled. I used brushes, a dip in pen, porcupine quills, a palette knife, fingers and crumpled paper pushed into the paint. Sometimes being very precise and at other times just letting the textures arrive as I played with possibilities. The final image was far more intense than the one I was working from and the elimination of colour allowed for a much clearer realisation, alongside the fact that I had made the image slightly narrower, that put more emphasis on the vertical travel of the sensation. 

Acid reflux: Fired painted glass

Unfortunately I managed to break the glass as soon as I got home but even that was in some way a helpful event, as it reminded me that both the initial experience and my feeling about the breakage were in some way linked. The experience I was trying to visualise was one whereby my body was feeling broken inside. I was now 'fixed' and in a position to remember the experience without any associated trauma. Perhaps a repair of the glass would echo this. 

The break

Repaired glass

Another drawing I took with me to the workshop was one whereby I had tried to visualise one of the stories told to me by a migrant to Leeds who had travelled across the Mediterranean in a small boat. He had, he told me, a guardian angel in the form of a rabbit and he would look over the side of the boat to see if the rabbit was still following him, often catching glimpses of his guardian in the swell surrounding the boat. I had tried to represent this moment several times, never quite getting it right. This time I rearranged the image as a vertical, using the ability of lavender oil as a pigment carrier to suggest a liquid environment. The man's finger points to an eye in a wave form, enough suggestion I felt to then trigger an identification of the form with a rabbit's head. Because I had to keep the ink flowing in order to render the image as a whole, it felt as if it was more in keeping with the subject matter. 

 

Man at sea spots his guardian rabbit amongst the surrounding swell: Fired painted glass

The flowing line needed to make the 'Man at sea' image was an approach to drawing I also felt I needed for one of my interoceptual portraits, in this case of a man who used to be a runner, but who now because of hip problems, can only walk with the aid of a stick. He has put on weight since his running days, but still sees the runner within himself, even if he is the only one left who can see himself as he formally was. The constraints of glass has helped simplify the image. 

Digital print

Painting on glass

The two versions above are before and after firing, there is a shadow of the pen drawing, cast onto the white paper underneath the image, at some point it needs inserting into a light-box or window frame. This was a very different image to the next two, both done in response to internal feelings, the one was a response to bad earache and the other a general feeling of malaise. 

Interoceptual portraits: Fired Painted Glass

Each time I revisit glass as a medium to work in, I learn new things about it. I hadn't realised I could keep a flowing line moving at the pace I needed, thinking that I would not find an equivalent to my pen and ink drawings made on paper. Because the glass is so smooth the line runs even faster and you can control the speed by laying down a very thin wash of lavender oil which gives a slight hold to the nib as it passes over the surface, the final images are a better resolution of the idea than the earlier drawings, in particular because of the central concept, that you can 'see' the inner man that still exists inside a now much older and time ravaged body. 

In the case of the interoceptual portraits, it was also the use of a brown alongside the black that I was interested in. It made the images feel 'dirty' and more of the earth and I thought that this grounded what were images of invisible feelings, giving them the gravitas of a perceived reality. I was also looking for a language that had to do with the insides feeling warmer than the outside air and the frustration of not having any physical control over interoceptual sensations, hence no arms or legs. 

Easing the pain

I finally returned to an image that I had begun, but not quite managed to resolve. It was a visualisation of a story told to me by one of the patients I had been working with. During the night his spinal injury would become very painful and being an inventive person, he discovered that his bed was jointed and that it could be adjusted by himself by using the power buttons alongside it. He had found an angle for the bed to be at, that when he lay over it, it helped relieve his pain. He was though getting into trouble from nurses for playing with his bed settings during the night and making adjustments that hadn't been ratified by medical staff. My problem had been that I used fused glass frit to develop the image but I had lost the man in the feeling tone. I managed to bring him back by eventually simply drawing a looping line in black oil based paint and having it fired, so that it was integrated into the coloured frit surface. 

Once again I have to thank Jo-Ann of Hannah Stained Glass for all her help and support. 

See also:

The inner and the outer

New wine in old bottles

Stained glass: Session 7

Pain relief drawings

Library Interventions

Reading an excerpt from a story that had shaped my idea of what an artist might be like

The more I write the more I think about the way writings have shaped my perceptions of the world. Over ten years ago I was involved in a 'Library Intervention' project, whereby I engaged with the library at what was still then Leeds College of Art. I had decided to explain how reading fiction had in many ways shaped my personal idea of what it was to be an artist; suggesting that I was in effect also a fictional character and that my own story was as much a fictional construction, as the stories I had read in the past that had in turn shaped my story. In order to do this I wrote 26 short stories, or to be more accurate, micro-fictions, each one fronting an alphabetically broken down list of fiction, whereby art or an artist had a significant role within the story. This became the artist’s book ‘Art and Fiction’ which included 1,000 short descriptions of novels in which art and/or artists are essential to the plot. I also bought as many second hand copies of these books as I could afford and filled a bookcase with an alphabetically organised collection of them; a bookcase that also had on its shelves copies of my artist's book, 'Art and Fiction'. 

Art and Fiction

I was amazed to find an image of the book still existing and I had forgotten the drawing I made of books with tongues for the cover. Looking back on the idea it feels as if I was giving too much honorific value to the idea of art, but it did feel as if it was an honest response to a long running relationship with fiction and story telling. Perhaps it was an idea born from a realisation that I had never really had an up front encounter with the harsh reality of the world and that my life had been shaped by fantasy more than reality. If anyone wanted to borrow the books, there was a specially created stamp with which to mark the date label.

Drawing for Bark-er rubber stamp

Slightly older and perhaps less of a dreamer, I returned to the theme of a library intervention in 2019. This time I was part of a group collaboration. This is how Nick Norton described the project within his own text written for the Soanyway magazine.

Library Interventions took place in October 2019 and was a project co-curated by Dee Heddon and Nick Norton for Leeds Arts University. The term “walk” was searched for in the library catalogue. Walk and variations thereof became a collection within the collection. A game began. The artists were invited to select a title. They then asked the librarian (myself) to select a sentence from the book in a pleasing subversion of the notion of librarian as gatekeeper passing out pre-approved texts. 

Nick then goes on to explain his own  journey: 

In what follows I try to explore not only the discovery of these sentences, how I got to them, but also how they got to me. That is; each sentence extends to become a discovery. The game then proceeded to another level: each sentence was returned to the artists: Dee Heddon, Angela Kennedy, Rosie O’Grady, and Garry Barker. Each walked with this sentence, in their own way, for up to a fortnight. What follows is not about their responses to this game, something of that was found in the gallery exhibition. Rather it is an exploration of how a game might be played; the aleatory dance of thought as it pushes toward creativity via research and the threaded connections of narrative.

Drawing made in the art college library

My own walk took me back into the library and I set up an easel and made drawings that explored how I saw. In particular I returned to a way of drawing I had used many years previously, one that relied on the recording of the search for the grid of looking, rather than a documentation of what was in front of me. These drawings became central to my own investigation of the library, one that hopefully prioritised looking over reading and that engendered a book selection system based on the measurement of visual perception, rather than a cataloging system. For instance I used the drawings made to discover books that lay directly on a path that followed my centre of vision. Therefore two books might become related simply because in my line of vision they sat one in front and one behind of an invisible line that passed through a particular bookshelf. It was as if I had fired an arrow through a bookshelf and I was looking for the books the arrow had speared. 

A digital print made from one of the drawings made in the library

In one case the arrow had on one side passed through books on fashion, in particular cowboy boots and on the other side of the shelf books on botany, in this instance exotic flowers. The process engendered various responses, some I made in ceramic and others I developed as prints. I felt that this form of working was very reminiscent of a situation whereby cosmic rays or x rays might penetrate solid objects in order to see what lies beneath. By inverting the tonality of drawings made on white paper, the images became 'cosmic' and they became the first responses that I thought were good enough to be exhibited. 

The initial drawings had been annotated with the names of texts found along the central axis of vision. As more drawings were made, 'speculative' encounters between book subjects were also imagined and a symbolic geometry of targeting was finally applied to clarify the sighting process.

Digital print: Thew sighting 2019

On the other hand I made drawings and ceramics in response to both the books selected by the drawing process and the ideas suggested by thinking about the physical nature of books as objects. I decided that if books had an anatomy the one organ that they ought to possess that would be the same as ourselves, as well as having a spine and a head, would be a tongue, an idea that had first of all raised its head when I was drawing images for the cover of 'Art and Fiction'.

Drawing made for Library Interventions

Ceramic object: A Book speaking with its own tongue

Some of the ceramic objects exhibited in Library Interventions 2019

I also began feeling that what I had done was awake some sort of library ghost and this had to be visualised too. 

Library ghost: Ceramic 2019

Sketchbook drawing of library ghost in the form of a bookend 

Digital print of library ghost

The library ghost image was developed as a digital print and that was included in the exhibition alongside other prints, various ceramic objects and an animation, all of which I either embedded into old repurposed metal library shelving units or had hung on the wall next to the shelving units.  What I was discovering was an ideal working methodology, the development of an installation, whereby chance and serendipity operated alongside logical narrative, connections being made that were not there previously, but which when found illuminated a situation from a new viewpoint.  

Work on display in the 2019 Library Interventions exhibition

The other artists involved, all of whom had spaces dedicated to their work were: Dee Heddon (curator), Angela Kennedy and Rosie O’Grady.

Reference:

Library Interventions: creative disruptions,a culture of curiosity

The anatomy of a book

Soanyway magazine issue 5 (Includes a review of the project)

See also:

The Myth of the artist

Reflections on the project Library Interventions

Soanyway magazine issue 5

Quantum Entanglement

Drawing and ceramics

Why My Lai still matters

My last post was written on the 16th of March, because of what is going on in the world the date has triggered a memory, one that is usually forgotten or more likely hidden under the psychic floorboards of our Western mind. On March 16, 1968, American soldiers from Charlie Company entered the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai and what would happen would change the way we thought of ourselves.

Like many people, I found out about what happened on the 30th of November 1969, I was at the time a young art student on the Wolverhampton Pre-Diploma course and just as I am now and have done almost all of my working life, I was searching for what I ought to be making artwork about. I used at that time to listen to Alister Cooke's 'Letter From America', I loved his comforting voice and take on life, he seemed humane and deeply insightful as to what was happening in a country that always seemed to culturally lead into places where we would follow and especially if like myself you were an art student, all the interesting new directions in art practice seemed to emerge from New York.

This is a quote from Cooke's broadcast:

...it's not often possible to say that a whole nation is haunted at any one time by a single preoccupation. This is one of those times. I don’t think there is any need to go into the details of the ghastly and deliberate massacre of a village and all its inhabitants in South Vietnam, which has only now come to light.

It’s a story of almost numbing horror; what haunts Americans this weekend is why they haven’t been numbed long ago. For though the story is, no doubt, detailed and complicated and will be straightened out in the coming courts martial, the moral issue is horribly simple, it’s been there for several years, and it ought to have plagued us long before this.

Only in the last few days has it been brought home to people that the massacre at Son My is not an isolated incident but simply a brazen variation on a regular policy of modern war. In spite of President Nixon’s regretful statement to the effect that the massacre violated the American rules of war, the truth had already anticipated him; that the men of Company C 1st Battalion 20th Infantry, did with rifles what the air force and the artillery had been doing for years, as standard procedure – namely wiping out the people of any village that were suspected of harbouring, or being under the control of, the Vietcong.

At the end of his broadcast Cooke had this to say:

...the moral riddle will not go away. Is it valiant to bomb a hundred women and children from the air, and despicable to shoot them on the ground? I leave it to you, and don’t care to stay for an answer.

I was at the time deeply affected by the news and I tried to make artwork about what I had heard, but it was of course totally useless and poor, my tutors at the time advising me to make work about something I had directly experienced and they were right, I had no visualisation skills of the order needed to make sense of what I had heard. It needed an artist of the calibre of Goya to say anything of meaning in a situation of this sort.
Recently I have again been writing about the development of a moral framework out of which I try to develop an art practice and alongside that a life. For instance in my last post I was thinking about how the holding of drawn conversations could develop empathy for other people and help us learn from them. I was also trying to articulate a need to develop conversations with plants and other things, if we are to thoughtfully embrace and care for the wider world we inhabit. Without a moral compass we are all lost and our current global condition, suggests that that compass is broken or temporarily lost. Therefore I feel I need to remind myself, of what can happen if we lose track of what it is to be a humane being. The word 'humane' is defined as showing kindness, care and sympathy towards others, especially those who are suffering. Its etymological roots remind us that 'humane' was used in the mid-15th century as a word for both being human and being kind and refined, it had evolved out of the Latin 'hūmānus', meaning "of man, human," which also encompassed the idea that to be 'of a human nature' was to be also "kind, gentle, polite or refined". Humane therefore shares its roots with the word 'human', but it diverged in the 18th century to specifically denote compassion and benevolence, separating itself from the earlier meaning of being a human. Today a 'human' is defined as being a member of the species homo sapiens, that belongs to the family Hominidae (the great apes) and is characterised by hairlessness, obligate bipedality, manual dexterity with opposable thumbs precision grip, and high intelligence. As we have developed a more scientific awareness of ourselves, it would seem we have uncoupled an earlier awareness of our moral capacity to be kind or gentle, becoming 'only human'.

On March 16, 1968, American soldiers destroyed the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai. Vernon Janick, a former US soldier when reminiscing about the way he was trained for service in Vietnam stated that, "we were trained that they were more animal than anything. You just didn’t trust any of them. We were always told that kids or women were just as much your enemy as anybody else. We never trusted any of them. I already hated them before I went over there. ...You always thought they were snakes - sneaky, which they are. Slant-eyed people, you couldn’t trust them." Janick's observations remind us that wars are not just fought with the weapons of combat, they are fought with language and imagery; how the enemy is shaped by the stories we tell, determines how far we are justified in our actions and how far those actions themselves might become divorced from any form of morality. We must never forget that Nazi propaganda used dehumanising language to describe Jews, portraying them as subhuman and parasitic, eventually calling them vermin, rats and disease-carrying agents. This rhetoric would eventually persuade ordinary people to take part in actions that would lead to the mass murder of millions. The shockwaves of that holocaust still propagate the current disturbances. The State of Isreal founded in 1948 was in many ways, a result of that horror. After discovering the extent of Nazi atrocities people in the Western World that thought they were civilised had to confront a realisation that one of the most 'civilised' nations could fall into barbarism. No nation, it seemed was immune to the committing of atrocities. When language is distorted, eventually moral failure emerges. Isreal it could be argued, evolved out of a collective guilt. After many years of unrest, on the 7th October 2023, Hamas and the Palestine Islamic Jihad, attacked Israeli civilian communities including attendees at the Nova Music Festival, where some 400 young Israeli civilians were murdered. On that day 1,189 civilians were not just killed, they were often mutilated and the perpetrators documented their own atrocities using live-streaming body cameras. We are now having to live with the consequences, consequences taken to such extremes that at the present count almost ten percent of the Palestinian population of Gaza have been killed. Barbarism incites barbarism.

The original UN approved map of the new state of Isreal

The proposal lines on a map can in future become a war zone. What at one time is a map of conjecture at another becomes a certainty. These drawings change the world; all maps are political.

Recently the United States Secretary of War, has described the ruling regime in Iran as a "death cult” driven by "prophetic Islamist delusions.” A description that suggests that the state of Iran, as far as the Secretary of War is concerned, is morally illegitimate and therefore war is the only reasonable response. This creates an idea in people's minds that it is a good thing to go to war, as Iran is an evil that needs destroying. He recently recited Psalm 144: "Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.", as justification for his stance.

This matters because it changes how people think. Iran is no longer a state that can be negotiated with, it is now a threat that lies outside the normal rules of political exchange. This type of language, as used by the United States Secretary of War (not 'Defence' any more) is embedded with rhetoric tropes, such as repetition and the use of metaphor or irony; it is a not very subtle propaganda, but it still infects people's brains, like a virus. This language is even worse when woven into the language of a new Christian crusade against Islam. US military commanders have recently being reported as invoking extremist Christian rhetoric about biblical “end times” to justify the war in Iran to troops. It was stated that one commander had said that it was "all part of God’s divine plan." and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. Whether this is true or not, (like so much information taken from the Internet it is hard to verify), this is why we should never forget the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in1572 of Huguenots in France or the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars or the Lisbon massacre of Jews in 1506 or much closer to home, the 17th-century Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, which resulted in a population loss estimated as up to 50%.  All of these bloodbaths were perpetrated in the name of Christ.

On March 16, 1968 the US soldiers that entered the village of My Lai were expecting to face Viet Cong fighters; instead, they found mostly women, children and elderly men. In just four hours, these soldiers systematically murdered between 347 and 504 unarmed villagers; raping women and girls, mutilating their bodies and finally burning the village to the ground in order to obliterate the horrors they had just committed.

Iran is now we are told an "existential and imminent threat.” The United States president has stated that after many Iranian civilians have already died in air strikes; “We may hit it a few more times just for fun.”

It was one of those air strikes that killed over one hundred Iranian school girls, a fact I find hard to digest. I have just returned from visiting my two granddaughters, girls of the same age as those killed in Tehran. If those girls had been in that school, I don't know if I could have carried on, their deaths would have built a fire in my soul that nothing would quench and I would have become a something other than I am now; something nasty in the world. Today in Iran over a hundred grandparents and parents will be grieving and hating and not knowing what to do with themselves, as at the same time the United States Secretary of War, tells reporters that he believes the war should have "no stupid rules of engagement".

I wonder if he had ever been asked to answer Alister Cooke's question; "Is it valiant to bomb a hundred women and children from the air, and despicable to shoot them on the ground?"

The My Lai massacre demonstrated to us what happens when moral principles are abandoned in war. Soldiers become murderers and the state becomes complicit in an unacknowledged approval of their murderous actions. After the My Lai atrocity those of us in the Western World that thought we were civilised had to confront the real darkness of the human condition. The massacre still stands as a warning that no nation, however exceptional it believes itself to be, is immune to committing atrocities when poor leadership and moral failure converge. 

In 2003 my wife Sue and myself joined a huge antiwar march in London, held to try to dissuade the UK Government from going to war with Iraq alongside the United States. At that time lies about the existence of weapons of mass destruction were used to drag the then Labour Government into the conflict. It feels as if we live in similar times; Tony Blair again stepping in to advise us that we should jump when the Americans say we should jump. The mind state of the man in unbelievable, he must be made of teflon or worse, especially if he has been infected with right-wing Christian fundamentalism. 

Antiwar demonstration 2003

A card I made at the time to instigate conversation about the value of antiwar protest marches

At times like this I find that drawing can still give me comfort, even though it can't offer any solution. There exists a monumental image that was drawn and printed by Mustafa al Hallaj. It fused folklore and myth with what were then the realities of Palestinian history. His images open out a visual narrative that mourns for those who have suffered after many years of conflict. It visualises the communal trauma of the Palestinian people and asserts that art can be a vessel for collective memory. It was never really finished, as he died in a fire before the idea was completed. This being perhaps the secret power of the work, in it not coming to an end, it reminds us that the suffering of the Palestinian people continues. 

Mustafa al Hallaj: 'Self portrait as man, God and the Devil'

Mustafa al Hallaj: Details taken from 'Self portrait as man, God and the Devil'

Mustafa al Hallaj lost most of his work to bombing when he had a studio in Beirut. His 'Self portrait as man, God and the Devil' is a black and white visual narrative that is over ninety-seven metres long. It is hard to see what is going on from a small on screen image, so perhaps I can give a description of a tiny section to show how his visual logic worked. Imagine a figure bent at right angles from the waist, carrying a graveyard on his back, with an Afro-Eurasian Hoopoe or 'Stink bird', standing over him. In local folktales it was said that this bird carried its dead mother buried in its head. Mustafa al Hallaj explained his visual connection in this way; "Our friends when they die are buried in us...Their bodies go to the graveyard but their personalities stay with us. We Palestinian artists are an orchestra. We are one choir...We have many friends and many dead. We are a walking graveyard of these personalities who left." Like the bird, the man carries the dead, however on his back rather than in his head. The artist also takes the weight of the dead, a weight carried by his images. His images may not have changed anything but they remain a testament to the conditions of the place and time he lived through.

One of the strongest opponents of the Iraq war was the Labour politician Tony Benn, who's son Hilary is a current Leeds Labour MP. His House of Commons speech at the time could just as easily be used today as a warning to all those that think war is a good idea. 

Tony Benn reminds the UK Government about the reality of war

I can feel completely helpless in times like this, my internal feeling state can be of deep depression, anxiety and grief, even though I am removed by thousands of miles from the reality of the conflict in Iran. This blog is supposed to be about drawing and related matters, it is important to therefore flag up the fact that I do take comfort in knowing that artists like Mustafa al Hallaj continued to make work when much closer to the front line than I have ever been and even after losing most of his work to a bombing raid, he still had enough belief in the power of image making to continue working. If we are brought to a stop by the words of the powerful, their words will prevail, this is why remembering the My Lai atrocity still matters. Artists I believe have a moral duty to confront the sometimes dark reality of the human condition and visualise it. But to do this alongside all those other qualities of life, such as being in love, caring for others and being able to appreciate the fragile delicate reality of a Spring morning. 

Goya: The disasters of war

Käthe Kollwitz: Raped

Durer: Turf

Stella Ross-Craig: Bramble: 1955

The drawings of Goya and Käthe Kollwitz often confront the dark reality of the human condition, but still growing out of the hedgerow are clumps of grasses and brambles, the former looked at wondrously by Durer many years ago and the later beautifully if more scientifically observed by Stella Ross-Craig. We have to remind ourselves that the love and care that Durer and Ross-Craig invested in the making of their images, are the very qualities that will save our souls from the horrors that Goya and Käthe Kollwitz witnessed.

Reference:

Alister Cooke's 'Letter from America' 30th of November 1969

See also:

Drawing war

Trench art

Drawing as testimony

The etymological root of art 

The dotted line 

Tiébélé in Burkina Faso