I shall miss you David Hockney

Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style: 1961

David Hockney seems to have been in the background or somewhere about ever since I decided to become an artist in the 1960s. The first ever etching I made was of a Typhoo Tea packet. "Just do something", I was told. I thought if Hockney could make something interesting out of a Typhoo Tea image, so could I. I wonder where those prints went? Of course he had got there first but we all need to get some sort of leg up when we get started. It was the fact he was working class that endeared him to me. He wasn't from an arty family, and he had enough confidence in himself to go where only the rich, posh boys used to go. If Hockney could escape Bradford, I could escape Dudley. 

He could draw and draw well. Frank Lisle had taught him when he was a student in Bradford and it was Frank, the then college principal who ran the rule over myself when I pitched up at the Jacob Kramer College in Leeds. Frank insisted that all his staff had to be able to draw; not long after I started he sat in on a life drawing class I took, telling me afterwards what I had done wrong, what I had missed and what he thought I had done well. However he saw enough to keep me on as a part-timer. Frank would make all the staff draw from the model, he liked to test people out and he was very wary of any staff who couldn't draw as well as he expected. This attitude forced me to draw more and improve on my basic ability, which wasn't really that good. I was never a 'natural' drawer, but I did know that if you persisted at it you could get better. After all these years I'm still practicing, each week finding out something else about either myself or the world around me, things that you can only grasp through drawing. I can imagine Frank setting Hockney some hard tasks, but I'm also sure Hockney would have surprised Frank with his ability. Frank would have made an impression on the young Hockney. He only had one eye and wore an eyepatch, rather like a pirate, he was a commanding figure and had a military air. He fitted his role as principal very well, somehow he had fused his military and artistic personas, accuracy in drawing being a training that would also equip you as a rifleman. 

Hockney turned up at Newport once when I was a DipAD student. I think it was John Selway that brought him in, they had both been at the Royal College at the same time. Selway back in the 60s being perhaps the more successful young artist but a return to Wales didn't do his career any favours. I remember Hockney showing us a drawing whereby a big plant obscured the feet of the model, he laconically told us he put the plant there because he didn't like drawing feet. I don't remember much else, I think I had a hangover that day, I did tend to drink far too much in those days. I was also going through a very conceptual phase in my work and had decided that Hockney was rather old fashioned, so I was not in a very receptive mood when he came. More fool me. 

The first exhibition that I had work in that Hockney did too was New Art in Yorkshire, which was held in Leeds in 1987. New Art in Yorkshire was something that emerged out of the workings of the Yorkshire Contemporary Art Group and was spearheaded by James Hamilton, who had recently taken over what had been the Park Square Gallery in Leeds. I was part of the organising group and had been asked to become one of the selectors. The others, if I remember rightly, were Sutapa Biswas, whose 'Housewives with Steak-Knives' image had recently gone viral and Joanna Mowbury, who had just completed the first sculpture focused residency for the Artist in Industry project and had just held a well received one person show of the work she had completed as part of that residency. Alongside them I felt like I often do as if I didn't belong, my impostor syndrome kicking in big time.

 

The New Art in Yorkshire catalogue

I don't know how it had been organised, but David Hockney had some work in the exhibition, but it didn't go through the selection process, he was an invited artist and as a selector, so was I. I would have to wait until 2020 until we were both in an exhibition together again. In the exhibition 'Untitled, 2020. Three perspectives on the art of the present’ at the Palazzo Grassi, Punta della Dogana, in Venice, I was showing work from 1991, 'Confessions of a house owning socialist', 12 etchings with aquatint and Hockney was showing drawing work from 1983, 'Ian and me ii', 'Ian and me iii' 1983 and 'Ian and me iv'. Just to have occasionally had work in the vicinity of his was a privilege. 

Moving to Yorkshire meant that I was constantly reminded of Hockney's presence, even though he had moved over to the States to live, he was seen in Yorkshire as an ever present icon. At one time I was asked to comment about his work on a TV program, I think it was 'Look North', I was asked about the artistic worth of his drawings for a new telephone directory cover; in those days it was big news him getting engaged in such things. I thought it was wonderful that he could still have an obvious fondness and affection for the area and that I thought he was working in the tradition of Raoul Dufy. Not that hardly any of the viewers would have known who Dufy was. 

Bradford and District telephone directory 1989

The older I got the more I looked again at Hockney's work and in fact as I have just had work on exhibition at Salt's Mill, I spent quite a lot of time recently re-looking at his art and it doesn't disappoint. They still have in Salt's Mill his fax machine work done in the same year as the telephone directory.

Tennis: Fax machine print

They also have many of the prints made from IPad drawings and work from his Bradford College of Art days. He is a very good illustrator as well as a fine artist. 

Above all Hockney was a very bright thinker. He understood the visual world better than most and he saw opportunities within what for some people could be quite mundane situations. He was still working through the legacy of Cézanne, therefore it wasn't about the things portrayed, it was about how what was portrayed was looked at and seen. That makes everything interesting, because the struggle is to find a form that carries something within itself that reveals how it was perceived. 

Three Vases on a Table, Inside, August: 2025 Acrylic on canvas with collage

The image above painted less than a year ago exemplifies his interests. It's not a great image, but it contains a raft of ideas, some of which we have seen Hockney deal with more successfully in the past, but as an 87 year old, he could be excused from having not been in the best of form when he made the image. The image's problem is one of reconciliation between the various elements. Yes they all sit in the same pictorial space, but they don't 'belong' in the places that they have been put. The views out of the windows are too static, the use of photography to indicate the far distance is too easy a solution. He is though still searching for that image that will finally resolve for him that conundrum of active seeing and the still image. The best of his images that take on the same or similar issues resolve these issues and you not oinly believe in the spaces he constructs and the forms that he renders but their internal logic gives them a gravitas that sits him in a company with Piero. 

I watched him from a distance one day when he was going round Tate Britain looking at paintings. He was mainly looking at Frances Bacon paintings, and was totally absorbed. Bacon was obviously doing something that fascinated him. You might think that the two painters would be in sensibility matters miles away, but I could guess what he was looking at. Bacon manages to compress movement into his images by the way he handles the paint.  I'm sure Hockney was trying to learn something from the way the paint was handled. In particular how Bacon was able to trap time in paint. 

The last encounter where I really felt his recent presence was when I was part of the team that was dismembering his Bridlington studio in 2013. The college had been contacted by one of Hockney's team and we were told that Hockney had instructed them to contact a local art college and see if they wanted to take what they could from the studio he was vacating. Of course we would. The college hired a lorry and three of us went over to Bridlington to get what we could. The studio was on an industrial estate, and we drove the lorry straight in from the street, the industrial roller door being of a scale to allow large trucks to transport work in and out. One wall had been fitted with wooden blocks that were obviously there so that canvases could be fitted together on the wall to create his huge landscape images. There were brushes with long handles, wide brushes, long bristle, short bristle and other types of good quality brushes, buckets of paint tubes and several unused linen canvases. We were not allowed to take anything with a mark on it, so for instance I remember one canvas with just a single brush stroke on it and his team wouldn't allow us to have it. There were models of exhibitions made of foam board, with small images of his works glued in where they should go and several empty  sketchbooks, that were made of excellent quality watercolour paper, as well as a pile of excellent unused art papers but most of all for myself it was about the experience of an empty space that had his ghostly traces everywhere you looked. While we worked to load the lorry, Hockney's assistants were either cataloging all his works on paper, which we never got to see, or just checking on us, making sure we did not accidentally hoover up something of importance. We took everything we could and all of it was given out to students over the next two to three years. I would have liked to have had a sketchbook, but it was all put away in containers and the process of eking out the materials to the students, so that they lasted for a couple of years, was something managed by the then technician and painting staff. It was so generous of Hockney an his team, a result I suppose of them all needing to get out of Bridlington as fast as possible after the unfortunate death of one of his assistants. 

But now he is gone. But he is also everywhere. I'm in Chichester at the moment and this morning we visited a small private gallery to see a flower painting exhibition and in the foyer was a copy of David Hockney's 'Dog Days', another reminder that he could make interesting images of most things that came his way. He is so popular because people can usually find something that he has made pictures of that they recognise as being part of their world. He is therefore, people think, both approachable and understandable. 

Hockney must have touched many lives because of his global media presence. I saw several Facebook posts this week about him, each one detailing the moment or moments where people's paths had crossed with his or connections made. We seem to have to measure ourselves in some way in relation to how much star dust we have managed to collect from our vicarious contacts with those who are famous. Most of us will at some time be guilty of the, "I knew him/her once" comment, usually followed by a sort of, "There but for fortune go you or I" quip, as the song has it. 

I still go back to his work, especially when he is questioning how we see. His graphic invention when trying to draw intangible things like water, being of the highest level and because of this I have included examples of his work several times in this blog. 

Above all I always felt that his art was generous and open, he never hid behind dense theory and yet at the same time he was always happy to explain himself in simple, direct language. He could draw well and more importantly drew with purpose. There is a straightforward love of looking that comes through in nearly everything he made and therefore a reminder that joy in seeing and a celebration of life, are wonderful gifts to pass on to others. 

I shall miss you David Hockney, I shall miss your eloquence and common sense attitude to the business of making art; you were able to make it both accessible and wonderful at the same time, never letting its mystery and magic go unacknowledged and yet at the same time opening doors for ordinary people to gain entry into its appreciation. 

See also:

Drawing water

Pouring water

More drawing devices

David Hockney retrospective

RIP John Selway

Drawing a life

For a while now I have been contributing to an on line project called 'Drawing a Life'. We began the project because some of us had been part of an earlier online experiment concerned with drawing the body. Drawing Correspondence ran a six week program, 'THE BODY I AM IN' that lasted from the 19th October to the 23rd November 2021. The participants were from the UK, as well as various parts of Europe. After the sessions were over some of us wanted to continue, so a new group was formed and because of wider interest new people joined, whilst others for a variety of reasons didn't continue.

There was a lot to think about. In particular, what type of knowledge about other people and their bodies, could you communicate through drawing, especially if the information was accessed via the computer screen? This question has sustained us for a while but it has gradually been apparent that simply seeing people on screen and drawing them isn't enough. A few of us had similar questions and we have been undertaking projects designed to test out how we could take some of the ideas further. I think, for myself, it’s about the nature of the hand made portrait in a post selfie world. How can a growing awareness of the narratives surrounding other people's lives be visualised and woven into an image that evolves out of contact with that other person. As we have evolved as a group, we have been changing how we communicate, initially it was simply about spending time looking at each other via the computer screen and making drawings in response to what we saw. But then the more we talked, the narratives that surrounded the images started to become more interesting, the issue now being how could the narratives shape the imagery, without having to resort to simply adding text? We began exchanging things, making things such as puppets, thinking about animal forms that we could inhabit and above all telling stories about ourselves. The image below emerging from a complicated session, whereby I began by working on two joined together large sheets of watercolour paper, an image which I then took into digital print in order to intensify the colour and find more coherence between te image's parts.

C

The image below, was made after a the member of the group gave a theatrical  presentation about their life. As in the image above I worked across two large 5 by 4 feet sheets of watercolour paper, as they presented aspects of their story. Initially working on two separate sheets and then joining them together.

L

We had also begun to exchange things by post. This to establish an actual physical link, to give each other something tangible to hold and to break away from the thin screen presence. Once the sent objects entered the studio, they became the catalyst for more work and new narratives started to emerge.

A new narrative emerges

Working in this way reminded me of why I had decided to join 'THE BODY I AM IN' project in the first place. It was because I wanted to make myself more aware of that 'body I am in'. I was thinking about what it must be like to make a self-portrait if you had never seen a mirror or any other images of yourself. You would know what others look like and would be aware that you were a human just like them. You would also know that everyone had a different external appearance and that these differences in appearance lay within the bounds of a certain ‘human’ template. No one was over a certain height, noses were nearly always set between two eyes and heads were always within a certain set of proportions in relation to bodies. However, you would also be aware that you had a feeling tone that was you. Your optimism or pessimism index, your sense of bravery, your introvert/extrovert levels and all of those other feelings that make up a sense of yourself, such as whether or not you are in love, in pain or feeling lonely. What Jacob von Uexküll called the 'unwelten' or phenomenological world of any particular creature. This 'unwelten' being dependent upon the body form that perception was housed within. Therefore, a portrait ought to be able to assess these things as part and parcel of the process of depicting a human being. Internal feelings, (interoception) being perhaps even more important than the external appearance of someone. However, there is a powerful paradox in the middle of this and that is that we can never be sure about what another person is thinking or feeling. They may lie, they may have facial expressions that are very inexpressive or not easily linked to internal feelings and many of us are to one extent or another autistic, often high-functioning, therefore not noticed, but nevertheless, something to be aware of.

Interoceptual portrait

The observation of perception considered through drawing, is a research project held under the umbrella of the University of Porto, my role is to use drawing to explore the role of interoception as part of our perceptual experience. Because the world of seeing is like an ever expanding dictionary of what has been seen, things that are not visually seen but which are still being experienced, such as pain or anxiety, are when drawn, usually drawn in such a way that certain aspects of what have been seen are used in those depictions. Metaphor and analogy are important, because meaning is made by making connections with other things. A pain might for instance feel very sharp, or be more like a dull throb, in each case we have an implied form, one sharp, bright and pointed, the other lumpy, grey and soft. From such a basic starting point, a language of form can be developed. 

A throbbing pain felt within the body

But feelings can also be associated with more figurative imagery. A memory of a particular soft, cuddly toy might be brought to the fore, every time someone needed a mental cuddle. My felt understanding of ‘leftness’ involves a feeling of pain in my left arm, coupled with an image of a carbuncle that grew in the crook of that arm when I was a small boy. I still see that image whenever I have to think about the difference between left and right. It is part of my internal language and makes no sense to any one outside of my body. 

An image I made when involved with 'The Body I am in'

Sometimes therefore in order to give more information an image of an inner feeling might be located within a simple drawing of the body. In the case below a stomach condition effecting the chest area. 

The longer the ‘Drawing a life’ group stays together, the more I gather insights into the worlds of the other people in the group. The fact that 'L' has decided to tell the group a story whilst applying layers of clay to her face and painting it, opens new doors, ones that suggest to me that perhaps we ought to have a period of time when we exclude vision and rely entirely on sound to communicate. Then gradually we might bring the senses together again in order to construct portraits that don’t just rely on external appearance. If only we could touch and smell and taste each other too.

L

These two earlier versions of 'L' were made directly from the screen, drawn as 'L' told us about her life. However at that time the portraits made were mainly of heads drawn directly from screen presences, more recently performative presentations have made me reconsider how the normally invisible narratives of our lives, can be transcribed into an image without having to rely on existing illustrative conventions.

When we went to our daughter's final exhibition in Wimbledon, I met Adam Pearson, he had been life modelling for the students there and was also an actor who lives with neurofibromatosis, a genetic condition that causes non-cancerous tumours to grow on nerve tissue, the result of which is that he has severe facial disfigurement. He is also like our daughter and her sister an identical twin, his brother having the same inherited condition, but without the facial disfigurement. (There is a film about their life available at: https://vimeo.com/315774991)

We went for a drink after the opening and we talked about what it was like to be so clearly different to others. Eventually he had to go to get his train and he asked me to walk with him as a form of protection. He had been attacked several times in the past when walking alone, simply because some people just couldn't bear to see him and wanted to literally remove him from the family of forms that make up the possibilities of the human animal.

Adam Pearson

As we talked his features became 'normalised' it was as if the more I saw him as being just another person interested in why people are like they are, the more his external appearance didn't matter, perhaps didn't matter is the wrong term, the less difference it made. I was again reminded of the issues the novel the Picture of Dorien Gray and its various film versions, brought forward, something I wrote about in an earlier post, Adam was I thought, like a first man, bringing forth a whole new series of thoughts about what it is to follow the template of being human. 

Typical image of Dorian Gray's portrait

Meeting Adam had helped me to distrust external appearances. To not take them at face value as we say in English. A phrase that when looked up tells us that we are advised to look beyond the surface, questioning the initial appearance or literal words of a situation, person, or statement to find deeper meaning, hidden motives, or truth. It involves critical thinking and verification rather than blind acceptance. What therefore is an honest face? Again on looking up a definition new problems arise as to how we understand facial appearance. An "honest face" I am told, refers to a facial appearance that instantly signals sincerity, trustworthiness, and innocence, leading others to perceive the person as genuine and free of deceit. This definition is though followed by another statement, 'This subjective impression is often linked to soft features, high symmetry, and "baby-faced" traits rather than hardened or intense features.' After I had left Adam at the station my feeling was that his face was perhaps the most 'honest' I had ever come across.

See also:

What is a portrait?

The portrait as witness and control

Interoceptual portraits

The Lamed Vavniks

Invisible worlds

Reflections on 'The Body I am in'

Pilates and interoception

The sleep of reason

Oh how we battle in our minds with reason. At one moment logic seems to be the answer to our collective follies and then it seems as if reason is befouled by the very creatures that use it, our limitations as a species being embedded into the core structures of logic, so that what at one time could seem to liberate us, at another seems to chain us into our place. Sometimes I think it might be only our imaginations that can free us from this dilemma, but the roots of the imagination lie in the subconscious mind and that may itself release monsters. 

Goya wrote a caption for his famous print "The Sleep of Reason produces monsters", it stated, "Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders". The two parts of the title sum up the quandary we find ourselves in. 

Goya: Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders

'Los Caprichos' is a body of 80 etchings published in 1799 wherein Goya responded to the political, social and religious abuses of his time. As is often the case with great artists he was also responding to the changing materials of his craft; aquatint had just emerged as an etching technique, allowing large areas of tone to be quickly and relatively easily built up within an etching plate and it could be used to develop dark areas with an emotional register alongside the etched line work. It was as if this new technique could carry the feeling tone as well as the tonal value of our dark subconscious reality. 

The title, "Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders", is an affirmation that Goya as an artist understood that imagination should never be totally renounced in favour of the rational. Our conscious and subconscious selves need to find a balance if we are to attune ourselves properly to life; logic without the imagination that reveals its consequences, breeding war. However, without imagination in combination with reason, we would also have no innovation. Goya's title is often shortened to "Imagination abandoned by reason produces monsters" and is used to argue that we need to be more rational in our approach to life, an approach that echoes the rise of the Enlightenment view. Building on the principles of science, this view advocated the application of rational principles to social and political reform. There was a belief that the evils of war, poverty and ignorance could be eradicated by scientific education. I notice that this belief lies behind a new attempt to seek an escape from our current seemingly irrational social and political woes. A new report by the World Inequality Lab aims to be the most comprehensive attempt yet to navigate the crises that are pushing the world toward climate breakdown, political extremism and ever greater economic and social tension and division. At its core is the concept of sufficiency – the idea that people can enjoy a prosperous, healthy life without constantly striving to consume or accumulate more material possessions, a process that degrades the natural world on which all life depends.

The authors envisage three interrelated moves. "More than halving average working time from 2,100 hours a year to 1,000 hours, roughly equivalent to a two-and-a-half-day working week; encouraging people to eat less red meat, which is the main driver of deforestation and ecological destruction and refocusing the economy toward low-consumption activities by more than doubling education spending to £7,250 a person" as well as increasing the healthcare spend. I was interested in the fact that the report has an understanding that more education leads to lower consumption. This link between education and rational beliefs is I believe similar to the one propagated during the Enlightenment. Before the First World War, educational rates had improved but the associated technological advances that were a consequence of scientific thinking led to the development of war machines that had unbelievable consequences in terms of mass slaughter. My grandfather was still suffering from the effects of having to fight in that war, continuing to relive his experiences of 1917/18 trench warfare while he was living with us in the 1960s and early 70s. He refused to speak about his time in the trenches and would occasionally be found beating his head against a doorframe, in a vain attempt to remove the still active visions of a Hell that remained in his mind. I would like to think that this new report would guide us towards a better world, but am sceptical, as it seems to rely too much on rational thinking and fails to take into account the unpredictable nature of people's desires. I sometimes think we all need counselling and to be given time to confront our dark inner recesses and only then will we be able to escape the landmines that we set in our own backyards.

As an artist Goya reminds us of our worst impulses. The Inquisition took an interest in Capricho No. 23 entitled 'Aquellos polvos...trajeron estos lodos.' (Those specks of dust...brought this sludge). The caption referring, not to the prisoner as it seems at first glance, but to the way court processes had been hijacked by the then religion dominated government. In a time of fascist aggression, any small transgression can be taken up and used by legal processes to frame innocent people, especially those who happen to think differently. In Goya's print the accused is framed in pure white, while the court and the accusers are collectively made grey by the covering aquatint, suggesting that mob rule, led by the man reading the accusation, will prevail when sentencing any individual who has been seen to speak of or represent an alternative truth. 

Goya: Those specks of dust...brought this sludge

Our contemporary social media allows for similar things to happen. It is becoming clear that as a tool for disruption and the engineering of collective hate, it is very powerful. Typical of the type of incident that seems to be occurring more and more, was one that arose in Epsom earlier this year. A young woman bumped her head after a night out, however, in a confused state, she had told the police she thought she had been gang raped. It turned out she hadn’t, but by the time this was clarified, a lot of damage had been done. 

The far-right used her testimony to galvanise hatred and fear. Bloggers, influencers and right-wing journalists spread ideas of an associated racist conspiracy. As they did mainstream politicians and magazines were sucked into the argument, giving the initial off the cuff, often racist social media posts more credence; an initial confused statement, now becoming a 'fact', around which was being stoked racial hatred. 

In those nine days, the Surrey Police were in the uncomfortable position of investigating a crime that hadn’t happened and this became a gap in time for the far-right to work up its arguments. Angry protests were organised online, white Englishmen it was stated would soon be forced to do “very, very bad things". The Surrey police it was claimed were demonstrating the “epitome of two-tier policing", a claim I see again being put forwrd in response to the more recent Southampton stabbing. 

The Spectator gave space to an article about the anger of locals and the article strongly implied that the perpetrators of the assault were brown migrants. The article again complained about two-tier policing. Robert Jenrick, who was now a Reform party member, but who had been a former Conservative Secretary of State for Justice, lectured the police from a position on Elon Muck's platform X, to insist they “communicate ASAP” about “the horrific rape.” Something of course that never actually happened, but which by now didn't really matter, because thousands of people believed it had happened and not only that they had been fed a very clear message as to who the perpetuators were. 

Notice how the arguments escalate, all without any grounding in facts, taking advantage of a gap in information, in this case using the nine days that it took the police to find out what had actually occurred. Thank goodness the police did find out that nothing actually happened, in a more pressured future, would they have been able to hold a proper investigation? They may well at another time, under the eye of a more right-wing government, be coerced to make a snap judgement, based on populist sentiment. 

This is the other side of "the sleep of reason", Goya's observations still ringing true after many years have passed, human nature it seems is not changing. This is why his work is still important, it is a reminder of who we are and who we might become, a warning and a wake-up call. 

The Global Village was a term coined by the theorist Marshall McLuhan, it was a sociological concept describing how the world had been brought closer together by electronic media, thus making distant events feel as local as if happening in the village, but it is also a reminder that even though communication systems were now global, our instincts and ways of operating as human beings remain rooted in the past. McLuhan developed the phrase before the rise of internet hosted social media platforms, communications now being even more global and almost instantaneous. Not that long ago there were devastating waves of violent pogroms taking place in villages in Eastern Europe. Some of my family arrived in England at the end of the 19th century as a result of those now nearly forgotten events. I really hope the global village doesn't have to suffer it own similar events in the future, especially as there may be no open-armed England to escape to. 

Interoceptual portrait of a fascist 

See also:

Freud and drawing invisible forces

Lacan and Drawing

The Borromean knot

Life lines

Projections of a single totality

Max Beckmann

"On My Painting" ("Über meine Malerei") was a lecture delivered by Max Beckmann in July 1938 at the New Burlington Galleries in London. It was written while in exile, shortly after the Nazis had labeled his work "degenerate". I read it many years ago and occasionally parts of it come back to me as I struggle to clarify my own approach to art making. In particular it was his search for the invisible through the visible that intrigued me. He sought to capture the deep hidden mysterious reality behind perception. As he did so he felt he might eventually "find the Self", as well as some sort of sense of the divine. In order to do this he felt that an artist had to maintain a commitment to human sympathy, thus putting empathy with others at the centre of his practice.

Max Beckmann: Blind man's bluff

I find this time period not dissimilar to the one Beckmann was experiencing and feel that fascism is on the rise again, not just in Europe but across the world. Fascism relies on oppositions, it sets people against each other and destroys the delicate connections that we have with one another, replacing them with fear, alienation and collective unthinking action. Beckmann wanted to visualise what he called "the profound mystery of all—the human I am". Therefore he began with an investigation of himself. In the context of his fleeing from Nazi Germany, you can see that he understands that art can have a role in maintaining human sympathy and understanding during times of intense turmoil; in order to do this he visualises the world as a vast stage where the artist constructs metaphorical images of both his own life and the trauma of history. He had set himself a high bar, one I would like to aspire to, but don't have the resources to accomplish to the same level. However my memory of Beckmann's writing has inspired me to put down my own thoughts as to why I think my personal pursuit of art is useful.

I wrote recently that whether I'm making a drawing of the landscape in front of me or constructing a drawing out of my imagination, both are projections of a single totality. This is something central to my practice as an artist, so bare with me as I try to unpick this somewhat.

The inside and the outside, landscape and the body, fantasy and reality, objective drawing and imaginative play, all are at one time or another seen as opposites and yet when looked at from another perspective they can all be seen as being part of the same venture, that of visualising the experience of being conscious.

From drawing a life: 2026

Visualising the experience of being conscious is a complex artistic and philosophical challenge because consciousness is an entirely subjective experience. However whether or not it is physically experienced or not depends on whether or not you argue for its understanding as embodied. I believe that as I am a very different physical entity to a dog, my consciousness will be shaped into a more human like form, which is itself physical. It is always a "first-person" experience, composed of "qualia", (a term for the information that comes in to the brain), whether this is from outside the body via the five senses or from inside via interoceptual feelings. As an artist I have to use various metaphors and abstract concepts to visualise this. Subjective experiences of consciousness are the ones that we think of as "what it's like to be". This inner awareness is what I am trying to communicate to others that have only a limited awareness of what I might be thinking. The aim is to grow that joint awareness. In the image, 'Drawing a life' above, I attempted to visualise another life, one that I was aware of through various conversations and from glimpses of that life given to me via my computer screen, it is though also a projection of a single totality, my feeling tone having filtered the information coming through and although the image is of another individual's narrative, it is, like all the other images I make, a product of my own consciousness. Perhaps the best realisation of this would be my sketchbooks, where observational drawings sit alongside imaginative investigations of ideas and where iterative thinking is used to find out what it is I'm thinking about as an image. These sketchbooks I tend to think of as batteries, storage devices that are also energy converters.

As an artist I try to externalise and make physical those hidden feelings and perceptions that I have. In doing so I aim to close down the difference between my experience of being conscious and another person's experience of being conscious. But as feelings, thoughts and sensations are private, they are impossible to describe objectively. However, I am aware that damage to the brain directly effects consciousness, which tells me it must in some way be dependent on physical structures. I'm also aware of evolutionary theory, which posits that things evolve because they are useful. Therefore consciousness will probably have evolved as an adaptive function for complex information processing and interaction with the environment. If so, by engaging with it, hopefully I help myself and others become more aware of it and how we use it to become more aware of the consciousness of others.

As consciousness is a phenomenon where subjective experience meets physical reality, engaging in art making in order to investigate it does therefore feel as if it is a good move. Every art object made is in effect the externalisation of a thought. But not just that, it is a physical embodiment of a dance that occurs between the material properties of the media of making and the consciousness that sits within the shape and form of a human being. I can't step outside of my body, but I can watch others who have similar bodies to myself do things. As they move they also react to other things, perhaps grimacing as they lift a heavy weight or smiling as they are touched by another human, as I watch I can begin to see a possible connection between my own responses to situations and the responses of others. I can begin a process of guessing or having intimations of the awareness of the minds of others. If I can guess what someone else might feel by observing their actions and reactions, then I might be able to make something that stands as a substitute for the process. Inner feelings and outer perceptions are constantly in play as I experience the world and both come into play as I make a piece of art. This is why, (and I shall now repeat what I have just written above), when I'm visualising things that attempt to crystallise experiences, the inside and the outside, landscape and the body, fantasy and reality, objective drawing and imaginative play, can all be seen as being part of the same venture, that of visualising the experience of being conscious, which is what I suspect all artists are in fact trying to do. In my case my images are thought of as projections of a single totality, a philosophical stance as much as a political position. 

Recent work has involved a process whereby an initial installation idea was visualised by myself using Photoshop and then developed in conversation with a curator, who decided on what furniture to buy from second hand furniture shops in Graz, based on my initial idea. 

The first visualisation for the installation reflecting on loneliness 

Final installation: Forum Stadtpark, Graz: "Islands of Loners"

Details: Images taken during the construction of the installation

Some of the 'votive' lino cut prints used as part of the installation

An early tryout for an installation of the 'choir'

The installation included ten of my lino prints, a blanket and pillow cases designed by myself and printed commercially, as well as forty ceramic figures making up a 'choir' of singers and several  'votives' that I had shipped to Austria for the purpose. This complex could have become very fragmented, however I hope that it cohered due to the fact that the installation was both a product of many years of my visualising the experience of being conscious and the fact that I'm still prepared to listen to the advice of others. It is a projection that has emerged out of the totality of my life's experience and as such I regard it both as personal as the prints displayed within it and as collaborative as the many images that have emerged out of conversations I have held with others. Art is a collective experience beset and troubled by the paradox of individualism; therefore I must express my gratitude to the team of Forum Stadtpark curators, who managed to tactfully help shape the final outcome.

So does a work of art still have a role in maintaining human sympathy and understanding during these times? Beckmann visualised the world as a vast stage whereby the artist could construct metaphorical images of both his own life and the trauma of history, however I have not had to witness the 'trauma of history' in the direct manner he had to; I see it via newsfeeds and on screens. My work evolves out of conversations, it acts as small moments of solace or as reminders of the shifts in our inner feeling tone, as we experience life's changes. Unlike Beckmann, who had a powerful vision of what he wanted to achieve, I struggle to clarify my own approach to art making, but out of that confusion, perhaps a different sort of myth arises, less heroic but more achievable and of the quotidian, rather than the cosmic.

See also:

Qualia

Penone draws a tree

The geometry of consciousness

A conference day

Drawings as aesthetic transducers

Who sees what where?

Frontview magazine: Micko and the Mellotronics announce new single

The issue of audience sometimes raises its troublesome head and an old debate comes back to haunt me. I can still remember a tutorial with Keith Arnatt that was held near to the end of my first year at Newport College of Art. I had been ill and confined to bed for several weeks. Whilst in bed I had continued to make work and had brought the results with me for the tutorial. Some of this work was in the form of collages and Arnatt seemed very pleased with them, but then I produced some small paintings, whereby I was trying to play a game with religious iconography and figures taken from the world of popular culture. He dismissed this work as being too illustrative. Here I am 55 years later still worrying about this artificial divide. In my mind Michelangelo worked to both illustrate the Bible for the Pope and at the same time make images that were transcendent of their initial function. It has always seemed to me that artists work at their best when having to squeeze meaning out of tight constraints as in for instance John Piper's stained glass, which I first saw in Coventry as a schoolboy; his New Cathedral Baptistery Window stimulating a long time fascination with the power of light shining through coloured glass to give spiritual uplift to imagery. 

John Piper: All saints Church: Clifton

Sooty heals my plantar fasciitis heel pain

I have for some years been making votives and have been interested in how an animist world view might help us all build a better relationship with the world around us. Therefore when I had an opportunity to study stained glass in more detail, (thank you AN for the bursary), I wanted to see if the spiritual uplift I felt when I first encountered the technique, could still be harnessed. In this case Sooty uses his magical powers to ease the pain and cure the ailment. This was of course a case of "physician heal thyself." My own arm coming in from the side of the image, with my hand inside a Sooty that is rising alongside my leg, in preparation for an act of psychic healing. The ability to do this in reality would involve severe contortions of the body but somehow that seemed right, as the 'something's not right' bit of the brain, is what ignites those inner feelings of unsureness, which in turn open the door to the unconscious and the workings of psyche.

The invisible contortion

When I was working with the idea of Sooty as a contemporary fetish, I little realised that the imagery would chime with so many people, one of which was a musician who needed images for his forthcoming album and associated singles. By agreeing to provide the images for the purpose of illustrating these things was I demeaning the work, was I somehow diluting its impact by taking it out of the fine art arena? I have been 'accused' of being more of an illustrator than a fine artist several times during the course of what is now a long career and it still worries me. Illustrators have to listen to clients and work to a brief, in my work I hold conversations with people and listen to them and respond by making images; so perhaps yes part of what I do is illustration. I also make images that tend to be figurative but I am not a painter, so I cant use the rhetoric of painterliness that surrounds the painting profession. But I've always worked out of a fine art context. My DipAD is in Fine Art not design and I see myself as an artist. However I'm very aware that design offers many positive attributes to a fine artist, in particular the sense of visual problem solving, a clear recognition of communication theory and the need to pitch work in different ways to different audiences.

Single review

Misery guts: Single artwork

Perhaps the main issue is that as illustration my work is seen as supporting the main event, which is rightfully the music. Therefore my work is set alongside other graphic images that are often unacknowledged as to their originator. This doesn't however mean that the images are not important. Both my Sooty image and the yellow and black 'Louder than War' image, carry messages that will be interpreted by the music focused audience in different ways and if interested someone can look to see who made the original artwork. 

King Crimson: In the court of the crimson king: Image by Barry Godber 1969

I still remember the image on the LP cover of King Crimson's 'In the court of the crimson king', an image cropped from a painting by Barry Godber, who at the time of my listening to the music, I wasn't aware of but I associated all sorts of ideas with this image, as it became part of my world. Like the work of many artists of the Medieval ages, these images went out into the world as anonymous products, in support of a main event, the Bible or more recently a CD, but now years later, the work is appreciated in its own right. For instance the Crusader Bible features Old Testament scenes in medieval settings, with brilliantly coloured illustrations attributed to seven anonymous artists.

The Crusader Bible

I like the idea that the people looking at the Sooty images used to support 'The Trinity' will come to them from outside the fine art world. These images will be seen mainly digitally, but also in printed form if people buy CDs or vinyl copies of the music. They will of course associate the images with the music listened to, their entry into the meaning or understanding of them, coloured by a relationship to Micko and the Mellotronics' lyrics and sound. 

Would you believe it: Single review

As several of my Sooty images have been used and associated with different single releases, people will become aware of them as if they were being drip fed a narrative. 

Artwork used for 'Proper Job'

Depending on which order you come across the images, you have many ways to interpret what the images might mean. This reminded me of Keith Arnatt again, who in 1969 had some work on German TV; which consisted of single episodes of his photographic series Self-Burial (Television Interference Project). Because people would randomly find these images appearing on their TV screens, very few would have seen all of them in sequence and therefore the audience would be left to make up stories as to what it was all about. 

Keith Arnatt: Self Burial

My Sooty images have been appearing randomly as different singles are released. Several of them are to do with the time I used to take my Sooty puppet to the Gaumont Cinema in Dudley. Sooty was a companion who would observe the films too difficult for myself to watch. My mum was an usherette back then in the 1950s and when I left school, sometimes I would go to meet her in the cinema and if she was tied up, I would sit in an empty back row seat and watch whatever was being projected, until she was ready to take me home. Into my Sooty series I have woven memories of 1950s film media, an awareness that inanimate objects can become animated and in certain cases operate as fetishes, something that as an older man I've become more and more interested in. 

On the Trinity CD's cover is a more painterly image from my Sooty series and as in all the other covers, the designer has had to crop my originals to fit a square. 

The issue of cropping didn't worry me, in fact it seemed to give a new twist to how the images could be read and it reminded me why I had developed a certain dynamic to their composition in the first place, helping me to see my work again.

The Trinity: CD

I was pleased to see that 'Louder than War' top tracks of 2025 included 'Misery Guts' at number 24, which must be some sort of success and hope that Micko is pleased with how his ideas have been received by the music world. 

From Louder than War Top Tracks of 2025

The point I'm making being that I'm very happy for my images to be used in another context. There is a certain serendipity in the processes of distribution surrounding any of the images we make and put on line. In the past many artists will have worked hard all their lives, only to find that their audience was hardly there, but in the days of online imagery, we all have the potential of our work to be seen by and used by many. Copyright in the age of AI being a whole different can of worms. Seeing printed images on a CD cover is I realise not the same as people seeing the originals and their hand made quality, but it is an aspect of audience reach, that I'm quite glad to tap into. So thank you Micko Westmoreland for keeping an eye out for my work and seeing the possibility for it to be used in this way and thank you Harry Corbett for inventing a puppet for the children of the1950s, but most of all lots of love to my mum who was working hard to hold on to a job and at the same time raise a boy who would still be making ideas out of his experiences of growing up, many, many years later.

Sooty blasted by Gort

Of all the films I had to watch at the time, the one that I was most frightened by was Robert Wise's 'The Day the Earth Stood Still'. I can still remember the tension in my body as the giant robot emerged from the spaceship and I hid behind the cinema seat backs; then as Gort the robot sent out energy blasts to decimate to surrounding military forces, I had Sooty watch the action that was too much for me to take. Nearly seventy years later I would make the GIF image above as a memorial.

The Trinity by Micko and the Mellotronics, will be released by Landline Records on June 12th. 

See also:

The narrative tradition in drawing 

Why I'm making animist images 

Stained glass

Communication theory

An excellent review of The Trinity