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. 

A sea worn island of a remaining bank of soil that had fallen onto the beach after erosion had undercut the coastal walkway. It now protruded from the beach like the head of some sort of dinosaur. As I looked at 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

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

1. Taniguchi, T., Oizumi, M., Saji, N., Horii, T. & Tsuchiya, N. (2025) Constructive approach to bidirectional influence between qualia structure and language emergence. Philos. Mind Sci. 6 

See also:

Drawing consciousness

Qualia

Surface and inner body perception in the age of CGI

Drawing textures

Angles, vision and sound

Interoceptual portraits

Mimesis

Drawing the processes of life

Gemma Anderson-Tempini: Garden of Forking Paths; Mitosis Score no.2, 2019. Pencil, watercolour and colour pencil on paper, 

When I attended the drawing conference "Drawing Across Along Between University Borders" in Porto in 2024, there was a presentation by Gemma Anderson-Tempini, whereby she outlined her work on what she called 'process biology'. I was fascinated to see how she had been integrated into biological laboratories, scientists obviously really appreciating what she was bringing to their understanding of the complex forms of life's processes. I was very envious of her contacts and thought the work she was doing was exemplary, so on getting home immediately bought a copy of the book she worked on, 'Drawing the processes of life'. The book explores how an artist might visually represent the dynamic processes of molecular level life, using drawing as a way of inquiring into living processes at the cellular scale. Drawing is shown to be a useful pathway to knowledge, rather than it being about the production of static images, something that I was aware I'm hoping to achieve myself, but also aware that I am still very concerned with finding that 'image' that sums an idea up. Her lecture was very useful and it gave me much food for thought. 

I am also interested in what she has to say because she had a complex installation constructed in Leeds in 2023, 'And She Built a Crooked House' whereby she had filled the rooms and garden at Burton Grange, a Victorian house in Far Headingley, Leeds, with elements of a journey through the fourth dimension; an artwork that was part-factual, part-historical and part-autobiographical. In addition to physics, concepts and ideas associated with the higher spatial dimensions were touched upon, such as maths, art, literature, cinema and the spiritual and I thought at the time that she had made a good fist of trying to show how these things could be ambitiously interconnected.

I wonder if I could make a similar or even more poetic set of connections and observations in relation to my own work. For instance is it possible to open out both scientific and sociological associations that begin with drawing the processes of life? Perhaps starting with the hand drawn diagram below of the relationship between RNA and DNA, that can be used to illustrate the fact that DNA stores genetic instructions, while RNA acts as a messenger and worker that translates those instructions into proteins. I like to think of the RNA as an open spiral, ready to connect, whilst the DNA is a closed spiral in love with itself. Reproduction and love being in our human minds often inseparable but also often subject to emotional stress. Our cells get RNA from DNA through a transcription process, which uses the DNA of a gene as a template to build a complementary RNA molecule. This happens inside the cell nucleus. This process is initiated when an enzyme called RNA polymerase binds to a specific starting sequence (the promoter) on the DNA, causing the double helix to unwind and separate. Once this happens a process of elongation begins, the enzyme reads the DNA template strand and builds a single-stranded RNA molecule by matching complementary RNA bases. However this is not a direct copy. For instance, thymine (symbol T or Thy), one of the four nucleotide bases that make up our DNA, alongside adenine, guanine, and cytosine (A, C, and G), is replaced by uracil (U) when RNA is constructed. Hence the three letter "start codon" that initiates the process is AUG. Like all other forms of transcription, during the process of converting data from one format to another, something is nearly always lost and yet at the same time, something is gained, a new read is possible, such as when a written transcription is made from a verbal model, by typing the information out it becomes more formal, it may then have more gravitas or appear to be more factual, it also becomes less personal, the unique sound of an individual's voice being lost and replaced by the chosen font that the printed text is now set within. 

Drawing of the relationship between RNA and DNA

I have looked before at the importance of folding as an underlying principle embedded into the idea of life and reproduction. Folding gives us a way to think about how reproduction is facilitated; for instance the first functions of chromosome folding are perhaps to mediate genome replication, compaction and segregation. RNA molecules play a central role in virtually all cellular processes. However in order to play out their roles, the various RNA molecules have to fold into specific three-dimensional structures. Therefore each and every RNA molecule has to at some point undergo the transition from an unfolded, disordered state to a functional conformity. A broader understanding of this transition has also led to the RNA world hypothesis. This proposes that early life forms relied almost entirely on RNA to store genetic information and catalyse chemical reactions, its ability to both self-replicate and operate as an enzyme being vital to the building of mechanisms that would eventually lead to the origin of life, facilitating both metabolism and reproduction. A RNA molecule is linear, but when folded into three dimensions ribozymes can be formed and they have similar abilities to enzymes which in turn allow for metabolism, the chemical reactions that convert food into energy. Most present day enzymes are now proteins; ribosomal RNA (rRNA) catalyses the formation of peptide bonds, stitching amino acids together to build proteinsribozymes. A ribosomal subunit is one of the two distinct, structural components that make up a complete ribosome. Ribosomes are essential for translating genetic information into proteins and are made up of two subunits: a small subunit and a large subunit. The small subunit binds to messenger (mRNA), which contains the genetic code for the protein. The large subunit adds amino acids to the growing protein chain. They are found in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells and are responsible for protein synthesis, which converts genetic information into the proteins which are essential for life, as they are necessary for all cellular functions.Together, these protein-and-RNA complexes act as the cell's molecular machinery, translating genetic information from messenger RNA (mRNA) into functional proteins.

I was pleased to find this illustration of the two subunits, we are built from blobs

Inside myself I know I house all sorts of bacteria, my intestines have a long standing relationship with E coli, which comes in a variety of forms many of which are useful to myself but some are harmful. Like myself though E coli will have a deep 'code' or 'codon' that determines the form that we will finally become, and we share a sequence of three RNA nucleotides (Adenine-Uracil-Guanine) that serve as the universal "start codon". The codon signals the cellular machinery to begin building a protein and dictates the insertion of the amino acid methionine. Methionine acts as the "start codon" (AUG) that initiates the translation of every protein synthesised in the body. The combined small and large subunit of E coli is in the scientific world named the 50S ribosomal subunit and it has been visualised as in the imasge below.

The 50S ribosomal subunit of E. coli 

I like this visualisation as it gives me a feeling that I think I know what sort of thing this is, even though I don't really. It intuitively feels like something I could grasp and if so, I can make something like it out of clay. It consists of three compartments, which are technically described as: the A (aminoacyl) site which binds incoming charged aminoacyl tRNAs. The P (peptidyl) site which binds charged tRNAs carrying amino acids that have formed peptide bonds with the growing polypeptide chain but have not yet dissociated from their corresponding tRNA. The E (exit) site that releases dissociated tRNAs so that they can be recharged with free amino acids. It is acting I think to put in place the first codon after the AUG. 

When I'm talking to people about what they feel their insides are up to, they may describe certain 'fictional' organs, such as a spleen, a something heard of but not very often seen, unless of course you are a medical professional. The drawn image of the 50S ribosomal subunit of E. coli has now begun to inhabit my visual archive and as such it will I'm sure emerge at some point as an image related to how I visualise an interoceptual experience. An image that is initially made to help describe one of the fundamental processes of life, becoming part of an image bank dedicated to visualising how we internally feel. Both the more scientific illustration and my feeling led forms, having a relationship to an idea that organic forms begin as blobs.

The issue for myself as an artist is that the processes of life are as much emotional as scientific. Yes I know that science is opening out amazing possibilities for our future, but I also know that our crazy emotional embodied mess of stuff, is what initiated the riots that happened in Southampton recently. I'm sure a scientist somewhere is at this very moment trying to isolate the various chemicals that were released as rioters achieved states of vitriolic anger, but my present feeling tone is one of anxiety and worry that a tragic death more to do with I suspect police incompetence, is seen by many as a sign of unfair treatment and the dire straits that some people find themselves in, can become situations that feel as if they can be transformed by smashing things up. Rioting can feel as if you are operating in response to righteous anger and some people are very good as triggering this. My body has been constructed using DNA sequencing but my conscious awareness of that is very much on the back burner as I watch the riots unfold, as I go back to drawing the processes of life, I try to acknowledge that both these situations are part of my life story. 

The riot in Southampton: Protestors make Nazi gestures

I'm reminded that science is often brought to a sudden stop by fascism. Emil Starkenstein Czech-Jewish pharmacologist, one of the founders of clinical pharmacology, was arrested by the Gestapo and murdered in the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1942. He would have been very aware of the role chemicals take in the construction of our mind/body complex, but nothing could have saved him from the mindset that took over the people who inhabited that part of the world at that particular time. I have to have faith that we will never return to those dark days, but to ensure that, we will I'm afraid have to have the courage to stand up to bullies and those that encourage them to think that aggressive action is the only catalyst for change. 

I would of course like to think that art can be a catalyst for change. Because it doesn't offer either / or answers and gives us a series of open ended responses as to how we can feel about the world, hopefully it helps celebrate difference and offers opportunities for reflection and speculation that lead to the opening out of imaginative new worlds. 

Sketchbook drawing

I often walk and draw. I look for things that both remind me of the thoughts I have been having and which I think might also become metaphors for them. In the case of the drawing above made in West Wittering last year, I was thinking about the sea as a constant devourer of the land and of how our bodies can be thought of as landscapes. Protruding spiral cut metal rods, emerge from a beach, their concrete base covered by seaweed; this rib-like structure, reminding me of work I had made that was itself a reflection on Japanese kusiizu images, those graphic depictions of corpses in the process of decay; images that were used by Buddhists to meditate upon the fragility of life and the reality of death. The processes of life are inseparable from those of death, there being a constant oscillation between the two states. In the acceptance of this we remove our constant internal suffering by coming to an understanding of the true nature of reality. Making a drawing of what you are seeing slows you down, it engages you in a dialogue with the materials of recording and the ability of your own body to shape those materials into a vision of what is seen. In doing this, contemplation begins and your breathing changes, becoming deeper and more in tune with the landscape you are within. I would argue that drawing is itself also therefore a process of life and that it is in many ways a form of meditation. My own image bank has recently been dedicated to visualising how we internally feel and these images are imaginatively conceived in the drawings I make of my external world. The process of drawing is internalising my perceptions of the external world. As these perceptions are recorded, they become as internalised things, not unlike those other internal objects that I think of as my body's organs or the scientific illustrations such as the 50S ribosomal subunit of E. coli that I have also recently been looking at. This personal narrative becomes a story out of which emerges the things I make as art, products of my own life's processes.

See also:

Why interoception?

Drawing and politics 1

Drawing and politics 2

Drawing and politics 3

Drawing and politics 4

What is embodiment?

The fold

Scale

Rene Magritte "The Portrait of Stephy Langui"

In Magritte's image is it scale or size difference that makes an impact on the viewer? It's interesting to compare his image with one of Spiderman, drawn I think by Mark Bagley.

The image of Spiderman makes me feel small, whilst Magritte's painting makes me think about size constancy. Scale in an image it seems to me is more an embodied emotional response. I remember for the first time walking the streets of New York and being overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the buildings. My body felt awe at the dizzying heights I was seeing. Perhaps that's what I'm getting at, scale at an emotional level is embodied; yes the buildings were big but the impact was emotional, their size was making me feel small. 

Scale is another of those vital visual elements that we use to create meaning. Scale is very different to size and although related to visual proportion, I tend to think of it acting more emotionally. Size refers to the absolute, physical measurements of an object, whereas scale is the relative size of an object compared to another, usually a standard of measurement as in the 1:72 scale that Airfix model plane kits used to be when I made them as a boy or human scale, a concept that references spaces and objects designed around the physical dimensions and capabilities of the human body. Size is objective, you can measure it, while scale is both objective and relationally subjective, for instance the 1:72 scale of an Airfix model allows you to objectively work out how big the original plane would have been, but scale can also be about the fact that the situation we find ourselves in as humans overpowers us, such as when we travel into the mountains and the scale of everything is awesome. In this case scale also could relate to the sublime, some scales being beyond comprehension. Scale is therefore about how big or small something feels within a relational context, for instance we can feel as if we are the wrong scale, as in those science fiction films that explore the consequences of miniaturisation or giantism. 

Gary Mayes: Storyboard for Fantastic Voyage story for Observer TV commercial

Scene from the 1954 sci-fi classic 'Them!'

Gulliver's Travels is the classic text on relative scale. Thomas Morten illustrated the 1864 edition, whereby we find at one point Gulliver coming across giants, the Brobdingnagians, that make him feel very small, whilst at another point in the book, he finds himself of giant size in relation to the inhabitants of Lilliput.  

On first encountering the Brobdingnagians

Gulliver in Lilliput: 1864 Edition of Swift's Gulliver's Travels

My last post was on proportion and human proportion in relation to scale is about how we physically and psychologically interact with our environment. It bridges the setting of the mathematical ratio of objects to a norm (scale) and the relative size of the parts within a form (proportion). Another way to think about this is that size is used to describe something (E.g. a woman is 5 feet seven inches high) and scale to compare one size of a thing with something else that it is related to. (The model of a train is half the size of the original) Scale can emotionally overwhelm or become attached to a feeling such as vulnerability, whilst size can be big or small, but this only becomes emotionally resonant when compared to something else and once we begin comparing we move into the realm of scale. Using a low viewpoint in drawing, such as in the scene from 'Them!' image above, is an effective technique to exaggerate scale, either making subjects appear immense, monumental and heroic or small, insignificant and dominated. This approach, often called a "worm's-eye view" or "low-angle shot," is often coupled with a bird's eye view or high angle shot in films, whereby swapping positioning is used to manipulate perspective to create a drama based on changing power dynamics.

The classic superhero view

Kings always used to have their thrones mounted on a dais, preferably with steps leading up to it. This meant that they controlled their viewing angle, being able to look down on their subjects, whilst their subjects looked up to them. Scale in this instance being to do with power and authority. On a day to day basis this might be something as simple as someone putting height-increasing insoles or heel lifts inside your shoes in order to look taller than you really are. Yes you are also actually taller, but your emotional response to the situation is related to the fact that you feel taller than someone else. 

Drawing for an artist's book

We play games with scale. The small people like marks made on the drawing above are there to help give scale to the figure with a burning back. For these biro squiggles the larger figure takes on landscape proportions and they in turn can be read as both small and or normal sized humans by someone looking at the drawing. 

Cosmic scale

Cosmic scale is often used to communicate a sense of the insignificance of our human scale of measurement. But as we go down in scale at some point the spaces of the quantum world open out and they can appear as immense as the universe itself. 

Breathing

The image above of 'breathing' that I made some time ago, being an early attempt to embed cosmic scale into the everyday. 

The cosmic human

When I was reading accounts of Chinese medicine I came across the idea of the body as being both of human and cosmic scale. In response, I attempted to fuse some of my interoceptual imagery, with a more 'heavenly' view. I do though realise that my own internal image bank still  includes the figure of Eternity as visualised in 1960s Doctor Strange comics. Back as a teenager I was fascinated by Steve Ditko's invention of 'Eternity', an image that would in the late 60s be further developed by Gene Colan. The way those artists envisioned the personification of an idea like eternity, has stayed with me and as I get older, I look back on what was invented for a cheap popular medium and think that perhaps what was done then had far more significance than we ever imagined at the time. 

Steve Ditko

Gene Colan

I have to acknowledge that I still find those 1960s images powerful and that my early fascination with comics is perhaps still one of the most important influences on my own image making. A conceptual fusion of Cézanne and Steve Ditko would probably underly my idea of the perfect image. Do I dare ask an AI programme to look at that? 

What AI came up with

It is interesting to look at what a current AI system does with the question, I used ChatGPT. It's the first time I have tried to use AI as an image generator and although it makes a decent fist of a fusion between the two sources, it doesn't really touch upon what I was thinking about, which was much more an approach to image making than a fixed image. "Here you are" the software seems to say, offering a solution that at first sight appears to be rather sophisticated, but it doesn't have my own awareness of that uncertain certainty that lies behind human perception. Cézanne's struggle was not about a final 'look', it was a process of human engagement with looking and the materials of its capture. Ditko, unlike Cézanne who was trying to record a series of perceptions, was trying to illustrate a story. I had to write a script for the AI to work to and I suppose I could keep editing that script, but it would be hard to eliminate the "Here you are" firm 'answer' that is produced, even if I asked the AI to involve that uncertain certainty, I don't think it could actually 'know' what that was, because it is not embodied. In this gap lies the difference between fine art and illustration. The AI it seems to me loses the human scale, it has no touch, it has never climbed a mountain or tried to draw one from an embodied experience.

Scale is in my world an embodied emotional register. I find the cosmic scale that AI produced a bit too like wallpaper but it is an image that asks me questions. I'm not ready to use the undoubted fascinating properties of AI yet but I cant discount the fact that it is here and is rapidly changing the landscape within which my images are seen. 

See also:

Visual proportion 

The vertical

Perspective

On seeing a plant in a garden

AI and drawing

Gulliver's Travels 1900 reprint using Thomas Morten's illustrations