Crosshatching as energy carrier

William Blake after Fuseli, Head of a Damned Soul, c1789-90

When looking closely at some of the images in the 'William Blake's Universe' exhibition at the Cambridge University Fitzwilliam Museum, I was entranced by the various uses of cross hatching. In particular Blake's rendering of the image chosen for the exhibition poster, had me gazing closely at its surface and as I did my gaze became lost in the movement of one surface into the next, as the cross hatching overlapped and its curved lines not only made form but produced energy at the same time. 

Hendrick Goltzius 

Some time ago I put up a post on cross contour drawing but when I did I failed to open out how powerfully some artists had used cross hatching to energise surfaces and create energy fields. Some artists in particular, such as Hendrick Goltzius, who was the leading Dutch engraver of the early Baroque period, specialised in using these techniques. Rembrandt for instance encouraged his students to copy Goltzius engravings as a way to learn how to cross-hatch. Notice how the engraved lines both follow the form and give an indication of tone. However it is in pen and ink and chalk drawings that we see the technique used at its most subtlest.  

Rubens

Rubens: Detail

If you look at the Rubens drawing above, you can see how the pen strokes create compacted energy, their slight curvature suggesting the soft curves of the body, the depicting of the movement of light to dark necessitates points of overlap, suggesting a constant flow of one field of energy into another. 

Durer uses this technique to both suggest mass and texture. The hair texture dances to one set of rhythmic dynamics, whilst the planes of the head are suggested by another set of rhythmically set out lines. What appears at a distance to be a solidly modelled head, on closer inspection becomes a series of energy fields. 

Durer

Durer: Detail of energy movements

Jean-Baptiste Greuze's drawing, 'The Ungrateful Son', is a very good example of how planar reinforcement using hatched lines, is not just a powerful explainer of how masses work within a complex solid such as a head, but can also be a way to demonstrate how energy fields can interact and overlap.  

Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The Ungrateful Son, ca. 1777

Greuze, The Ungrateful Son: detail

Greuze has a very strong grasp of three dimensional form, each line reinforcing the head's planar structure, but we can also see that complex rhythms are made as these contour hugging lines overlap. The movement of marks as they define the brow, the eye socket, the cheek and the nose, chin and mouth, is not unlike currents or eddies in a stream flowing over rocks. These marks also link one facial form to another; if you begin by looking at the bridge of the nose, you can drop down its side and slide over the cheek, falling towards the mouth and then visually tumble down towards the chin and neck. An idea of the body as landscape emerges the closer you get to the drawing. 

The body's energy field

I have begun to think about how these various energy fields overlap. Perhaps this was triggered in my head by listening to obituaries of Professor Higgs who died last week and the various accounts of the Higgs field. This is a field of energy that is accompanied by the Higgs boson, used by the field to interact with other particles, such as electrons. This interaction gives weight to the particles and hence 'mass' comes into being as well as energy. 

Mapping the energy of a concrete block in the sea wall

Gradually my thoughts about the energy of seeing are becoming fused with the energy inside mass and how it sits within the space that surrounds it. 

Perceptual study of a toy dinosaur found in the woods

I am still working on how to visualise the inner body, so will be trying to add in these thoughts about energy mass, as I try to fuse the ageing awareness of a body into the landscapes that it remembers. But for now this is where that particular strand of thinking has settled. 

The ageing body and a memory

Aways so much to do, always so many things to reconcile, but as always so many exciting things to get involved with.  

See also:

Cross contour drawing

Visualising Energy Flow

Visualising energy flow part two

Signs of life in flowing line drawings

Quantum entanglement

Drawing the internal body

Max Brodel: The mouth

Max Brodel: The throat

There still seems to be a worry about the relationship between fine art drawing and illustration. I personally find no real difference between them, both are concerned with trying to represent and communicate visually things that we experience. The fine artist often makes very personal decisions as to what is being visualised and the illustrator is usually more directed by the role they have in solving problems set by others, but whether the problem set is a personal one or set by others, at the end of the day a piece of visual communication is made, that is either one that works well or doesn't. The history of art includes many artists working directly for clients, be these to do with the church, the ruling elites or galleries and many artists have also worked as illustrators or have had roles that didn't separate out the 'artist' from the other functions that someone was involved with. For instance a monk may have also been a fantastic image maker, but their main role as someone in the service of whatever religious order they belonged to, meant that they were never singled out as 'signature' artists; in fact most artists would as far as history is concerned, be anonymous. We can ask questions of an artwork, such as does the work enrich our understanding or awareness, does it help us to get more in touch with our feelings, does experience of it allow us to do things differently? But we can ask these questions of a fine art painting, sculpture or drawing, just as much as we can of an illustration,

I compare my own work with both fine art and illustration. For instance, my interest in interoception overlaps with medical illustration as it attempts to visualise what goes on within the body but I'm also trying to communicate feeling tone, something more akin to music perhaps and therefore closer to artists dealing with expressionist themes, so I'm also happy to look at artists such as Max Beckman or Cecily Brown, both of whom have contributed to the visualisation of the human body's expressive possibilities.

There is a history of medical illustration that is vitally important to how we think about the interior of our bodies. One artist in particular was very influential on the development of the contemporary anatomy textbook and his work is also of interest to myself in that he developed very specific techniques in order to communicate the particular qualities of our visceral  insides. Max Brodel (1870-1941), is considered to be one of the shapers of modern medical illustration. He understood that a drawing was much better than a photograph when it came to showing others what was going on and he had this to say about copying:

"Copying a medical object is not medical illustrating. The camera copies as well, and often better, than the eye and hand, in medical drawing full comprehension must precede execution."

In order to better communicate what he was seeing, Brodel devised a method of using carbon dust to create a two tone technique that could capture the sparkling highlights that characterise the wet visceral look of the interior living body. His particular use of carbon dust involved using special paper coated with white layers of chalk or clay. Carbon dust is then layered on the paper in stages to create shadow and depth. The results are incredibly rich tonal images that not only suggest wet insides but capture the nature of three dimensional form well. He also used erasers to lift out bright highlights and create further three dimensional effects. 

Max Brodel: Illustration of the musculature of bladder and urethra

It is interesting to compare his drawings with Alberto Morroco. Alberto Morrocco unlike Max Brodel was an artist better known for his landscapes. 

Alberto Morroco

Morroco produced anatomical drawings in the period following his service as a conscientious objector in the Medical Corps during WWII and never made any other anatomical drawings once he had completed his work for the anatomy textbook. However the drawings he did do are powerful examples of how to communicate complex hard to read views of the interior of the human body. 

Alberto Morroco: The eye

Alberto Morroco was making his images in the mid-twentieth century and medical textbooks were now being printed in colour. This meant that he could selectively add colour to his drawings in order to further distinguish or pick out vital aspects of the anatomy he was focusing on. His drawing technique is better at depicting the bony substrata of the body, whilst you feel that Brodel keeps you much more aware of the slimy visceral nature of the body's reality.

Both artists influenced my own ideas about how we might visualise inner body feelings. 

The pain of separation

The image above, 'The pain of separation' being an image produced after working with someone who had experienced heartache and longing for someone. This was in effect a landscape of their emotions and was as much a response to anatomical illustrations as it was to cross sections of landscape whereby the structure of rocks is revealed as a cross section. 

Geologic cross section of the Flagstaff area, northern Arizona

The one thing missing of course is annotation. Because feelings are so hard to point to, sadness, regret, longing etc. are all subjective experiences and therefore although two people might come to some sort of agreement as to what something might mean, this is far from a universal language that is useable by everyone. This is perhaps the fine art/illustration divide. An illustration will need to have an agreed communicative value, but the fine art image is open to interpretation. Hopefully though by working with someone and forging an agreed synthesis of visual/verbal responses, something gets communicated that is greater than the conversations that were had and that something more universal emerges from the conversational drawing activity, that is sensed by others when they see the final image, which is in this case a digital print. 

Reference

Cullen, Thomas A. "Max Brödel, 1870-1941, Director of the First Department of Art as Applied to Medicine in the World". Bulletin of the Medical Library Association. Vol. 33, No. 1, January 1945.

Macdonald. Joanne (2022) How can drawing support understanding in anatomy through the work of Robert Douglas Lockhart (1894-1987)? Aberdeen: Aberdeen University

See also:

Drawing and healing

Joanne Macdonald: Drawing Bodies

What lies beneath

Objects, people and stories

In his book 'The Entanglement' Alva Noë points out that the aesthetic experience is centred around the way that we engage with ourselves and the environments that we find ourselves immersed into. He suggests that the aim of this experience is to move from a position of not seeing to seeing, or from seeing to seeing differently. My recent work looking at how we materialise thought through the use of significant objects forms a parallel visual conversation with his thoughts about how we come to understand things. Evaluating and detecting things, he suggests are inseparable activities. We see the things we love differently to the things we don't care about. He states, 'Values are antecedent to the encounter with the object, because they are embedded in and find expression in the relationship that is the encounter with the object.' p112 He then goes on to say that these values are what makes the object 'present'. 

I have been sitting with people and drawing objects that they think are significant to them. In doing so I have tried to learn about how we can together come to some sort of agreement about the mutual imaging of that significance. This work is about how one person's values are gradually transferred to another person by conversation and as this process is visualised hopefully both of us can move on from 'not seeing to seeing differently' and when the work is then seen by others, perhaps it may help them see things differently too. 

I begin with making sketchbook drawings of a significant object. These drawings are made whilst making verbal conversation with the object's owner. As we converse significant ideas and thoughts begin to become apparent and they become the gateways through which the next phase of the work will be entered. 

One of the first conversational drawings

One of the first drawings done as we talk is a 'location' drawing. In this case right in the centre of the room is a small table, on which a pack of cigarettes, a bottle of whiskey and other 'being used' items surround a polished wooden carving of a baby crawling. 

Sketchbook pages made as we talk

The carving of the crawling wooden baby becomes central to our conversation. The memories associated with the sculpture begin to be related and a tale of a Thailand island and jungle wonderment begins to emerge, as the conversation opens out. Flying fish enter the story as a short sea voyage is remembered and a mystery 'shaman' type figure is introduced as a long gone supplier of Chinese heroin, in another conversation a memory of seeing fighting cocks surfaces. The baby is a carved figure from over 40 years ago, it may crawl across a table in northern England, but its dark polished rosewood surface, intimates another life, one from a time when our neighbour was a young man. Initially made as a symbol to help others see the child in all our lives, the baby was a like a narrative magnet and I begin to seek out other stories that it could be crawling into. In Thailand carvings of Baby Buddhas are common or at least were when this one was bought. A story of Buddha's birth may have been taken from a Hindu Rig Veda text, such as the birth of Indra. After Alexander the Great conquered central Asia in 334 BCE, there was a considerable intermingling of Buddhism with Hellenic art and ideas and the last echoes of that time, were now mingling with global tourism. Our neighbour in particular was trying to get off the day to day treadmill of office and factory work and was like the Beatles, looking for spiritual nourishment in the East.

Greek terracotta figure of a baby in a cradle

There an alternative origin narrative of the Buddha’s birth being pictorially re-invented after Buddhist traders returned from the Middle East with tales of churches hosting paintings and sculptures celebrating the birth of Jesus. But babies have always been potent symbols of fresh beginnings, new life, innocence and the possibilities of future lives.

Medieval icon, where the baby Jesus is depicted as a small man

Gradually this baby begins to draw around itself more and more stories. The Buddhist view of birth encompasses vast cycles of death, bardo (the state between death and rebirth), and rebirth. The experience of bardo is a result of the life or karma, of the being who enters it. Those who have recently died enter the bardo with a task of searching for the right conditions for their next rebirth, therefore the baby is also in many ways the re-entry into the world of an existing soul, so it is both old and young at the same time. Perhaps an echo of this is seen in the icon above. In Medieval art painters had to reflect the fact that the Church believed that Christ was essentially a perfectly formed and unchanging man during his entire life. I.e. Christ even when a child needed to appear in the form of an adult because he was not supposed to change with age. 

After talking to the crawling baby's owner about some of the possibilities for narratives, I take the sketchbook drawings away in order to work from them. Over the next week or so I begin developing them as images that are made to enhance or develop any narratives that were beginning to emerge during our initial conversations. 

The idea of the baby in the jungle begins to emerge as a story is written. The point is not to write a novel or a short story, but to see if some sort of narrative coherence can be drawn from the fragments of memory that my neighbour has held in his head for all these many years. This is how the first draft of a story was put down and it was decided that this would be a 'once upon a time' story, as for both of us, the tale seemed very like a fairy story, the jungle being a setting like a 'Just So' story or the forest of 'Little Red Riding Hood'. 

'Once upon a time in Thailand there was made a baby. It was a beautiful baby, lovingly carved from the wood of a rosewood tree. This wonderful baby’s name was Phayung, and he learnt to crawl almost as soon as he was made. Because he was so beautiful everyone wanted him and he was soon bought by a rich and kindly young foreigner who had heard of the magical nature of this wooden child. The baby was much more than a baby, and it could never really be owned by anyone. Within a day, his new owner on picking it up had gently brushed his forehead against that of the wooden baby's and was astonished to hear a voice in his head. He was soon listening carefully to a constant babble of baby thoughts, thoughts that seemed at times very wise and which spoke of vast long ages of wisdom, but which were also silly thoughts, naive ideas about the world and at times totally incomprehensible jibber jabber. The young foreigner soon realised that the baby was someone very special and he was sure that a new life beckoned, especially once he had begun to understand what the baby was trying to tell him. 

Because the baby was a wooden boy, he yearned to be with the type of tree from which he had been carved. As well as having all sorts of insights into the new world he was experiencing, he had feeling that came from his past life as a growing tree. Eventually he asked the young man if he could be sent back into the jungles out of which he came. But the young man was from somewhere else and had just been passing through, he didn't know one jungle from the next and of course didn't want to let such a special wooden baby go. But the baby persisted, it now spoke of little else and the man began to become irritated and more importantly very aware that his special find would be of little use if all it could ever do was go on and on about returning to the jungle.  Gradually he made up his mind to follow any instructions the baby might give him about returning to the jungle and so began to ask questions about the nature of the place the baby had come from. It was, said the baby a place surrounded by water, his log had been floated down a river and then carried across a salty sea. There had been a tree that had grown from a seed, that had itself been grown from the seed of a tree, that had been grown from the seed of a tree, that had been grown from the seed of a tree under which in its shade the Buddha had once sat, and during that time had achieved his enlightenment. Each of these trees had lived to be many hundreds of years old and every one had held within the possibilities of its heartwood a new life. 

The man grew frightened of what he was now hearing. He realised that not only was this baby special, it may have had a deeply spiritual message to transmit, one that he was not in any way worthy of. He looked around and decided that where they were was as good a place as any for the baby to find its family. All these trees looked similar to a man who had grown up in a city far away and it was clear now that the baby had its own mind and that a wooden mind could never in reality be used to help his own fleshy one accomplish anything. After wishing him good luck, the man put the baby onto the ground and watched as it began to crawl off into the thick, dense jungle that surrounded them. As it did a haze began to settle over the man's eyes and he fell asleep. On waking he couldn't quite believe in the baby's existence, but began to trace his way back and to think of all those reasons why he ought to travel back to his former life. 

The baby quickly disappeared into the undergrowth. For what seemed like many years he crawled through the dense undergrowth, his lovingly polished dark brown skin glistening in the dampness of early mornings. His tautly curved but very solid back, at odd times emerging like a stone tortoise, pushing itself up and out of the dense leaf compost of the forest floor and when it did other creatures might find the time to gaze in its direction and wonder what it was. Gradually over time the jungle creatures accepted the baby as their companion and after even more time they forgot to even remember he existed.

Then one day the baby found another very like himself. As he crawled into a sheltered jungle glade he came across a seated figure. It was, like the baby, made of rosewood, but it was not crawling. It did move, but only by swaying very slightly, as if surrounded by invisible breezes. It had one hand resting on its right leg, the hand’s fingers pointing downwards, its third finger just touching the ground. The other hand rested on its lap, its palm facing the sky. Its calm eyes were nearly closed, with pupils looking down towards the jungle floor, upon which the baby now crawled to a halt.  The rosewood baby gazed back up into the figure’s eyes and as he did he realised that at last he had found what he had been looking for.

The figure he had found seemed familiar, it had a skin of warm polished wood that was exactly the same as the baby’s. It also had a voice, an inner sound, not one like the other creatures of the jungle, not a voice of shriek, or gibber or squawk, this was a voice of singing and of chanting and it called to the baby. It had been calling for a long time, calling the baby to witness; calling it to re-find it's body, to re-vive itself in a new form as an earth-touching element. The wooden carving told the baby a story of its own enlightenment, of how once like the baby it had crawled on wooden hands and knees for many years through the jungle looking for answers, until one day after meditating on its life, it had realised that all was illusion and that all it had to do was to accept this and desire would disappear and he could at last be at one with the rest of the jungle. Therefore he now longer had to crawl, but could sit still and as he did he became a centre around which all things could be entangled, a centre around which spokes could radiate out and connect with all the illusions of reality but not be affected by them. 

How long the baby stayed there in the shadowy jungle glade is not known, but when finally he crawled away and back into the jungle, the baby knew that its time as a jungle baby was coming to an end and he needed to make his way back to the place from where he started. 

After what seemed many years the baby saw a thinning of the trees and shafts of light breaking through in such a way that he knew he had reached the jungle’s edgelands and that soon he would be able to make his way out and back into the place of his making. As he finally crawled out of the jungle, he passed a small still puddle of dark water and looking down into it he saw his reflection for the first time since the start of his journey and staring back was no longer the face of a baby but the face of an old man, and no longer did the jungle surround him, it fell away and as he looked to see where he was, he thought he recognised the form of the young man who had once owned him, but no, it was only an old man sat on a couch, an old man staring past the baby with eyes that were now finding it hard to see the things of this world, but which were beginning to peer gradually into the next.'

 

The story is now became central to how the visual work was evolving. 

A new series of drawings and collages were then made, but this time they were designed to be made into prints, so that the ideas emerging could be solidified and firmed up, thus giving the emerging narrative more traction. 

The baby crawls into the jungle

Baby enters the jungle

The baby in the jungle

The baby spots something in the distance

The baby meets his former self

The baby in the night jungle

The baby returns to the world as an old man

Other memories are also drawn, flying fish and fighting cocks seemed particularly important to my neighbour and images of men and babies, all of which didn't go any further but which helped with the growing dialogue around which the central story grew. 

We talked about the fact that everyone's life has stories entangled into it and that all it took to unpick those stories was often a conversation or a chance meeting that could trigger a memory or an association. We also talked about the nature of images as memories, such as my neighbour's old fading photographs and how they were very different to the new images that were emerging from the story. I some ways they are both illusions, but both contain within them certain truths about how we experience the world through the stories we tell. 

 So as this process was visualised did we move on from 'not seeing to seeing differently'? I certainly had a very different idea of what the wooden baby in my neighbour's front room was about. My neighbour had confronted something in his past that now meant that he saw it much more mythically and that what was for him a fading memory, was now something not just shared but which was a kernel around which new stories could be grown. Above all we had a shared experience, memorised in the form of drawings and prints, each one of which could be re-visited and could become a trigger or starting point for yet another elaboration of a constantly growing tale of a wooden baby learning from its journey through an imagined world. 

As the baby story began to evolve it reminded me of 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' by Oscar Wilde. The fictional artist Basil Hallward, was infatuated with Dorian's beauty and somehow managed to create some sort of magical fetish in the form of Dorian's portrait, an object that would soak up the visual impact of all the evil deeds that Gray would in his life go on to perpetrate. Ivan Albright would be chosen to paint the final look of this painting for the 1945 film, an image that could be seen as the dimetric opposite of the carved baby. In the one instance the baby is frozen in its cherubic form, the art form of carving operating to trap its shape forever within a block of rosewood. However the painting made of Dorian Gray is constantly changing; each evil deed undertaken by Gray, is etched into the painting's surface, until an image begins to emerge of an ageing, dissolute man, who has finally realised that his time on this Earth is up.

See also:

The narrative tradition in drawing

Why it matters (Conversations) 

Drawing and printmaking

The weaving of grids (stories of life)

What is a portrait?

Loss of innocence and its rediscovery

Detail of an imaginary landscape

On the subject of the loss of innocence and its rediscovery, Picasso is quoted as saying "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up" and he is also quoted as stating, "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child".

I was reminded of these quotes when I was listening to Kirsty Young's podcast 'Young Again' that was focused on an interview with the writer Phillip Pullman. He was he said at one time a middle school teacher and during the years 9 to 13 he saw children change their behaviours as they became self aware. He referenced in relation to this, 'On the Marionette Theatre' by Heinrich von Kleist, and this extract below is what I think he was referring to.

"About three years ago", I said, "I was at the baths with a young man who was then remarkably graceful. He was about fifteen, and only faintly could one see the first traces of vanity, a product of the favours shown him by women. It happened that we had recently seen in Paris the figure of the boy pulling a thorn out of his foot. The cast of the statue is well known; you see it in most German collections. My friend looked into a tall mirror just as he was lifting his foot to a stool to dry it, and he was reminded of the statue. He smiled and told me of his discovery. As a matter of fact, I'd noticed it too, at the same moment, but... I don't know if it was to test the quality of his apparent grace or to provide a salutary counter to his vanity... I laughed and said he must be imagining things. He blushed. He lifted his foot a second time, to show me, but the effort was a failure, as anybody could have foreseen. He tried it again a third time, a fourth time, he must have lifted his foot ten times, but it was in vain. He was quite unable to reproduce the same movement. What am I saying? The movements he made were so comical that I was hard put to it not to laugh.

From that day, from that very moment, an extraordinary change came over this boy. He began to spend whole days before the mirror. His attractions slipped away from him, one after the other. An invisible and incomprehensible power seemed to settle like a steel net over the free play of his gestures. A year later nothing remained of the lovely grace which had given pleasure to all who looked at him. I can tell you of a man, still alive, who was a witness to this strange and unfortunate event. He can confirm it, word for word, just as I've described it."

A key moment in Jewish and Christian religious terms was of course the fall of mankind. By eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, we were no longer innocent and knowledge brought with it the difficulties and vicissitudes of too much awareness; suddenly we realised we were naked. As knowledge is gained innocence is lost and we become more self-conscious. We have hopefully when children all at some point in our lives inhabited those states of unselfconsciousness; experiences that were often pure and joyful. As adults though we have to attain those types of experiences in other ways. The poet Lorca suggested that we could regain the poetry of unselfconsciousness via what he called 'el duende'; that quality of human 'lost in the moment' action that he found in the best flamenco dancers; who could attain an almost trance like state that made the experience of their dance unforgettable. Lorca believed duende could be found in all the arts, not just in dance, and that it could only come into existence when someone is totally possessed by the experience, one where subject and object are conjoined, where the physical world and the artist merge with the spirit world; and when this happens forms arrive as if “shaped like wind on sand”. (Lorca, in Berger, 2016, p.99) But to achieve that state, we need to practice and practice and practice, until our body/minds meld into one and we know what to do without thinking. As we get older, what we loose in spontaneity we can regain through hard work. Through practice, a new type of grace can be attained that is even better than the one we had as an unselfconscious child. Hard work and long effort can lead eventually to an apparent child like simplicity, which is the state I'm sure Picasso was referring to when he said it takes a lifetime to paint like a child.

Philip Pullman then went on to say that you don't make art because you are inspired, inspiration he stated is a reward for hard work. I have spent endless hours drawing, years and years of making artwork, and gradually I think I'm beginning to make some things that look easy, but which on second looking it hopefully becomes apparent that they have a deep complex conviction behind them.

Childhood is though always with us. I remember at the age of 10 looking out of the window of my bedroom in our house in Himley Road, Dudley. We were about to move house and I wanted to remember the landscape that I had spent so many hours playing in. My bedroom was at the back of the house, it looked out over the scarred wasteland that had been the space within which I had grown into my own self awareness. There was the slag heap down whose sides I used to run or ride my battered old scooter, bomb craters that I had in the past lined their edges with hedge clippings in order to make dens and hide away from everyone else. I looked at the walls that formed the backs of yards where the pigs were kept, animals that would inhabit my imagination throughout my life, a slag mound hillock on which I once stood holding a roof slate in my hand for an older boy to shoot at with his air rifle, the pain as the pellet went into my hand still remembered, the rusty remains of old factory equipment still left broken after wartime bombing, but which were now entangled in weeds; all a backdrop for vivid imaginary play.

That landscape is still with me now, the cradle of my innocence. I have tried to rediscover it time and time again, each time looking for a way of capturing something of that feeling of total immersion that comes from being lost in play. Part of an artist's role it would seem to me is to try to maintain some sort of naivety and to try and hold off the sophistication of adulthood for as long as you can, or at least to fold into the knowledge that comes with age and memory of the innocence that came first. 

Landscape of the past

The drawing 'Landscape of the Past' is based on my memories of the time when I looked out of that bedroom window. I made the drawing about 5 or 6 years ago, so roughly 60 years after the actual experience. Has enough work been done to regain an innocent eye? I suppose that is up to others to decide, but within my own aesthetic process, the loss of innocence and its rediscovery are key components that need to be added into a mix of animist practices and a need to be entwined into the world and not to stand outside of it. I still struggle to accept the subjective insides that have become enfolded into me from a previous outside, but in that very struggle, perhaps my most interesting work is done. 

Running with low cloud and pig

The drawing 'Running with low cloud and pig' melds together several stories. Clouds were wonderful things to watch as a boy, I would lie on my back for what seemed hours just gazing at them and imagining what worlds and creatures they contained. Then one day as a teenager I saw the film based on Michelangelo's life, 'The Agony and the Ecstasy' and saw Charlton Heston doing the same thing, but this time seeing in his clouds the Sistine Chapel Ceiling. This very romantic take on an artist's life effected me deeply and it was one of those 'moments of epiphany', whereby I realised that I wanted to be an artist. The clouds are tadpoles waiting to metamorphose into whatever they needed to. I run down the hill towards home, arms outstretched as I did as a boy, always about to take off, always about to fly. The pig, my nemesis, waits in ambush, all tales from a younger self, but now re-seen with an older eye. 

See also: 

Contemporary landscape 

Contemporary landscape part two

Drawing plants

Why do I draw?

Clouds

Carlfriedrich Claus and Sprachblatt

Carlfriedrich Claus's sprachblatt or speech sheets, are forms of a writing/drawing mix, whereby text is fused with texture, and as you stand away from the image, texture begins to dominate text, but as you focus in, text becomes more important. So for instance at the scale of screen reproduction texture is more immediately apparent and the image can be read as a visual sound.

The use of language in visual poetry was a specialty of Carlfriedrich Claus, who developed his work in the early 1960s. He believed that the 'naturalised individual’ ought to live in harmony with a 'humanised natural world’ and his ideas mix European philosophy with Eastern mysticism and the writings of Marx. His text-drawings, often drawn on both sides of transparent sheets, illustrate both the processual and dialectal approaches to his ideas. For instance you might get two pages that set out a thesis and antithesis in order to arrive at some sort of synthesis; however no matter how hard you try to 'read' these images, it is hard to avoid the sense that their meaning will always be hidden. 

'Aurora’ (1977)

This is how Claus wrote about his processes: "The production of speech sheets and of phoneme processes ran parallel. The speech sheets arose through my experimental use of my left hand (I am right-handed), and in doing so I noticed, first, the formation of internal blockages, like a psychological stuttering, and second, a different coloration of the content of my thought. (…) These phoneme processes or speech operations are not speaking in the sense of phonology, in which the specific scaffolding of a natural language must precede each act of speech. Here, the whole point is to break through this scaffolding, to break out of it or out of the prison of natural language, which determines in great part our relationship to the world. (…) Basically, the 'phoneme aggregate' suggests to the listener that he experiment with his own organs of speech and that he explore how various sounds, consciously articulated, affect his psychological state."

Carlfriedrich Claus: installation in the former Reichstag Building in Berlin

Carlfriedrich Claus at work

However it is in the work he did with sound that I think has the most potential to be revisited and thought about as a stimulus for students interested in contemporary drawing. Claus had been working on an installation from the 1950s to the 1990s, which addressed language as a written image and sound process. 'Lautaggregat K' used a spatial layer of sound, forming a 'sound aggregate', originally used for a WDR radio play, using a special stereophonic system; this sound material then forming the basis for a 1995 installation, in which several speech processes ran in parallel and were mixed at an editing desk. These layers of sound corresponded with the writing images, that were spatially arranged on transparent surfaces. The subject of the text dealt with philosophical themes, while the sound process itself was intended to be experienced physically. These two normally separate experiences, the intellectual and the physical being brought together.

Carlfriedrich Claus: sound processing room 1995

In his work there was a constant dialectical flip between reading, hearing and looking and he stated that his works aimed to impregnate ‘ways of seeing with lingual thinking’.  Perhaps I have been reminded of his work because Sue has begun working towards a PhD and she was looking at how work she had done in the past when curating sound artists, is now being archived. Sometimes our interests feel very different, but they also touch at sometimes unexpected points and this work of Claus's is I think an interesting case. He now has his own archive, where his acoustic work is available on 15 reel-to-reel tapes and 267 cassette tapes and it would be interesting to see what issues and problems the archive has faced in reconstructing experiences of his work for those who visit. 

The move towards a gesamtkunstwerk, whereby various elements of an artwork come together to create a totality, is something that at one point or another many artists consider, because by the nature of things artists try out various approaches to communicating related ideas. This often leaves you with a diverse body of work that only seems to make sense when the various elements are collected together. For myself the drawings Claus produced make far more sense when coupled with the sound pieces he made. I think in my own case my drawings make more sense when shown alongside my ceramics, prints and written work, but how to organise all the elements is at present something I'm not sure how to do, I need curatorial advice. 

See also:

Eye music

Drawing sound

Mapping as translation

Asemic writing

Drawing as portable sculpture

Drawing into installation