But what is it about drawing that helps us feel better? For myself it is a way of externalising my thoughts and dissolving myself back into the world.
Many of us are on lockdown because of the global corona virus pandemic. It is a time when many people will face severe challenges to their mental well being, in particular because we are social animals and on being deprived of that social life we struggle with what to replace it with. Drawing can be a way of exploring the fact that a social life isn't just about how we relate to other people, it can help us form new relationships with the wider world. Every morning I go out and walk in order to take some exercise and I always take a sketchbook with me. I make at least one drawing during my time outside, and try to spend at least 20 to 30 minutes on a drawing, which means I have to slow down and concentrate.
What I have also found useful is to have a particular interest, so that when I'm looking for a subject to draw, I have a filtering device. The other week as I walked through my local woods, I noticed some very rudimentary structures being created. They looked very unfinished and I suspected that they were mostly made by children, but as my walk is very early in the morning, I will never know who builds them, as I come and go before the builders arrive. I see these structures as signs of a desire for shelter, of a need to build things, but none of the people doing the building have the skills to make something robust. Gradually an allegorical idea begins to emerge from observational drawing.
Unfinished structures: drawings from my sketchbook
It is important to me that I'm drawing something that is part of the ecology of the woods and that it is a sort of interface between humans and trees. Nobody is destroying anything and the living trees are used by people to lean various lengths of found branches against them, which means that no one is trying to cut them down. I can imagine both a future and a past where these simple structures would be developed much further and would become dwelling places, the important issue being that the structures are built in sympathy with the trees rather than replacing them. As I begin these trains of thought, I'm of course linking myself back into society, thinking something that connects all humans back into the natural world.
The Zulu or Nguni Bantu word 'ubuntu' means, 'humanity' but it can also be understood as 'I am because we are', it is a word that reminds us of a belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all, not just people, but everything. Trees, rocks, dogs, plastic straws, electric light bulbs, the wind, soil and Bob Dylan.
When people use drawing to find their way out of difficult places, they will often find themselves using imagery that is a metamorphosis between the human body, nature and the world that humans have constructed. It's as if the mind searches for ways to dissolve us back into the environment from which we emerged, a way of healing that recognises our need to be entangled into the fabric of everything.
This drawing of a head and a church set in a garden by Bobby Baker, fuses together internal imaginary thoughts with memories of real experiences, seamlessly conjoining differences of scale, material and concept. In the drawing below, the waters beneath the head/bridge crossing a brain/lake, flow out into a body/garden, all enmeshed together; memories, dreams and experiences of the world, all finding a place that fits into a coherent idea of something that transcends logic and the different categories that words tend to place the world into.
From: Bobby Baker's 'visual diary' of her road to recovery from depression.
When the artist Bobby Baker was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, followed by a breast cancer diagnosis, she set out to visualise her experiences by making drawings that gave form to her private catharsis. Baker because she is a professional artist, could like Leonora Carrington another artist that chronicled her own mental breakdown, observe herself at the same time as she was suffering from both these physical and mental issues. The activity of externalising the experiences she went through, though a process of making imagery, seemed to be a vital part of her recovery process.
Leonora Carrington
In Carrington's case she was a Surrealist and accepted the fact that the subconscious mind was as important to an artist as the world of logic and order. For Carrington as well as Baker confronting their own mental conditions, was also a result of the particular self awareness that artists develop as they try to fine tune their own sensibilities to the world. If artists can help themselves through this process, perhaps they can help others who are not artists to externalise their inner feelings too.
Shamans also develop often hidden or unconscious links between people the landscape, plants and animals, believing that the wellbeing of someone is dependent on how well an individual is in some sort of empathetic union with their environment. The shaman's job being to re-establish contact with whatever has become disconnected. It was Joseph Beuys that introduced me to the aspect of an artist's role that could be seen as shaman-like and although I only met him a couple of times, his ideas stuck.
Shamans also develop often hidden or unconscious links between people the landscape, plants and animals, believing that the wellbeing of someone is dependent on how well an individual is in some sort of empathetic union with their environment. The shaman's job being to re-establish contact with whatever has become disconnected. It was Joseph Beuys that introduced me to the aspect of an artist's role that could be seen as shaman-like and although I only met him a couple of times, his ideas stuck.
I have over the past year been talking to people about their illnesses and trying to visualise or 'externalise' some of the images that people have about things that are often hidden or difficult to talk about. They have in effect become disconnected with their own bodies. In order to help the process of re-connection I decided to design a set of 52 cards that could be used as an opening gambit for conversations. After trialling and making a few changes I have now been commissioned by the University of Leeds Cultural Institute to have a quantity of packs of these cards printed, so that they can go out to various community groups and be used as part of the Beyond Measure: Research and Evidence in Culture and Health project. This way of working avoids the gallery and in effect makes the pack of cards a travelling exhibition that can be carried around in someone's pocket.
In the process of drawing and designing the cards I was reminded of how important colour is to feelings of wellbeing and therefore I concentrated on producing the cards as rich colourful images that would initially stimulate thoughts about feeling rather than about any sort of scientific analysis of any medical problem. The cards are designed to begin a conversation and trigger stories and have no healing properties in themselves. However there is an overlap between them and some of the work I have been doing making votives for people who have wanted me to help them externalise and in effect 'banish' a pain or a problem.
Images of cards and the pack used to contain them
In the case of walking and drawing these are activities that promote wellbeing by directly engaging with the external world and in the cases of Bobby Baker and Leonora Carrington drawing is seen as an activity that directly engages with the internal world of the mind, but that also leads to wellbeing. In the case of the cards, the images of body parts that are set out alongside images of viruses, bacteria or wounds, are drawn images that have been through a process of 'design' to ensure that they all belong to the same family of forms. The cards can be engaged with in a similar way as you would a tarot card game, so there is a different type of physical engagement as you have to initially play with them, rather than contemplate them. All of these approaches are however centred on drawing, drawing that gradually, in the case of the cards, becomes simplified as images are turned into 'icons' or 'symbols'.
Drawing as an approach to communication using image making is a vital tool for human wellbeing and by going 'beyond' the verbal it can help develop an understanding of things in ways that are more 'holistic' and attuned to the body as a whole rather than just the mind.
See also:
Notes taken in response to Richard De Marco's Leeds talk on Joseph Beuys
Just do it A reminder not to think about it too much
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