Drawing Dialogue Symposium

A first and a last drawing for Drawing Dialogue: Moving from an empty page to a full one. 

Giving space and taking space.

From the Drawing Dialogue exhibition

Last weekend saw a Drawing Dialogue symposium, designed to accompany the Keighley Creative exhibition of work that had been done so far. My contribution was a presentation about the relationship between dots and lines, a subject that reflects my current interest in 'primitives' or the basic building blocks of our visual language. It was very much a 'follow my nose' sort of presentation, but I did write out my main points beforehand, so I thought I might as well host the presentation text on this blog, because a couple of people did ask me if they could get hold of the script I was working from.

Drawing Dialogue is an ongoing project and I have posted about the project in the past. The basic idea is one artist begins a drawing, it is then sent on to another artist, who develops the drawing, and then a third artist is asked to complete it. A form of consequences, or collaborative drawing, that essentially means that each artist has to be sensitive to the needs of others. It is a very interesting exercise in empathy and sensitivity and helps to dissolve artists' egos.  

So here is the full text.

A new life for dots. 

Drawing Dialogue Symposium

 At the core of all our drawing dialogues is the coming together of different drawing languages. In order to explore the implications of these meetings I’ve therefore decided not to focus on one of the actual encounters I’ve taken part in, but to set up an imaginary encounter between points and lines so that you can get some sort of glimpse of the theoretical possibilities that open out within our various collaborations. Tim Ingold has written extensively on the life of lines, he regards lines as essential to our understanding of life. This is an old idea and it goes back to the Anglo-Saxon idea of the Wyrd, a cosmological idea that has at its centre a vision of life that is shaped by fate. 

Cats cradle as life story

Imagine if you will, that on birth you have two umbilical cords, one the physical connection that you have with your mother and another invisible one that connects you to your fate or life. The first one is cut on the day of your birth the other is finally severed on the day of your death. This line will first of all wrap itself around the family core, mother, father, brother, sister and then around the home, the village and the landscape of childhood. As you get older it will tie itself to and around all the events in your life as a pattern is woven and what was once a single thread becomes a thick blanket of interconnections. This is a wonderful metaphor and it has for myself and many people of the drawing community been a concept that has allowed us to develop ideas, images and ways of working that themselves continue to extend and expand the woven fabric of drawing dialogues. However although lines are used by most of the artists involved in Drawing Dialogues, lines are themselves second order entities, they are composed of tiny ideas that we call points and it is the life of dots and their uses in image making that I would like to explore today. 

A point becoming a dot

All forms of drawing are essentially to do with the imagination, and a dot is at its centre an idea of a point. A point is what Euclid called a primitive notion, which means that it cannot be defined in terms of a previously defined object; originally Euclid defining the point as "that which has no part". In fact for Euclid points were all about relationships. 

Points have relationships and these can generate ideas of space

Points were where things met. A line could meet another line at a point, this point allows us then to build a further construct in the mind, a tiny piece of grit around which pearl like we grow ideas, such as three dimensional space. From this thing that has no part we can build an edifice, the three axes of height, width and depth all come together as a point. 

Map of Ghana: Look at the line that separates Ghana from Burkina Faso. 

Lines have certain issues that they bring with them, one of the most difficult being that they also operate as boundaries. When the European nation states were carving up territories they would often do this with maps and rulers; the rule establishing the rule so to speak. Drawn lines would divide peoples from their traditional homelands, would establish new nations consisting of collectives of peoples whose only common issue was that they had been bundled together because of some European game of thrones. We draw lines around things to define them, to fix them in the imagination, this is why so much of our graphic design imagery is sharp edged, fixed by a line often now clarified by Bezier curves as in software programs such as Illustrator or Photoshop. 

A car drawn using Illustrator 

Perhaps the strangest drawing I know of is the one drawn onto the plaque that was fixed onto the side of the Pioneer 10 space craft. Launched in 1972, it was the first manmade object to be sent out into far space, it was designed to be able to travel beyond our solar system and out into the wider galaxy. A wonderful idea, but not so the line drawing of a man and a woman that accompanied the vessel on its journey. The line drawing of both man and woman is from the front, the man holds his arm up in greeting, showing an open hand, the woman, less active of course, stands beside him. The man has short hair and is clean-shaven, the woman has a longer but coiffured hairstyle. 

Pioneer 10 plaque

So many things are wrong with this drawing, from the Eurocentric portrayal of the humans, to the graphic convention of a line representing complex three-dimensional forms. There is no way that any creature on finding this space vehicle entering their star system could deduce any information from these drawings, except that something with some sort of intelligence had had them manufactured. We have been seduced by lines and believe that they can be used to clarify situations. But there is also another problem and that is how lines fix identity and give things a shape that you can put a word to and that word is nearly always a noun. A tree, a stone, a body an arm, a leg. 

Architects' trees

Words are themselves boundaries and although we find them very useful, we also need to be reminded of their limitations. A tree is also a process and as a process it has no edges. It belongs to the soil as much as to the air. As a squirrel takes an acorn away to bury it, the squirrel become part of the tree’s process, as the rain falls, the tree engages with the weather, allowing some waters to pass through its leaves and others to fall around the edges of itself, selectively watering the surrounding soil for other organisms that have become part of its eco system. 

Primary school teaching aid

As you eat that apple, you are participating in the extended process of treeing, your humaning conjoining for a brief time with the life process that we often put a line around and call a tree. But when you use a dot and I use the word dot rather than point deliberately, you can think about these issues differently. 

The edges between things become permeable

A dot has more physical presence than a point. Therefore it can have more of a life of its own and any life form or self-organizing system relies on an ability to interact with its surroundings in order to survive. This ability to self organise is in fact an emergent property of random dynamical systems, that you might think of as chaos. I.e. eventually if you have enough stuff and mix it about long enough at some point order will not just emerge, but a type of order that likes to keep itself in that very order, as well as being able to interact with all the other chaos around it, will come into being. In order to maintain themselves, these orderly systems possess what are called Markov Blankets. If we go back to our tree, there is a core part of the system that is clearly treeing, but there are other parts of the system that are also raining, humaning, soiling and squirreling. That is, that the tree’s Markov blanket touches and enacts with the Markov blankets of other things. These edges between things could be where disaster strikes, but on the whole some form of homoeostasis and autopoiesis emerges, whereby the treeness becomes part of a system that both includes it and other things, helping itself to keep regulating all its internal systems, whilst also forming part of other regulation systems. For example the acorn may help the squirrel survive or the tree's root system may help aerate the soil. 

An amoeba enclosed within a membrane. 

A membrane is a selective barrier; it allows some things to pass through but stops others.

An amoeba on the attack

Why might this idea, that all self-organizing systems need to be surrounded by Markov blankets, be the case? I think it is about the relationship between independence and interdependence. We constantly update our decision making based on past experience and current change. We do this in order to survive or to achieve homoeostasis, but so does an amoeba. We exist like the amoeba in the midst of dynamical changing systems all of which are mediated by certain forces. If these systems are to work together, rather than simply break each other apart, they need to be able to ‘couple’ with each other, in order to create ‘interdependences’. If independence is to be maintained alongside interdependence, then these independencies will need to induce Markov blankets, so that the internal, independent state can be statistically separated from the external state. This enables the minimization of the disturbance of free energy, because the internal states (and their blankets) will engage in active Bayesian inference. I.e. that surrounding area where the tree engages with soil, squirrel and rain is an area of probed uncertainty, whereby updates in decision making based on past experience and current change are made all the time in order to ensure the continuing existence of the core independence, which is also reliant on the continuing existence of the surrounding systems that it finds itself nested within. This process can be statistically modelled and when it is, points are used and not lines. 

We can now get back to drawing again and in particular the issue of collaboration. Perhaps you now have an idea of where all my ramblings are going, I am trying to articulate something about the way artists have to negotiate with each other’s drawings, and that the process is not that dissimilar to the way all life forms have to negotiate with their ever changing environment if they are to survive. Every drawing begins with a dot... the tip of a brush, the point of a pencil, the sharp edge of a broken stick of charcoal or the nib of a pen, touches a sheet of paper, the dot, that material manifestation of the point, becomes the centre out of which will grow more dots, lines and forms, all of which emerge from that initial point. This is the opposite of the point in Euclid. 

The universe as star dots

The point is formed by the coming together of axes of directionality but the dot is the centre from which all forms emerge, it is the cosmic mother of invention. The first imaginative drawing was done in the mind and not scratched into sand or drawn on a cave wall.

The first drawing would have emerged from the field of dots seen in the sky at night, like the Great Bear of astrology / astronomy, it would have consisted of a series of dots that were in someone's mind's eye morphing into forms that emerged from tales of Gods and Goddesses. Dots collaborate with each other to form new things. A broken or dotted line is permeable, it forms a boundary that can be crossed rather than a fence to keep things out. 

A dot doesn’t have to be perfectly round, it can have directionality, it can pulse with life. 

Van Gogh

When Van Gogh draws or Monet paints, their marks or brushstrokes are in effect elongated or distorted fields of dots, rather than filled in lines. The post-impressionists perhaps above all recognised the power of the dot, the importance of a field of marks that were never fixed, but which drifted across the surface and plunged the mind into a floating world of perceptual actions.

Monet

Seurat

If artists were to collaborate with the world they had to allow themselves to dissolve into it. The fixed moment of photographic time had just arrived and like lines, photographs froze boundaries and didn’t engage with process only surfaces. However close on photography’s heels was emerging the technology of the moving image. Initially using drawing to create animations such as in the phenakistiscope and the zoetrope, and then after the pioneering work of Muybridge and others photography itself was allied to movement and as this technology was understood and developed over the next 100 years, it eventually became the norm and the still image was regarded more and more as a technology with severe limitations. However drawing was never really about the frozen moment and its strength was always its ability to simultaneously provide an image for contemplation and provide a surface to unravel. The traces of the maker’s movements captured in the marks and the images made arriving out of the collection of marks as they were developed over a surface. 

Second and third stages of a Drawing Dialogue image

The conjunction of traces of body movement and different marks and lines operates as a simultaneity, and this is what makes the images in the exhibition so interesting, and which opens out opportunities for thoughtful reflection every time it happens. Drawing continues to be done and this exhibition celebrates drawing done as a form of collaboration, each artist beginning each drawing with a point, a dot of intentionality that has at some point to engage with another artist’s field of marks or lines or shapes. The best of these drawings maintain as we do ourselves, a state of homoeostasis, whereby each artist has probed the uncertainty of either a white sheet of paper or the energy fields of other artists’ marks, and engaged in decision making based on their past experience and the new challenge of other artists’ worlds emerging out of the paper. They will partly have to ensure the continuing existence of their core independence, while at the same time allowing the work of others to make total sense, as they build a new world within the one they are nested within. Perhaps this uncertain certainty will open doors, perhaps it will lead to thoughts and imagery unthinkable as solitary endeavours. What is true is that without cooperation and a willingness to soften boundaries and become permeable to other ideas, as people we will become ossified and brittle, easily broken and ripe for being blown away by the winds of change. Collaborative drawing being not just about making weird or strange imagery, but also being a model for survival and a gateway into another world where things are less defined and where words are vowels much more than nouns and where dots are sometimes privileged over lines. 

 See also:

Collaborative drawing: a proposal

Collaborative drawing

Support for collaborative drawing

Dotted lines

More issues arising from Burkina Faso  

Drawing and politics

Markov blankets explained 

Communication theory and the Pioneer plaque 

 

On seeing a plant in a garden

Seeing a plant, seeing a garden: Agnes Waruguru: 2020

Dreams of more and more and yesterday: Agnes Waruguru: 2020

The Kenyan artist Agnes Waruguru has reminded me that you don't have to go far to find subject matter, sometimes you just need to look out of the window or step out of the back door into the garden. We make gardens because we are in love with that feeling of wellbeing we have when we are immersed in them. We feel so much more at home in even a small patch of greenery; window boxes and tiny yards with a few plant pots will sometimes have to do or we might have to go to our local park, but whatever we do, we find the natural world of vegetation sits kindly on our eyes and we breathe a deep sigh of contentment as we immerse ourselves into the soft greens of leaf filtered sunlight. We existed as mammals for millions of years amongst trees and other vegetation, forging lives that were entangled into innumerable seasons of growth and decay, in doing so in conjunction with our environment we created a state of autopoiesis. This allowed us as creatures to maintain and renew ourselves by regulating our embodied selves and conserving but interlacing boundaries between our bodies and the environments we inhabited. It is important to remember that our internal state of  homeostasis can only be kept up if we are an integral part of a living system and gardens remind us of this. Richard Deverell, the director of Kew Gardens was forced to close the botanical gardens during the covid pandemic and as he did so he stated that it really hurt him to do this because, "There is no salve quite like nature for an anxious mind." The further we are taken away from our natural environment, the more anxious we become, this perhaps being one of the key meanings of the Garden of Eden. 

Waruguru's delicate images are partly sewn, partly drawn and partly painted. She touches her surfaces delicately as if almost frightened to make a mark, she is an artist that is dealing with an uncertain certainty that feels to me a right and proper way to go about our relationship with the world. For too long we have valued those that seem to command respect because of their certainty and clear vision, but I'm afraid too many of those visions have now been seen as self-aggrandised flag waving. "Look how wonderful I am", says the artist, while the world burns and the forests die. 

Durer: Columbine (Aquilegia vulgaris)

Right outside my back door has grown a columbine, its flowers suggestive, as its common name of 'granny's nightcap' implies, of an old fashioned type of headgear, a pixy's hat. 

Columbine (An illustration from the 1950s)

The flowers of the columbine outside my door are now dropping and being replaced by seed-heads, and every time I pass this plant I'm reminded that Durer made a beautiful image of the same plant way back in 1526, and that the name Aquilegia, is derived from aquila meaning eagle because of a similarity between the shape of the petals and eagles' wings. In medieval times, columbine was thought to be eaten by lions and because of this connection, rubbing the flower between your hands therefore gave you the courage of a lion. But for the Romans it was a flower beloved of the Goddess Venus, so you could wear it as a love token. The more you delve into a plant's history, the more connections you will find, it eventually becoming something mystical, something entwined with the ghosts of its ancestors, the columbine of today, being the columbine of 1526, just as it was the flower to clothe a pixy's head and to soothe the heart of the goddess of love. 

Sketchbook drawing of a now gone to seed columbine outside my door

The function of flowers is to involve mobile animals in their reproduction processes. Pollen can be scattered by animals and thus reproduction is more efficient. 'Animals' of course also includes ourselves, as well as bees and other insects, birds and any passing mammal that can get close enough to cause stamens to get involved with pistils.

Diagrams of bee flights

These diagrams of bee flights are rather like the spiralling marks on Waruguru's images and remind us that other creatures are involved in the creation of gardens. Without insects the world will perish. In fact a plant on its own is not really viable, it is only viable as part of an event. An event that includes sunlight, soil and insects, and sometimes humans but often not. The boundaries or edges of what we call for short a plant, are permeable and blurred. All life is in fact an interpenetrating series of interacting, overlapping relationships.

David Jones

David Jones had an approach to the natural world that also feels as if it is both uncertain and certain. His vision enables him to with great delicacy, intuitively picture the atomic dance of flowers and spaces in such a way that in this image, the garden moves inside and overpowers the interior space. The vibratory buzz of a bee, is perhaps the driving force behind this approach to composition. 

Apple tree: Gustav Klimt

Klimt's 'Apple tree' is an image that suggests that there is no definite edge between the tree and its environment, the one slips into the other. It is an image that any one of us could see just by stepping out into the garden. Klimt's images are though also cosmic visions, the  flower garden dissolves into life energy, these could be paintings of galaxies or the interior of an atomic cloud; like Van Gogh's sunflowers and Monet's waterlilies they go beyond seeing the world as a collection of objects or things and picture it as an event, a happening rather than a record. 

Flower garden: Gustav Klimt

Nathan Hawkes continues the tradition of the unfixed image, uncertain but certain, his drawings are never still. His flowing vegetation escapes being bound by lines and his surfaces pulse with energy. 

Nathan Hawkes: The double dream of spring: 2019

These images remind me of Markov blankets. It has recently been argued that any living system is a Markov blanketed system and the boundaries of such systems need not be co-extensive with the biophysical boundaries of a living organism. In other words, autonomous systems are hierarchically composed of Markov blankets of Markov blankets, all the way down to individual cells, all the way up to you and me, and all the way out to include the local environment. For instance, in the drawing below, a human being and a tree both dissolve into their surroundings, whilst at the same time still maintain enough of an internal integrity to still be seen as a human and a tree.

Human, tree, air and ground

It is the permeable boundaries between one thing and another that allow systems to operate. If we look at the image by Seurat below, we get the sense that the edges or boundary of the figures slip into the surrounding air, a way of image making that helps us think about that permeable boundary that all self organising things need to have in order to maintain their existence. If we were cut off from everything else we couldn't exist, we need to breathe the air, stand on the earth, ingest food and exhale. In order to regulate our body temperature we sweat back out into the world around us; if we are to function, we have to ensure our permeable boundaries are in place. I particularly like the way that Seurat suggests that the tree and the human being both dissolve their edges into the same light fused space, it feels as if the tree is ingesting the carbon dioxide exhaled by the human, just as the human is inhaling the tree's output of oxygen. 

Seurat

Minjeong An has looked at how her father grows sprouts. Her diagrams set out to visualise both visible and invisible relationships, in the case of the sprouts, she is as concerned to show that her father has to lavish love and care on his sprouts, just as much as he has to water and feed them. I.e. the feeling tone of a human being is as important as the nuts and bolts of a system, such as a need for water and food. Care it should never be forgotten is essential to all the best gardens.

Minjeong An 

Minjeong An's work includes drawing using sharp lines, she uses Illustrator as a drawing tool in order to give her diagrams precision and coherence. However because she concentrates on relationships, she overcomes the tendency of line to isolate things. 

What I'm getting at, is the reason that we can work powerfully with the garden as a subject matter, just as we can work powerfully with any other subject, is that as long as we can see a series of interconnections, understand or intuit the consequences of any thing's being, we can develop images that in their very making try to communicate things about the situation we have begun to explore. If on top of that we have a view on how we feel about or think about the connections we find, we can shape the process of making images to reflect this view. It's not easy and very few of us have a clear point of view that is easily translated into imagery, but by every now and again trying to feel our way towards an answer, we can have something that keeps us going, some kernel around which we can build a construction that at least feels as if it is meaningful. Hopefully this approach stops us thinking we have the answers, but allows us to continue searching and in that search perhaps we become more attuned to the things that surround us and become better gardeners. 

There is as always another story. The Aboriginal peoples of Australia used to draw sacred designs on themselves and in the soil, these designs often using dots and zig-zags, were outlined in circles and encircled with dots and were deeply interconnected to sacred rituals. Their garden was the landscape they existed in and it was something that inhabited them as much as they inhabited it. These designs were for the tribe and the initiated, for people who would understand how the dots and patterns reflected the stories told; stories woven into folk tales of the people, intertwined dreamtime encounters with animals, plants and the landscape. Those who were uninitiated should never get to see these sacred designs, because they would be able to enter the secret places, steal the knowledge of thousands of years and upset the delicate balance of the eco-system.  These designs would often be drawn directly into the earth with sticks, and the soil would be smoothed over on the appearance of an outsider.  

In the early 1970s Australian school teacher Geoffrey Bardon asked the young aboriginal school children he was teaching to paint their world in their own way. But the youngsters struggled and their parents couldn't understand why they had been set such a task; they wanted to know why he was asking the young people to picture things that it was the job of the old people to know. I thought this was very interesting, because in the west we associate children with creativity and celebrate their fresh if often clumsy approaches to depicting the world, but we rarely look at older people as the custodians of image making. 

Karun Warun: Meeting Place

Michelle Possum Nungurrayi 

Because of the private nature of certain ritual links to image making the initial group of men who Bardon worked with decided to work out which aspects of the stories could be told and which ones had to be withheld from public view. Men from at least half a dozen different language groups worked on this together. They worked out jointly how they could express very significant aboriginal stories without upsetting the requirement for non-initiated people not to have access to the meanings. Once this was resolved it meant that the elders could paint their stories. At that time there was little interest in Aboriginal culture, most of the government directives in Australia were directed at trying to make aboriginal peoples let go of their traditional beliefs and to embrace Western culture. Bardon supplied art materials to the group of elders and with help from him, they began to paint their stories by transferring their depictions from desert sand to paint on canvas. Because of the concern that the more sacred and therefore secret aspects of the things they they painted were being seen not only by Westerners, but Aboriginal people from different regions, these early translations therefore had their special secret elements abstracted into dots to conceal their sacred meanings. These first paintings to come from what became known as the Papunya Tula School of Painters were never intended to be sold.  They were created by the Aboriginal people who had often been displaced, and living a long way from their original home country, as reminders of landscapes that they still inhabited in their minds, landscapes that they still felt they needed to protect, even as they represented them in paint, by changing some of the more significant features. These paintings were in effect visual reminders of their own being. They painted the lands that they belonged to and the stories that were embedded into them. These paintings were visual assertions of their identity and their origins. The original colours were restricted to variations of red, yellow, black and white produced from ochre, charcoal, sand and pipe clay, however when these paintings became popular and saleable, acrylic paints were introduced and much more vivid colourful paintings ensued. The fact that the original colours were also representations of the various earths of the landscapes they lived in, was quickly forgotten. 

Even though the original patterns were changed in order to remove secret meanings, the basic structures and ideas about how to depict the world remained intact and the work produced had a resonance and a visual power that broke through the difficulties associated with the conditions of the people that began producing work of this sort. For instance the artist Michelle Possum Nungurrayi is the daughter of one of the group of men brought together by Geoffrey Bardon in the 1970s, her paintings even more abstracted from the initial forms as were developed by her father, but the rhythms and visual pulses emanating from her work are still effective and some of the forms she paints still echo the symbolism that was came from original sand drawings.

Some basic symbols

The world of the dreamtime is one that is unique to the Australian aboriginal peoples. It resonates with us because it reminds us of a much earlier time when we were all living interconnected with the landscapes we lived in. Perhaps this is the garden of Eden we feel we have lost. This is a harsh landscape however, most of us couldn't survive more than a day or so in the wild, our contemporary skills would be useless to us as survival tools. The plight of many aboriginal people is plain to see, as they lose the skills to negotiate their own landscape, they are not being given the skills to negotiate the world of modern Australia, the disjunction of western and aboriginal cultures is such that they are almost incomprehensible to each other and life set between the two is difficult, people being prone to mental instability because many of the old landmarks and associated meanings no longer make the sense they used to. The garden that was Australia is now facing global warming, and fires are becoming more and more a threat to life, the impact of western technology now forcing itself on the indigenous peoples as never before. 

It is to be hoped that the nations of the world will see sense and get together to control climate change, but that will mean looking at the world as an integrated system, whereby everything is interconnected, something that the indigenous peoples of Australia understood many thousands of years ago. As we step out into our garden, hopefully we are also reminded that one of the most wonderful things you can do as an artist is to show how the stories that emerge from the world are special and how they are woven into the very fabric of living, and in their entanglement with other people, animals, plants and things, they help us to care about the places we inhabit. Even as they disappear, the ancient peoples of Australia have much to teach us about how to inhabit our own gardens.  

Coda

Every now and again I'm asked whether it is worthwhile putting work into competitions. These always cost money and you very rarely get through to the exhibition itself. I tend to be ambivalent about the process, sometimes I think its a total rip off but at other times I decide that its one of the only ways that an artist can get his or her work noticed. For instance Andrew Barrowman has just won The Bowyer Drawing Prize. He received £500 for his pencil and charcoal drawing, 'Tree Study'. Little recompense you will I'm sure all agree for a tremendous drawing that will have taken hours to make and years of art making experience to allow him to control markmaking within such a complex space. A short video was made of his response to winning and he was obviously delighted. A very traditional artist, he shows that you can still make a wonderful image out of the things you see on your local walk. His drawing process of working into charcoal on a gesso ground has allowed him to give a vibrant energy and life to this image of a tree that he encountered in his sketchbook recently. If he hadn't won the prize I would have probably never seen the drawing, so perhaps it is a good thing to apply for these competitions sometimes.

Andrew Barrowman: Tree study: Charcoal on gesso

See also: 

Sustainability resources 

Where do you draw the line?

Mapping as an art form

Drawing plants

Uncertain certainty 

The zig-zag

Natasha Kidd: Painting as Disegno

Natasha Kidd: Overflow

Natasha Kidd makes automated paintings, systems or machines.  Her mechanisms fill paintings from the inside and in making visible the process, action and event of painting itself, I would argue she returns painting back towards a need for grounding itself in disegno. I'll try and explain. Disegno is a Renaissance term describing both the ability to make a drawing and the intellectual capacity to invent a design. It was seen as something all artists, (painters, sculptors or architects) had to do in order to 'design' or visualise their ideas. Disegno was the underpinning framework that a painting was built on. If you wanted therefore to reveal or make visible the processes from out of which a painting emerged, you would show the pentimenti (underlying drawings), cartoons, and the studies, which would again all be drawings. 

It is interesting to compare Kidd's work therefore with more traditional approaches to making visible the process, action and event of painting itself. 

Robert Polhill Bevan: The Feathered Hat: Study for a portrait of the artist's wife 

The black chalk drawing above has been squared and numbered for transfer, by leaving this process visible, Bevan in effect is also making visible one of the processes of painting. 

Natasha Kidd: Flow and return

The underlying grid that so many painters used to transfer their drawn image onto paper, echoes the grid of pipes Kidd produces in order to 'feed' her canvases with paint. 

Jenny Saville: Study from Pentimenti 

Jenny Saville’s Study from Pentimenti is an image that demonstrates how making visible the process still can be achieved in more traditional ways. This time it is the pentimento or adjusted underlying drawing that is revealed by Saville as part of the disegno process. 

Titian: Bacchus and Ariadne 

Beneath the figure on the left in Titian's 'Bacchus and Ariadne' there still exists an adjusted drawing or Pentimento. This normally invisible process can be revealed by x-ray photography and once extracted or separated from the original image, becomes something new again. 

Another meaning emerges if we go back to the original Italian understanding of 'pentimento' which is repentance. This suggests that changing one's mind can also be a type of repentance or regret. 

Jasper Johns: Regrets

The adjusted drawing is also the place where imagery arrives or emerges from the process of making a drawing. In Johns' image 'Regrets', the dark vest like shape and skull image that sits above it, emerged when Johns began drawing from an old torn photograph of Lucien Freud that was found on the floor of Frances Bacon's studio after he had died. The torn out section of the photograph, the missing element, became a positive when the image was mirrored and redrawn, and for Johns the pentimento is now the final image.  This too could be compared with another of Kidd's images. 

Natasha Kidd: Painting that is machine dipped

The paint ripples and lines demarcating levels of dip in Kidd's work, could be compared with Johns' ink washes made within the boundaries of a traced series of shapes taken from the original photograph. The painting as it rises and falls into the vat of paint, creates negative spaces around itself, the rectangular form of the dipping tank, echoing the shape of the canvas. Both Kidd's and Johns' work being self reflective and concerned with the processes of making art itself, in Johns case he recognises other artists and their mythologies as being part of the process, just as much as the physical action of putting paint onto canvas. 

See also:

Drawing machines at the Venice Biennale 

Drawing devices

Drawing from old masters

Process and its documentation