Life lines

Michael Leunig

So why for the last post of the drawing year show the work of Michael Leunig an Australian cartoonist? Cartoonists take positions, sometimes on the left and sometimes on the right, but whichever way they lean politically, they have to put their cards on the table. Never forget the cartoonists of this world, they use drawing in ways that are direct, articulate and audience aware, i.e. they are excellent communicators. They are always putting their work on the line and because they are the artists that stick their necks out, also have to take heavy flack, sometimes literally. 

Leunig made several cartoons as a personal stand against Western involvement in the Gulf War, however at times his work simply pointed out the stupidity of all wars. Our tendency to believe situations are either right or wrong, is for myself another example of the problem with definitions. Once something is defined it exists in a particular way as a thing, rather than as a process, once it is a thing, it can also be seen to have different properties to other things, it is capable of being another.  Michael Leunig's world is the world of the holy fool, which means he sometimes puts his foot right in it, as he did with his recent anti-vaccine cartoon. As a free spirit, Leunig chided against his government telling all Australian's to get vaccinated, so he made a cartoon about it, suggesting that authoritarianism has no boundaries, at one time it is telling people to be vaccinated but then at another time it could be taking away civil liberties. As a cartoonist associated with left wing views he faced a heavy back-lash and was removed from his post as cartoonist in residence. Whether or not you agree with him, he is always putting his work on the line and this is what I wanted to get you to think about as artists. Do you put yourselves up for criticism? Are you prepared to sometimes take a difficult stance that goes against the grain? The holy fool is another stereotype that has been used in the past to allow artists to say things that other members of society would not be able to. Just like Michael Leunig, Cecil Collins saw himself as a holy fool. It allowed him to accept his role as a misunderstood mystic, an image that takes us back to medieval times, as when a king used to allow the fool to operate as a sort of escape valve, to be able to say things that no one else could, but which were necessary, if the king was ever to confront any ideas that ran counter to his own. 

Cecil Collins: Holy Fool

So as this fool continues typing, he needs to remind his readers that the year is finally coming to an end, and that it has been a year of much foolishness, doubt and argument, as well as bravery and hard fought successes in the face of poor governance and venal decision making on the part of those in power. Sometimes drawing can seem to be such an irrelevant activity. However as a thinking tool, we must not forget what Tim Ingold alerted us to. He showed us the power of lines as metaphors, and of how easily a line can become a border. One of this year's posts looked at lines as false boundaries around countries and how drawing on a map with a ruler and pencil can lead to decisions out in the real world that shape the lives of millions. This shows us that lines can be very powerful ideas indeed; lines and the drawing of them can also help us to meditate on the more philosophical issues that face us in life, they allow us to think with visual languages and help us to develop alternative understandings, ones that can take us far beyond words and numbers.

But if we combine two languages we can very quickly begin to see alternative understandings. The old northern idea of the Wyrd, was centred on an invisible lifeline that threaded its way through everyone's lives, sometimes linking them together and at other times cutting lives short. From a beginning like the one above, you could easily begin to construct a woven fabric, that told a story of our lives. 

The fact is that all our lives are intertwined in many ways, some that we see clearly and others invisible to us. A decision made in haste that we don't really think about, could well impact on a life somewhere outside of our immediate consciousness. This may be a human life, but may also be another animal life or plant species. In a recent publication by David P. Barash, 'Buddhist Biology', it is proposed that the Buddhist concepts of the not-self, impermanence, and interconnectedness are built into the deep structure of the world. This means that all living things and concepts that emerge from living things, such as humans, are also impermanent and in their impermanence, they are simply part of an ongoing process of entanglement; therefore science, in this case biology, needs a re-formatting, if it is to not to eventually find itself as yet another outdated, noun led concept. Lines in this case, weaving through both types of world views in order to create a new cloth, that is much more open and caring in its use, a cloth that weaves itself into being, and as it does so, it begins to unravel itself, even before the final pattern is revealed. 

I'll leave you with Solzhenitsyn's thoughts on a line:

“(T)he line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years…. If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

Michael Leunig

Let's hope next year will be less stressful and a little kinder and that we will all try much harder to treat others as we would like others to treat us.

See also:

Cartoons and stereotypes

More on the Wyrd

Artists' Christmas Cards

 It's come round to that time of the year once again when I send out a post focused on artist's Christmas cards. A motley bunch this year that just proves how the festive season impacts on artists of all sorts, whether they are abstractionists, conceptualists or realists, nearly all artists want to celebrate the yearly ritual in some way or other. Hopefully by also pushing back into the limelight artists now often ignored or treated as second class because of their cross discipline approach, I can introduce, especially younger followers of this blog, artists that are well worth looking at, even though it could be argued that their time and approach to art making has now past. 

John Wells

John Wells was an abstract artist who was associated with the Penwith Society of Arts, he shared his Newlyn studio with fellow artist and friend Denis Mitchell and was the co-founder of the Crypt Group. His tenuous connection to the Leeds Arts University is that he worked with ex-student Barbara Hepworth from 1950 to 1951. 

John Craxton

Known as a Neo-Romantic artist he preferred to be called a "kind of Arcadian". Although he travelled widely and lived in Greece for many years, I tend to think of Craxton as a very English, Blake and Palmer influenced artist. I've always had a soft spot for any artists attempting to bring back a mythic past and trying to mythologise the present and I think he has touched a sensibility that although will at times be denigrated as being too blinkered and unaware of wider global art forms, it will at other times be praised for its ability to look backwards and draw from older traditions. In fact the older I get the more I think can see what he was getting at, and being an Arcadian was a form of ecological awareness and a pointer towards a new understanding of animism. 

Gary Hume

Gary Hume came to our attention as a YBA with a painting of a pair of hospital doors. The paintings were sized one to one with the originals and stood in a conceptually fascinating space between the readymade and abstraction and between realism and colour field painting (The Art of the Real). Hume says that he knows he's reached the end of the process when a painting "looks like it's always been there, rather than I've made it". It's a subtle distinction, and one that isn't always as obvious to the viewer as it is to the artist, but I think we know what he means. When we look at his Christmas card, it seems like it was always meant to be, better and less forced I think than the snowman sculpture that was at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park a little while ago. 

Edward Bawden

Edward Bawden is another of those English artists that straddle the border between fine art and illustration. In Bawden's case he is mainly spoken about as an illustrator, but as a master of the linocut, he raised what was seen as a very humble medium to the level of high art and he had a distinguished career as a war artist. He was a great image maker and full of invention, the old 'he was too illustrative' critique is I think redundant now and he can just be looked at for his ability to construct a well designed image. In this case I like the fact that the lion family have taken great joy in using Father Christmas as their food and plaything. The best present for a lion at Christmas being a fat Santa. 

Bruce Mclean

Bruce Mclean is probably known best for his use of art languages to mock the art world itself. However this provocative and probing approach covers up the fact that in reality he loves colour and image making, it is almost as if he cant quite accept this and has therefore always tried to appear to be a bad boy. His reference to the Christmas stocking partly irreverent but at the same time a love of the black, green and red of Christmas holly permeates the image. 

Emily Sutton

Emily Sutton has taken up the challenge left by artists like Edward Bawden and has continued to work in that pocket traditionally thought of as sitting between fine art and illustration. She had an exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park recently, see below, and she has made some very powerful animations about our need to rethink sustainability and how we think about our 'ownership' of the planet. 

Emily Sutton

Enid Marx

Enid Marx was also a contemporary of Edward Bawden but she never received her Royal College diploma because her work at the time was judged to be too "vulgar". I would argue that it reflected her interest in popular forms and that she was rejecting certain aspects of the traditional definition of fine art. She went on to have a career that incorporated fine art, illustration and various design disciplines, and she is another artist well worth researching in terms of an idea of what an artist could be and do. My post on Fine Art  perhaps pointing to the need to go back and re-think the definitions and distinctions surrounding fine art practice that we have built up. Christmas can often be a time of reflection and after a long career where I have taught across both fine art and design and still do; I strongly believe that the distinctions drawn between the various visual disciplines are a hindrance rather than a support. The tendency to 'atomise' concepts, so that in order to understand something we have to go through a very particular process of reduction, is something that has been developed from scientific thinking. However this leads to a situation where things are either one thing or another. It is either fine art or illustration, black or white, good or bad. The reality is that all is in flux, there are no defined edges between one thing and another, only the opinions of people that think that there is. It is in those strong beliefs that conflict is born, and people are punished for not belonging to one set of beliefs or another. At a time of heightened awareness of Christian charity, perhaps it's also a time to give more credence to those artists that had to make a living and still do, by developing a complex portfolio of work and like Michelangelo, having to at times follow the money, because if not they would starve. As someone from a working class background, there has always been a suspicion at the back of my mind and sometimes right at the front of it, that certain definitions and attitudes to art were driven by class. The men from the upper and middle classes that set out the perimeters and value systems of disciplines such as fine art, did not want to think about 'work' and what it actually consisted of; especially women's work. If the values of the working class had been embraced as part of the aesthetics of art practice, I'm sure crafting and manual skill would have been set much higher up on the honorific value scale and the fact that an artist had to make a living producing a much wider range of things than paintings or sculpture, would not be seen as a compromise, but as a celebration of the breadth of interests and abilities that an artist had. 

Hans Fiebusch

I have a long and enduring fondness for Hans Fiebusch because he was the man who painted the mural that filled the back of the stage of Dudley Town Hall. Every school speech day and prize giving event was held in that august building, as well as it being a venue for pop bands, (the Who played there in the mid 60s) and all sorts of other Dudley events. A European exile, he had his work displayed in the nazi "Degenerate Art" exhibition, but for myself he will always be remembered as the first artist to made me think about the business of art as a career. I would sit staring at his large painting trying to work out how he did it, a welcome diversion from whatever else was going on in the school prize giving event. I could see that there was a looseness and sureness about the way he went about depicting things, an approach that made you want to be there in his presence, I felt he had left his gestures in that painting just for me to see. Now long painted over, I wonder if it is still there under many coats of white emulsion? Hans Fiebusch's work is often to be seen at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester and whenever I am in the area I always drop in to see if one of his paintings or prints is being exhibited and I'm always impressed at the level of his professionalism, he gives the same high levels of visual attention to the making of a Christmas card as he does to a religious painting, (there is one of his religious paintings in the nearby Chichester cathedral), and that would seem to me to be a worthy epitaph for any artist. 

Ben Nicholson

When I came to Leeds and began teaching at the college of art Nicholson was still a well respected artist, although as Patrick Oliver said, his work suffered from a certain 'thinness of line'. He was instrumental in bringing the European tradition of contemporary art into a post-war England and made it palatable to an isolated country that had had little involvement in the dynamic changes that had been taking place across the whole of the rest of Europe between the wars. His work on 'Circle' the International survey of constructive art also opened up ideas about how art could be seen as part of a much wider set of principles that could be applied across the whole of design and architecture, as well as be seen as an approach to how to live one's life. 

Barnett Freedman

A prolific commercial designer, Barnett Freedman was another of those mid 20th century British artists that straddled design and fine art. A war artist, if you look at his image of a 15-Inch Gun Turret as used on HMS Repulse from 1941, you wont see a better image to illustrate the idea of humans and their relationship with machines. He stated in 1945, "If you see a man turning a wheel, you can tell immediately whether he cares for machines or not. If he doesn’t, he looks separate. But if he understands and loves them, then he and the machine have a strange look of being one.” As someone who was many years ago trained as an overhead crane fitter, (I never did finish that apprenticeship), the feeling of being clustered around a machine and making sure it worked, can be almost religious. I know its not a Christmas card but if I did receive this image for Christmas I would treasure it. 

Barnett Freedman: 15-Inch Gun Turret: HMS Repulse

Albert Irvin 

Albert Irvin was a friend of Harry Thubron's and was influenced by a similar group of artists to those that were involved with the development of the basic design course at the old Leeds College of Art. Harry Thubron moved from Leeds to Goldsmiths which was where Irvin met him, as well as him being introduced to Peter Lanyon in the early 60s and other St Ives artists such as Terry Frost. Irvin's work was always cited as something to emulate when I began teaching at Leeds and so I took a great interest in how he was working, in particular he was often cited as someone pushing what were then the new acrylic paints to their limits. Leeds staff at one point going down to his studio and reporting on how he was using water sprinkler systems to keep his large paintings moist, so that he could overcome acrylic's tendency to dry too quickly and keep working on his images for much longer times. 

Jeremy Deller

Consistently lifting pop culture, from wrestling to raving, into fine art, Deller gave us a definitive 2020 Xmas card. We all knew it had been a bad year and in many ways as an artist he nailed it. 

A curmudgeonly Xmas to you all 

As this year nears its end I'll probably put up just one more post after this one, hopefully something more positive for the new year. My Xmas greeting above being the essence of a Christmas hat being sucked down into an alien body, an image that has emerged out of my long rumination on interroception, less Christmas cheer, more Xmas seer. I do have a feeling that the whole world has become alien to me or unrecognisable at the moment, and like Jeremy Deller, don't really think a happy Christmas is really possible this year, but the new year is fast approaching so....

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X

XX

XXX

XXXX

XXXXX

!

Happy New Year

See also:

Artist's Christmas cards 2020

The artist's Christmas card

Dali's Christmas cards

Artists Christmas cards 2018

Drawings for Easter

Victorian Xmas cards

Ben Shahn 

In praise of the Doodle

There is an interesting difference between the activity of 'scribbling' which is defined as to draw carelessly or hurriedly and doodling, the making of drawings while a person's attention is otherwise occupied. To scribble is a word that comes to us from the mid15th century and it derives from Medieval Latin, scribillare, a diminutive of Latin scribere "to write" (from Proto-Indo-European *skribh- "to cut"). The noun, 'scribble' as in "hurried or careless writing," is from the 1570s, and was derived from the verb to scribble, gradually this came to represent careless or overly fast drawing as well as writing. But it is interesting that its history is one also associated with cutting or slashing. To doodle is also a verb, a doing word. As you look in more detail at its meaning you get, to "scrawl aimlessly," back in 1935 this use it was suggested was perhaps coming from dialect, the terms doodle and dudle were used to express an idea of "frittering away time or a trifle." It was also associated with the word dawdle (which might be the source of the dialect word). It also was a noun meaning "simple fellow" from 1620s. That link to "simple fellow" re-emerges in popular culture from time to time.

In the film, 'Mr Deeds goes to town' (1936) we have a scene in a court with the following dialogue, 

Longfellow Deeds:.....For instance, the judge here is, is an O-filler.

Judge May (H.B. Warner): A what?
Longfellow Deeds: An O-filler. You fill in all the spaces in the O's with your pencil. I was watching him. (laughter from audience in courtroom) That may make you look a little crazy, Your Honor, just, just sitting around filling in O's, but I don't see anything wrong, 'cause that helps you think. Other people are doodlers.
Judge May: "Doodlers!?"
Longfellow Deeds: Uh, that's a word we made up back home for people who make foolish designs on paper when they're thinking: it's called doodling. Almost everybody's a doodler; did you ever see a scratchpad in a telephone booth? People draw the most idiotic pictures when they're thinking. Uh, Dr. von Hallor here could probably think up a long name for it, because he doodles all the time. (laughter; he takes a sheet off the doctor's notepad) Thank you. This is a piece of paper he was scribbling on. I can't figure it out -- one minute it looks like a chimpanzee, and the next minute it looks like a picture of Mr. Cedar. You look at it, Judge. Exhibit A for the defense. Looks kind of stupid, doesn't it, Your Honor? But I guess that's all right; if Dr. von Hallor has to, uh, doodle to help him think, that's his business. Everybody does something different: some people are, are ear-pullers; some are nail-biters; that, uh, Mr. Semple over there is a nose-twitcher. (laughter) And the lady next to him is a knuckle-cracker. (laughter) So you see, everybody does silly things to help them think. Well, I play the tuba.

This scene is the result of Deeds being taken to court to see if he is sane or not, irrational behaviour being cited as a reason for him not to be able to have control of his own very valuable estate. The courtroom scene makes it plain that 'sanity' is a very contested issue, the judge eventually declaring that Deeds (the country yokel) is "the sanest man who ever walked into this courtroom". This brings me to a very personal issue that also draws out another aspect of the doodle. I was always interested in Gary Cooper films, (he plays Mr Deeds), because my mother told me I was named after him, (Gary Cooper - Garry Barker), a bit of information leading to my fascination with Cooper, something going I suspect deep down into my own psyche, and an influence emerging as I write these sentences as a sort of word doodle. As Yates said, "I made it out of a mouthful of air". In fact Yates' idea is that everything we say just emerges, we don't sit and think it up before we say it; so could it be that all our great edifice of words is constructed out of verbal doodles? 

Doodling is a word rooted in contemporary history, people in the far past had no spare time on their hands. However there is one meaning for 'doodle' that comes from the Dutch, a 'Doodle Sack' which was a bagpipe, but probably because of a bagpipe's organic form, it was also a term used for the private parts of a woman. This more sub-conscious association, is also interesting as it brings into the arena of meaning something else again, a Freudian slip perhaps, that reminds us that all meanings are capable of slippage and that doodling can be a way of channelling the unconscious and tapping into Jungian archetypes. 

Doodling is fascinating, because as you are only half attending to what you are doing, things from the back of your mind can be allowed to surface, doodling in some ways can record the body/mind's thinking when outside the framework of logic, perhaps like a map that records fragments from unlit territories of the mind. Sometimes this can also be to do with horror vacui, or fear of empty space, a need to fill a void or gap in the visual field, but it is how we fill that gap that is interesting. 

Adolf Wölfli

Adolf Wölfli, regarded as an 'outsider artist' fills every corner of his images with something, images, writing, musical notation; all having an equal visual weight. These types of images it would seem to me are extended doodles, doodles that emerge at some point into constructions that 'know' what they are becoming. They slip from one thing into another, from a horror vacui to a diagram of the mind, from an unthinking doodle to a complex world with its own laws of construction and inner logic. When stuck, I often just begin by just drawing a line, and if I trust myself to just let things happen an image will emerge. The doodle lies very close to the heart of creativity. 

Caleb Lewis, a west Yorkshire artist, has autism, he describes in detail how doodling for him became the starting point for a complex world of images, and he clearly articulates how an obsession began to lead to a particular type of image making. Although the article on his work is used to illustrate certain points about the relationship between image making and autism, it seems to me that we are all on a spectrum of autism, and that the issues raised could therefore be applicable to everyone.

Caleb Lewis: The Commonwealth’

Lewis had been doodling with a felt tip pen and when it ran out of ink he had to resort to a fine liner, and he then goes on to say,  "I finished what I had to do with dots, triggering a dormant compulsion that once awake became very difficult to control. I thought I was onto something and started stippling paper. Stippling for stippling sake rather for any broader artistic purpose- I needed to escape from my own mind and stippling lifted me off to somewhere else. I tried to do lots of dots as close together as possible with none overlapping which seemed an important rule at the time. In my mind all other anxieties were eclipsed by just one- getting the dots right. As time progressed I became happy that I could fill in circles with small dots and ventured into the great unknown"....he then goes on to state..." Stippling a line will ordinarily leave a slightly jagged edge similar to the pixels visible on a blown up computer image. Using a 0.03 nib, with a heart rate and breathing set to zero, I’ll further stipple along the outer and inner edges of the line until smoothness is achieved. Lines must taper and bend without flat spots, widths, shapes, the spaces between them and their relationships in groups and with other groups need to be perfect or else I will have failed." In fact Lewis often refers to his breathing rate when drawing, and he sometimes draws between breaths, at other times he uses his breath to carry him through much longer times, such as those needed when covering larger areas of paper. 

Read more about this in a detailed article on the art of autism. 

My recent experience of working with a range of other artists; 'The Body I am in' also touched upon breathing and its effects on drawing and I'm very aware that Zen artists take great care in relation to the integration of breathing techniques with brush control. These issues linking back into the importance of embodied thinking, the 'stupid' body being in reality the controller of all these activities. 

Henri Michaux

The art world has its own codes of acceptance in relation to doodling, because of its association with 'scrawling aimlessly', it has to be understood as something else, as a definition of this sort could undermine its value. Therefore an artist like Henri Michaux is referred to as working with Tachist ideas or belonging to Art Informel, a group of artists concerned with "a lack or absence of form itself". Art Informel was more about the absence of premeditated structure, conception or approach, another way it could be argued of doodling, except that is, that it would have to be premeditated, and doodling just happens, you don't have to stretch a canvas to encourage doodling into existence.

The delicate line between what is seen as fine art and what is seen as doodling was identified by the artist Alan Brookes a few years ago. 

Alan Brookes: Fill 183 x 183cm

I remember seeing Alan Brookes' 'Fill' painting at one of the John Moores painting exhibitions in Liverpool, I cant remember the year but I was immediately fascinated by the image, and saw it as one of those attempts to bring to our attention something little noticed and normally outside of artistic worth. Alan is an ex student from LAU, who now lives and works in London, at the time he had this to say about 'Fill'. 'It started as a found scribble on a discarded post-it note. I was attracted to its bored, absent-minded spontaneity, its author filling in time as well as the physical space of the piece of paper. I enjoyed its structure and its disciplined use of the square. By remaking the image, enlarging and magnifying its surface detail, my intention was to harness the attitude of the original and add to it a perverse, fragile peculiarity. The process and the image act as a container for managing an insane desire to make gestural marks'.
On the one hand we have a response to horror vacui, every bit of the post-it note has been filled with horizontal and vertical scribble. On the other hand we have an image that could be an example of Tachisme. By copying this image and making it large, Brookes also adds mimesis into the mix of approaches and a dollop of realism to boot. 

Doodles made by the Queen of Prussia 

Those doodles left by ordinary people in the margins of meeting notes and school books will of course all be consigned to the wastebasket of history, but occasional doodles do get preserved, often due to the fact their makers are deemed as being more worthy. Doodles made by the Queen of Prussia, Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, as well as by our own queen Elizabeth, being cases in point. 

Doodles made by a very young Queen of England

In a society of the celebrity it matters as to who doodles, it's not what it is, but who did it that counts. However the 'doodles' by a young queen bring up another point, and that is, at what age does doodling begin? Are all children's drawings 'doodles'? 

However it's also about time for this verbal doodle to come to an end, as is normal with these posts I don't know what I'm going to say until I say it. Short informal pieces of writing are rather like scribbled ideas, but gradually perhaps they build up into that map that records fragments from hidden territories of the mind. My point is that doodling, something rarely taken seriously, especially within art education, may be the most important type of drawing there is. Its very informality releasing it from logocentric thought and in that release invention may well be at its greatest. 

See also:

Unica Zurn

Children's drawings in an adult world

The continuing influence of Surrealism

Drawing with Tape: Part two

Colour coded electrical tape

I was interested to hear this week that an artist in Sheffield who is working with LEDs has had some research done on how to give the strings of LEDs in her work more resilience as the work has to be publicly sited. The answer was to embed the LEDS in a heat shrinking transparent electrical tape. Tape seems to be going through a technical revolution, some of its more industrial uses now looking to replace older methods such as welding and riveting, thus making much cleaner finishes and in many cases a much better waterproof bond. 

I have put up a post on drawing with tape before, but that was a few years ago and its use is perhaps even more popular as a drawing medium, so it is perhaps timely to remind you of how useful it can be, as well as how powerful and very particular the aesthetic language of tape drawing can be. 

Mark Khaisman

I've been working with brown translucent packaging tape myself recently and it is a very sensitive medium if you want to control tonal variation. It has other benefits too, such as if you cut it neatly into rectangles, eventually all the small pieces of tape begin to create a grid like structure that gives stability to images that could be rather formless.  Mark Khaisman's tape drawings are a useful indicator of the types of possible surfaces you can achieve and it is also useful to follow his career and look at how he has progressed his work from an aesthetic dependent on tape, to one now using more sculptural conventions. 

Aakash Nihalani

Aakash Nihalani uses tape to create optical illusions and in particular he makes use of tape's easy to use and remove quality. His work reminds me of Felice Varini and Georges Rousse; artists I looked at when discussing illusion. 

Joy Walker has used tape to create tightly controlled rhythmic geometric structures. Walker is an artist living and working in Toronto. Her work reflects her interest in pattern, repetition, geometry and the ephemeral, using a variety of methods including printing, photography, drawing, stitching and cutting. In the image below you see her attaching a small, very informal tape drawing to a wall. Her approach to using tape is to reveal its delicate, more sensual properties. 

Joy Walker

Maurizio Cattelan: Comedian 2019

Probably the most sensational recent use of tape was by Maurizio Cattelan. His banana taped to a wall, 'Comedian', provoked debate and discussion among audiences around the world. Cattelan's work initially thought of as a witty stunt, then as a self portrait, eventually morphed into an unlikely symbol of a labour movement, initiated a discussion about art and financial securities, as well as becoming a symbol for the end of conceptual art. All this with a banana and some duct tape.  ArtNet news has collected articles about the debate and made them available here.

Perhaps the Guerrilla Girls had the most succinct repost.

Guerrilla Girls: 2019

Find below a few more tapes that can be bought on line. The fact that tape can be thought of as very long drawings means that certain types of associations gravitate around this common commercial product, from miniature roads to playful games about measurement. The idea I really like, which is the screw head tape; a tape designed to stick two surfaces together but to make the join look as if it was a screw fixed joint, is a simple illusion, but in its very uselessness it becomes poetic. The same designers (Richard Shed and Sam Johnson) came up with Dovetail tape which is conceptually witty but not quite as poetic. 

Centre Tape

Tape measure tape

Screw head tape

Dovetail tape

It's not just designers that have used tape in interesting ways, the architect Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai, has had to use tape to draw with because of trying to make drawings in a very wet climate.

Studio Mumbai: Saat Rasta: Mahindra Unit Tape drawing, 2013. Pencil and tape on wood

Bijoy Jain explains that tape drawing is for him about ‘adapting to place’. The idea of drawing with tape on a plywood sheet originating from a response to constant, heavy rainfall and the need to find an alternative to drawings printed on paper, which could not withstand the conditions on site. The tape drawing contains information about the fabrication and workings of the unit’s roof edge, building components, layering of materials, and their proportion. The contrast in colours and grain of both the tape and wood also lends a tactile quality to the drawn section. In this modest architectural drawing, practicality and visual expression are conjoined, as line is activated by the seams between each piece of tape, in such a way that it suggests the material properties of the final building materials. Bijoy Jain goes on to state that the Saatrasta-Mahindra tape drawing also conveys a narrative of place and process and that building design needs to be rooted in a context that also includes the way in which architects design and draw.

Bijoy Jain has this to say about his design process; 'The way I practice, architecture works both on a personal as well as universal level. If we think that what fundamentally makes me, also fundamentally makes everyone else, then it means that we are all deeply connected'. 

Tape as a connecting material is something that is not too far away from the material that wrapped mummies in ancient Egypt, and of course before we forget, was also the stuff that Maurizio Cattelan used for his piece, 'A Perfect Day', the 1999 work in which he duct-taped his gallerist Massimo De Carlo to a wall.

'A Perfect Day'

See also: 

Drawing with tape part one

Michael Craig-Martin creates a line drawing using tape

Reflections on Drawing Correspondence - The Body I Am In

I decided to take on a drawing course as a participant rather than as a tutor. You might wonder why I would need to do this, as I'm pretty busy with several projects and teaching drawing myself, but there are always things you can learn and above all it's useful to check in with yourself at times and check out whether or not you are still learning or even capable of learning. 

The other issue is that like all educational experiences, it is the people that for one reason or another also find themselves wanting to undertake the same course, that you will learn most from and often that learning is oblique, not expected and offered up totally openly. I was though also interested in the 'Drawing Correspondence' course because the tutors were all highly regarded professional practitioners in the field of drawing. 

There is a certain amount of trust that needs to be kept going throughout the course and so I wont be sharing other people's work, only my own, but if people want to comment or add to this reflection they can, by simply contacting me and I can add into the post or even put up another post using guest authors. If you are reading this I'm afraid the course will be over, as I agreed that I would not post during its run time and get what I had to say checked over before going public. 

Before the course began the team had put together a free online event, 'The Body I Am In', which was convened by the Drawing Correspondence team and hosted online by Drawing Projects UK. There were guest presentations with speakers including: Chloe Briggs, Tania Kovats, Anita Taylor, Hélene Fromen, Nell Brookfleld and Charmaine Watkiss, the last three being invited speakers. 

I didn't get round to looking at the recording of this until after I had started, so I cant say that it was the experience of looking at this that made me join up, but it was useful to be able to reflect on other people's approaches to dealing with the body in drawing. In particular I was interested in Nell Brookfield's presentation because the issue of drawing the face by touch is something I have encountered several times before and it seems to reemerge at regular intervals. 

I first experienced drawing the face by touch as an exercise on my pre-diploma course when I was at Wolverhampton School of Art in the 1960s. I was intrigued at the time by the results but found that I was always making a compromise by drawing what I remembered of my face at the same time as drawing what I felt. Then during the mid 1970s I was working on a Foundation course now teaching drawing and thought I'd re-introduce the idea, but first of all I thought best to try it out myself. This time I decided to use very large sheets of paper and to begin in the middle but with feeling the back of my head and to only allow myself to get to the front once I had exhausted the back of the head's tactile information of hair and skin over bone and had begun to build a language appropriate to the sensations I was getting through my fingertips. The interesting issue was that ears therefore often came next, rather than eyes, the nose or the mouth, one ear might emerge as the hand moved left from the position where the occipital bone comes to a rounded end at the back of the skull just above where it meets the axis of the backbone but the other ear might be reached by a hand slowly exploring the top of the skull and dropping down to the back of the ear. What was particularly interesting about the ear was the amount of surface it took up. I have very large ones and had always been rather self conscious of this, but they now gave me a very difficult translation problem. If you feel the back of the ear as it emerges from the skull, you can feel the cartilage through the skin and then you rise to the top or helix and your fingers turn over across a smooth but soft lip, all of which are areas you cant see when you look in a mirror. However then your fingers begin to touch areas you have seen. This complex of tactile information meant that an ear experience might spread out over a large part of the paper surface. Gradually I would move to the front of the face, but always returning to the back or top of the head as anchor points, and what this did was release me eventually from my 'visual memory of the head'. 

I then tried this out as a drawing exercise on the students but only a few were able to conceptually grasp the idea, most of them ended up with a drawing of the head from the front by touch because it took too long to conceptually disengage with memories of the head's visual perception and then re-engage with touch and the rebuilding of visual information based on that. I was also teaching an adult education course at the time and the students were older and in many ways more ambitious, however I didn't have access to large sheets of paper, so we tried out the concept on A4 sheets and it worked so much better. By starting again at the back of the head, the students constructed 'joiners', some of which stretched the head experience out and along the floor and others into large freeform circles of imagery that turned up-side down as they were pieced together. As soon as the nose, mouth, eyes visual axis was broken the images took off. This memory was I realised very important, and although I no longer have the drawings I did at that time, watching the recording made me think it was about time to engage with this type of process again. 

The sessions began with an introduction Chloe Briggs, Tania Kovats and Anita Taylor presenting themselves, followed by the people who had joined the program, each of which had been asked to select a drawing to talk about. 

However for our first real drawing challenge we were all given a body part to draw and I was given a left arm. 

These images below were of some of my attempts. 

I'm always interested in what triggers an idea, and in my case it was the fact that whenever I have to identify my left from my right I feel a pain memory in my left arm. This then takes me back to my childhood and a time when I lived with my grandparents in the village of Pensnett in what is now the West Midlands. It has since been swallowed up by urban growth, but in the 1950s it was still easy to walk out into fields, but at the same time it was not far away from the Round Oak Steel works, a place where my grandad worked as a train driver, shunting metal and coal along local lines that linked the steelworks to the national rail network. My gran was adept at all sorts of country healing techniques, and when I developed a carbuncle on my left arm, a huge thing that covered the arm's bend; she applied her home made ointments and pastes and wrapped my arm in bandages. I can still see in my mind the removal of the big pad of sticky brown stuff and the feeling of relief that the carbuncle had been removed as well. She didn't just work on myself, other women in particular would come for advice and help on health matters, and usually whilst they did, my gran would make tea and when it had been drunk proceed to 'read' the leaves. I used to wait for the stories and as I listened to them, began to have a first young boy's inkling of the power of a story. I have thought about my gran many times since she died and she is still central to my thinking about how we operate in this world and how we are connected with it. She could talk to horses and had a wonderful almost symbiotic relationship with them, having grown up in a stable complex and as a girl having to sleep with horses at night, so that she could alert the grownups if a horse was becoming unwell. 

The images of tiny arms and hands emerged naturally and I was interested in how they worked as metaphors for the fact that every man has a boy trapped inside him, and it is often that trapped boy and his experience of growing up, that still makes decisions for the man.

These thoughts are of course very personal, and right from the start I realised that this course was going to become a challenge in relation to who can accept their body as a publicly faced carrier of tales and who needs to hide behind it or keep their thoughts to themselves. I was also the only man on the course, something I only found out at the first session and I did wonder if my presence might inhibit others in talking about their relationship with their body.  

Between the first and the second session I began to process the images, in some ways needing to step back from them, they were too 'loaded' with own life messages and needed to be universalised. 

These images allowed me to bring colour back in and also forced me to think again about my processes, in this case my long years as a printmaker were very evident, breaking the drawings down into layers and adding colour to these being central to how these images were realised. The final one being a sort of reflection on late Michelangelo's crucifixion drawings and the need to find an image sitting on the edge of spirituality, but still grounded in the body, an image trying to take off, but still being tied to the ground. 

Session two

Session two was centred on online life drawing. I have in the past been very dismissive of drawing from online sources and have avoided them, but now there was an opportunity to find out whether or not anything of value could be transmitted via the screen. I had committed to this program and therefore also to a certain trust in the provider, so I was pleased to find out that it was possible to get something from the experience. 

The first encounter was with Lilli, a very pregnant model, who was therefore weighted down by her condition. This of course gave a certain gravity to the situation, and worked to give me a way in to creating three dimensional form within the flatness of the screen. We were given an opportunity to loosen up our own bodies by making a couple of fast responses, these I did in charcoal and decided that they were too clichéd, so decided to work with mixed media, as this would give me more opportunities for visual invention. The thing I had been most worried about in relation to screen based imagery was in fact weight. I didn't think I could get around the lack of physical presence, but the fact that Lilli was pregnant, gave me a heightened sense of the real behind the lens. In fact as I moved the materials about I began to see her melting down into the cushions she was sitting on, the soft contours of the sofa-bed, merging into Lilli's rounded body. The flesh and blood stuff that lies just beneath the skin, being what I found myself very aware of and I was reminded of my daughter's last pregnancy when things went wrong and she lost a lot of blood. This personalisation of the situation was again something I hadn't expected but which I should have, as even the process of drawing an image of a left arm had done this. I was beginning to realise the body is always a site of intense emotional investment, and that part of my response was going to be that I was now getting old and my own body is beginning to fail. This was going to be something that became even more apparent when the next situation was revealed. 

Once again we were introduced to the model, this time a totally in control of her body dancer, loi. 

The situation was one whereby she would work her way around a particular set of spatial configurations, a pole was available for her to hold on to and she could control her body so well it felt that each movement was choreographed. She was in particular very aware of the camera, and was obviously working to the screen, composing her body, so that 'pictures' were being constructed in the drawer's vision, as much as the drawer selecting various movements for the drawings. I produced a lot of drawings, and again realised I was finding a way to work on screen, this time though finding what had been about liquidised gravity in the Lilli drawings, was now about tethered flight and movement, loi's body became for me very bird like, her dance one of fluttering movements, as she worked her way around the pole centred spaces. The drawings I felt were most successful integrated loi into the spaces she was moving in, but I never quite felt I was getting to a point beyond my past history, having worked with dancers and moving models several times before, but of course in the past always in the flesh. This experience of seeing someone in the box like space of the computer monitor was both easier to engage with when drawing quickly and conceptually interesting as this was cyber-space and I hadn't really come to terms with what that meant in terms of 'seeing' another human being as an electronic form. 

Because I was having problems going beyond what I had done before, I began cutting into the drawings as I did them, pulling the spaces out so that the drawn gestures were making 'real' curves and in effect another body was constructed from the spaces loi's body had made. Again these drawing fell short of what I was experiencing and I decided to throw them away. As luck would have it, as I began stuffing the things into a bag to take them out to the recycle bin, they finally seemed to find themselves as images, and so began the next stage. 

I realised that if I took these cutup drawings back into the 2D world of the screen, that there would be some sort of closure to the process, from 3D (loi's body) to 2D (the computer screen), to 2D (my drawings) to 3D (the paper constructions) and back again to 2D (the photographs on screen. Once liberated by the process I felt able to then work with all the images as digital files and made several large scale printable images that were designed to work with colour as a rhythmic elemental force, that could heighten for myself the pulsing power of loi's original movements. 

I was finding these images very interesting but still I felt they fell short of being an experience in their own right. They were too 'easy' too decorative or not 'discovered', whatever it was about the images I needed to do something to get to a point whereby I wasn't just going to leave the process unresolved. Then just to see what would happen I began folding some of the images in half. The fold was central to the earlier process and I had thought about the fold as in Deleuze, several times before when trying to think through some of my ideas about how to draw aspects of interroception or somatic approaches to body imaging. 

The bilateral symmetry of the folding took these images back into being human bodies again. We are of course like so many animals reliant on bilateral symmetry, constructed around a backbone and inner-tube, something that so many cultures and societies have understood when making representations of humans and their gods. Symmetry gives power and as I began embedding the movement drawings back into a centrally folded composition, I realised I had re-discovered something very important, that if energy is to be captured it needs to have its handedness balanced and symmetry does that. So I was finally left with an image I thought had power, a female power that was channelled from both Lilli and loi and one I was for a moment at least going to keep working at. 

Session three

The third session was about clothes and people. We all construct our identities through the clothes we wear and rarely come across naked people unless in very particular situations, such as in a life studio or when wild water swimming or in bed. Therefore the session should have been very revealing and a way into dealing with the very personal issues that kept emerging. These are a few of the drawings I did of the other participants, we all had to model something that meant something meaningful to us, I modelled an old tie given to me by my father and attempted to tie it on screen, whilst telling the story of its father/son history. 

I didn't think any of the drawings I did that evening were any good. I wasn't able to get into the other people on the program in the way I had with Lilli and loi. There was no punctum for me, not enough time to find that entry point I have always needed to find if I am to get into an image and every drawing I made was I felt superficial. It was a good exercise in terms of getting to know the other students and things were stated that were very personal, and I was now very aware that other students really were committed to revealing themselves as part of the process but somehow visually it wasn't working for me. Perhaps I don't have enough empathy, or in this case just needed to spend time trying things out, instead I was too focused on getting an image made during the very short time each person told their story about the item of clothing they had chosen to wear. 

It was only later when other people remarked that my tie story was very interesting that I decided to have an attempt to get into that aspect and I then made a few images I was a bit happier with, but they were not anything beyond average, being too predictable again. 

Non of the images were going to ask questions as to what the reality of the situation was, the 'cartoon' like approach didn't do anything beyond trivialise the ideas and I decided to drop the approach. It was perhaps something for a short video, but certainly not for memorable two dimensional image making. 

Session Four

The forth session was much more focused on self portraiture. Anita Taylor opened the session with an introduction to her own large scale images of herself. I've seen her drawings several times before and have always responded to the way they engage the viewer perceptually. Much more interesting than drawings made from photographs, you get the sense of a visual and tactile journey over a face, that is itself like a landscape. The vigorous handling of charcoal and erasure techniques develops a 'feeling around the head' sense and tone is used not just as a modelling or emotive device, but as a way of establishing mass in space. So it seemed very appropriate that the session would be led by her and the memory of her self-portraits that set a pretty high bench mark. 

After the experience of the third session I was a bit worried that I would not be able to respond effectively, but I soon got lost in the making of responses to views of myself in a mirror. In fact I had brought two large mirrors down into the studio, so that I could vary my reflection and see myself re-reflected, which meant I could see multiple images of myself. I worked on my knees, crawling backwards and forwards, pushing my reflected images back into the glass, whilst pulling information out from rapid working across sheets of hot pressed watercolour paper. Anita had suggested we work on newsprint, but I wanted the freedom to use wet materials as well as dry ones, and the smooth surface of the hot pressed 300gsm paper allowed for both sensitivity to movement as well as textural manipulation. 

I began each drawing with crayola wax crayons, a sort of nod to childhood, but also with an awareness that whatever I did later would be preserved by the wax, as it would resist any water based pigments. Lines in space, rather than around features set out the initial responses, which meant I didn't feel trapped by my first responses as I did the week before. In fact I didn't try to capture a likeness at all, struggling with space and mass as something to pull out of the mirror, and not a surface. Because I was on my knees I felt like an animal, a dog looking in the mirror, puzzled by what it sees. Only in the latter stages of these drawings did I try to find any sort of likeness, and it was more a likeness of attraction than reflection. Marks are sometimes attracted to other marks, they cluster because they need each other's company and in their gradual correspondence they finally adhere into something recognisable. This is again not about a surface likeness but more a corresponding mass or intuited other, a doppelgänger or ghost of whatever reality might be out there in the mirror. 

I did several of these drawings, some more worked on than others and at the end of the session felt exhausted by the physical effort of looking and trying to keep my responses to the looking as honest as possible. One of the problems if you are an experienced drawer is that you have a bag of tricks that you can always refer to if a drawing is going wrong. No not going wrong, looking thin, no not that either, aesthetically unloved perhaps. Anyway I know it when I see it and I have to stop myself making 'art marks' as a solution. I still remember my first encounter with this as a life drawing tutor. We had brought in a new tutor from another college and he was regarded as a life drawing specialist, so I was very interested to see how he would teach. As I was at that time in charge of booking life models I sort of had an excuse to drop in and see what was going on. I was puzzled at first by a certain similarity of surface being developed by the students and then realised that the new life tutor was showing students how to cover up inaccuracies or clumsy attempts at rendering mass or form by making 'interesting' marks that had the appearance of 'adjustment' but were in fact stylised markings. It was interesting to see how many people were fooled by this and several people remarked on how they thought the drawings were improving. As the tutor worked his way round the class, he would rub out some sections of each student's drawing and those same 'interesting' marks would begin to work their way into more and more 'improved' drawings. I think we all can have a tendency to do this to ourselves as well, so it's hard to blame anyone for trying to get the students' work to look more accomplished, but an honest clumsy attempt will in the end teach the drawer far more. 

Only one of the drawings that was done from a sideways view in the second mirror survived, but several of the head on images felt honest enough to keep, there was something about my hand continuously interfering with and touching my face, as if looking into the mirror wasn't enough to make contact with the image; I had to feel it into place. I rarely make drawings of myself and when I have been making drawings over the last few months they have been about how I feel inside myself. Interroception and somatic responses to the body have been where I've been focused, so in many ways I had also drawn myself into a conundrum. Where does feeling tone come from? I had been looking for it intuitively inside myself, but these drawings found it by looking in a mirror. 

I was very busy doing other projects that week so had no real time to reflect and so felt under prepared for the next week's session. 

Session Five

Session five, entitled 'Liquid Bodies' was led by Tania Kovats and Callen McKeon, organiser of @queerlifedrawing who led as someone who was gender neutral, or moving between genders; the fluidity of current gender definitions being something that like many of us I have had to engage with quite a lot over the past year or so. My own sexuality is something I am very aware of is a product of 1950s post-war culture. I always felt as if I was out of time and place and had had many a run-in with my father as I grew up, mainly because he never felt that his son acted like a man. This was a situation only resolved when I was married and we had children, finally my father seemed to accept me as someone he could identify with. I wonder how things would have turned out for me in a time of liquid modernity? 

The drawings I made were again awful. I was very tired, had been working on other things and had to move on the moment the session finished to do my permaculture course, for which I had prepared a presentation, so that was also in the back of my mind. I thought something would come through, but the looking was poor and I couldn't find a 'punctum' or entry point into the situation. I had thought the image I made of myself wrapped in a red tie and with an androgynous body a couple of weeks earlier would have helped me with the empathy issues, but no. Perhaps I needed more time to get to know someone who was obviously a very interesting person, but who I couldn't quite reach through the screen. I needed to 're-gender' my materials as well as my looking, but hadn't had enough time to get to grips with how.

We also had a session responding to breath control. As we controlled our breathing, we drew. Breathing in and out through the nose, followed by in through the nose and out through the mouth, and in through the mouth and out through the nose, and then finally to breathe in and out through the mouth. 

I only made one drawing, but I was very interested in it because of all the drawings done during these sessions this was the one nearest in intent to the work I had been doing on interroception. I drew with both hands, not looking at the paper, eyes closed and feeling where I was as I changed breath type. I found the drawing interesting mainly because I realised that I was in some ways re-drawing my ribs. (I had made some drawings about ribs and breathing a little while ago, but from imagination, not as a performative trace of a physical event). 

Session six

We were asked to choose three drawings to talk about as we were getting near to the end and some reflection was needed. I chose these three:

The final drawing was of two images I had been working on in relation to the interroception theme, the somatic images were now being incorporated into more recognisable figures, but their interiors were still washes of variegated liquids. These are quite big, (see the door as size check) and I was wondering whether or not to use them, as well as thinking about how I could use the whole experience as a way of taking my drawing on into unexplored territory. Of the three looking back I think the left arm has most potential, if only due to the liquid nature of its making. My bi-lateral symmetry interest is now waining and the door sized images feel over blown, but they all have something of interest, so I will jump off from where they are and see where I land. 

We all had to contribute one image and a short text for a final publication that was designed to reflect our collaborative efforts and I did this twice, first of all selecting one of the tie drawings and then a self portrait. The text for the tie drawing was a bit too long, so I wrote something else and made do with that. I was beginning to get a bit irritated with myself for not being able to put more time in, but I had been teaching a lot more and was also in the middle of a permaculture course, one that also held its Zoom sessions on Tuesday nights. 

The original text for one of the tie drawings has however begun to interest me again, so I shall paste it in here, as I think it does make some sort of sense, and may be something I return to.

First proposed text for 'The Body I am in' publication

As a drawing I emerged alongside much more technically competent observations and conceptually fascinating approaches to how a body becomes visible within a drawing process. You can see the remains of other thoughts sliding through the thin paper I sit on, but I'm not effected my them, I'm wrapped in my own thoughts, as I am wrapped in the memory of a tie once given to me by my father, a man deeply troubled by a son who wanted to be an artist. 

Drawings can emerge unbidden and when they do they are not always appreciated. Like Freudian slips, apologies are made for them, cracks that can destabilise the bigger picture. As an embodied thought, I am aware that I will be misread many times by those who think first and feel later; but I'm used to that, my father never understood me either. 

I'm drawn using an implement called a fine liner, on a sketchbook page thirteen centimetres wide and twenty-one centimetres high. The 'fine' in liner like the 'fine' in fine art, is though too pure for my liking. This is a word that came into use during the mid 13th century and was used to refer to things that were 'unblemished, refined, pure, free of impurities and of high quality'. All terms that suggest boundaries between things, ways of separating out what is good, better and best, a word evolved from the Latin 'finis', 'that which divides, a boundary, limit, border, end', a word we are used to seeing at the end of any French film, 'FIN'. The word fine in its current use, does not so much denote the quality of the art work, it points to the purity of the discipline. Hence in maths we have pure maths, and the idea of purity, as we have seen so many times, is an idea that leads to the eradication of the un-pure. You are supposed to be either male or female, or of a particular race or colour, to be of a certain religious or political persuasion. The eradication of impurities and the elimination of the heretic are both sadly implications of our fondness for a fine liner, for an implement designed for its ability to draw clear boundaries around and between things. So my emergence as an image is perhaps fortuitous, a reminder that impurity, the unsure, the mixed up, the confused and the hybrid, are what will shape the future of both bodies and drawings. 

Page from a notebook

So what did I get out of it? It is always good to check in with other people that are interested in drawing. Chloe, Tania and Anita are all seasoned professionals who can offer advice and put things in such a way that it opens more doors, sometimes its really simple, such as Tania's "put your hands around the edges of the screen" to finish a session with, a simple but somehow very profound gesture. The people met on the course were all fascinating and we are planning to keep the group together and I suspect that will be the long term benefit. As to the drawings done by myself, I was quite disappointed, but when looked at in a few month's time I might have changed my mind.   

The final publication made as a record of the event:

The Body I am in

See also:

Drawing exercises

More drawing exercises 

Drawing and mindfulness Part one

Drawing and Mindfulness: Part two: Drawing before drawing

Drawing and mindfulness: Part three: Making a drawing
Drawing and mindfulness: Part four: Material conversations
Drawing and mindfulness: Part five: Finding yourself

Self portrait drawings

Drawing hands

Flesh