When drawing from life you are in effect visualising energy flow. However the way you approach the task is very important. Every mark you make is a captured moment of energy, the action of looking being a transfer of energy from the world via the eyes into the brain. A growing awareness that there is constant energy transfer within yourself, between yourself and the world, and between the complex of animals, vegetables and minerals that make up any surrounding environment, is central to the concept behind these drawings. Once a drawing has been used to capture various visual and invisible energy flows, it stores the energies recorded like a battery; something that can both store energy and when it is in turn looked at, release energy back out into the world.
Trees demolish walls
Tyrannosaurus in the woods
An emerging giant
I'm particularly interested in how nature removes blocks from the energy flow, how it in effect heals itself and all three of the drawings above touch upon my feelings about that.
Detail from 'Trees demolish walls'
Brush with a nib attached to the other end
The important issue for myself as I draw are the different rhythms set up by visual encounters with the situation, for instance the brick wall itself is still, even after many years of erosion, beating its heart to the regular rhythm of carefully laid bricks and mortar. My job is to both pick this out and to embed it into the other rhythms of moving grasses, broken stones, trees etc. that surround the wall and which are working to gradually dissolve the wall rhythm back into the older rhythms of the woods. The trees are pushing vertically up, powerful forces that surge out of the ground towards the sun, the walls are in contrast now broken at angles, angles that remind myself of broken bodies. As I draw it, a nearby slab of concrete feels to me as if it could have come from a cemetery and it now becomes a tombstone for a dead building.
Detail from 'Trees demolish walls'
The rhythm of marks is also a vibrational trace of my hand movements. I stand to make the drawings, so movement begins in my feet, rises up my old wobbly legs, is carried up my aching back, down my arms and into my now arthritic fingers. I am ageing just as the building that once stood here has aged. At some point, like the broken wall, I will join it in dissolving back into the world I emerged from.
The dinosaur drawing is also about energy transfer but with a slightly different emphasis in relation to time. I was trying to get through a very overgrown part of the wood in order to draw something else, but as I broke through some undergrowth, I looked down and lying in grass on the floor was a bright red plastic tyrannosaurus. It was so incongruous that I was initially baffled as to how to deal with it, but as usual drawing sorted the problem for me.
Detail: Tyrannosaurus in the woods
The issue I found I had with the tyrannosaurus was the power of its image. It was still pristine, its plastic surface unscratched and unsullied by dirt and grime. It felt put there on purpose. I gradually became aware that the tail was missing and that it was in fact broken and therefore probably discarded by its owner, who must have taken it into the woods and left it as some sort of ritual ending to its short toy life. As I drew it, I was able to reconcile its form with the surrounding vegetation, able to dissolve its edges into the more energetic marks that I was using to suggest the life of the flora that surrounded it. It will eventually be covered by fallen leaves and will sink gradually into the ground and become a type of fossil for future diggers to uncover. This drawing of what had been a top predator of its time, began to look as if the dinosaur had just been defeated by something far bigger than itself. It was a fallen giant, now made small; the fast drawn marks made to suggest surrounding grasses, could perhaps be indicators of giant ferns seen from far above, time collapsing in the mind's eye. The image of the dinosaur, something glanced at in a brief moment, also being a window into deep time. The dinosaur's red plastic was once a carbon fossil, then fossil fuel and as a high molecular weight organic polymer, it became morphed into a form alongside cups and saucers, other toys, medical equipment and the myriad of other plastic goods that now threaten oceans and their residues begin to live in our bodies as micro-plastics. The drawing arena is small, not more than a couple of feet to scan, I don't stay long, don't attempt to describe the light change, don't dwell on textural differences, I simply draw mark rhythms. The toy dinosaur's form had been made clear by its designer, stomach ripples looking to me like wave forms, lines of energy that I could play off against marks made to signify the forms of plastic muscles on plastic legs. Legs, that like its arms, are stuck out helplessly, now air running to the rhythms of waving grasses growing nearby.
The third drawing 'an emerging giant' was made over a longer period of time. The tree at the centre of the image, was in my mind getting ready to take over, ready to reclaim its territory. The tree had grown out of the side of what appeared to be a mixed pile of earth and rubble. Slabs of cut stone, old bricks and other remains of a former time when this was an industrial site, poke out around the tree's base, all of which felt very inconsequential in relation to a dominant tree, that as it was drawn demanded more and more pressure to be exerted on the pen, its rhythms energised the place, so that as it pushed its root system out into and down into the world, it took up the space necessary for a powerful presence. These tree roots were alive with a muscular vitality that visually grabbed the ground and anchored the growing tree to a mound that was now part of itself. The tree's twist into space dominated the rhythmic forms of the area, other vegetation taking a very secondary role. As in a visual opera, tall grasses set up a background rhythm that could support the loud vitality of the tree. As I drew, I felt myself falling over as my feet slipped on the slope I stood on, this became confused with my attempts to depict the slope that surrounded the tree. Disorientated by being off balance, the energy I had to invest in standing upright, was channelled through my drawing hand into the way I was drawing the tree gripping onto the ground. It became more like an octopus stuck onto a rock.
An emerging giant: Detail
The above approaches to drawing have gradually evolved from a lifetime of drawing that initially used the visual checks and balances of a William Coldstream inspired grid of looking to assess where things are in relation to each other, and which then for many years used the 'giron and fesspoint'* method of spatial drawing as an attempt to capture the flicker and movement of perception. I have spent hours looking at and thinking through the implications of the drawings of Cézanne and have nearly 50 years experience of teaching drawing and a lifetime of making drawings behind me, all of which has only led me to have an uncertain certainty about these issues. I am however still learning, every week something new occurs to me, but I would hope that these recent drawings have enough to them to convince the viewer that they are the product of serious research into how it is still possible to stand in front of the world without a camera and make an interesting drawing of it.
How to visualise magnetism
See also:
Visualising energy flow Part one
The oscillations of observation Learning from how to visualise magnetism
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