Images as ghosts

 

Rachael Whiteread: Nissen Hut

I sometimes think that all representations are like spectres or ghosts. So what do I mean? There are various overlapping issues here. For instance representations are frozen at the point of their making, whilst the things represented carry on changing and ageing and they eventually die or wear away. Although the representations are also wearing away, they often take longer to fade out of existence than the thing represented, hence they become rather like ghosts of former things. For instance I have photographs of my father and mother, both died some time ago, but their representations, although now faded, are still with me. 

Ghost image of my father

My father died of a heart attack. He was cutting the lawn when it hit him. It was of course a tragic moment but once I had processed the fact he was gone, I needed to then accommodate or find a place for his death by making images about it. Perhaps this is one of the blessings of being an artist, in that you can externalise your feelings in moments like this. I ended up with an image that perhaps on reflection I tried too hard to embed layers of symbolism into; the hourglass/mower handle has broken, the grim reaper is now a lawn mower and my father's face, moon like is being eclipsed, all suffused in spectral white's and greys, the result of colour being selectively removed from the image. It was a necessary thing to do though and at the time I made several versions, some watercolour and ink, others using digital print processes to suggest the representation of something having gone or being removed by using the 'replace colour' function of Photoshop and replacing each chosen colour with 'white' or 'grey'.

Rachael Whiteread's 'Nissen Hut' extends the idea. She makes a mould from a still existing Nissen hut and then presents this 'ghost' or shell, as a white spectre of its former self. The Nissen huts were a common feature of 1950s landscapes, often built for army barracks during the war and then converted into cheap housing after it. I had several friends who lived in them when I was a boy. The Second World War is itself now a ghost, long gone, but during my time of growing, it was only just over. My father had been in the army and he learnt many of his ideas of fatherhood from his time in service. My father and the Nissen hut were both shaped by war and therefore you could say, so was I. The world of the 1950s is now also a black and white ghost. Photographs and films from the time frozen in a colourless world, one that exploded into technicolour during the 1960s, and on the advent of the Beatles, was coloured in as new aspirations began to appear as if by magic in front of our very eyes, life becoming a Magical Mystery Tour rather than a grim reality. 

Father enters the land of the dead, still pushing his lawn mower

Ghost mower: 2nd version

There are other ways to think about images as ghosts, one is in printmaking when after you print off a plate, there is usually some ink left on it. If you print again what you get is a “ghost print”, a much paler version of the original. In drawing you can do something similar. If you make a drawing in chalk or charcoal, you can place a damp sheet of paper on top of it, smooth it down to make a good contact and then peel it off. You now have a ghostly image of the original in reverse, which is called a counterproof. You can also use image transfer techniques such as using acetone to dissolve the ink used to print an image, which allows you to lift the toner off a printed image and apply it to another surface. As the image is transferred it leaves behind a fair amount of ink resulting in a more transparent image than the original, that can feel very ghostlike.

Rauschenberg: Image transfer

By pushing a sheet of paper into oil paint once it has been manipulated to form an image, an artist can pull off individual prints by either burnishing the back of the paper, or if the image is painted into a metal sheet, by sending the plate and paper through an etching press. The final result is often an image with a 'ghostly' feeling, as it is a trace or fainter impression of the original. Degas was a noted user of this technique, as he found it a very good way to 'discover' imagery, when he was thinking about possibilities for painting. 

Degas: Mono-print

Perhaps all images are ghosts, faint impressions left over from encounters with reality. Derrida would argue that we are all haunted by the return of old ideas that rise up out of the past like ghosts. He calls this aspect of our lives, 'Hauntology' and he explains how it works in his 1993 book 'Specters of Marx'.

The older I get the more old memories seem to arise unbidden, again like ghosts they begin to haunt my everyday reality. In particular my old hand puppet, 'Sooty' has begun to arise unbidden into my thoughts about what is going on now, it slides ghostlike into view, turning my thoughts into snapshots from some sort of long gone stage-play or silent cinema. 

The ghost of Sooty engages with a cinematic world

See also:

How to say what you mean

John Berger

Vanessa Baird: Also some thoughts about images made on the death of my mother

Western World A book concerning the ghosts of a cowboy past

The imprint and the trace

Simon English: Taking the rough with the smooth

Simon English: Drawing installation 

I have a book of Simon English's drawings and have often turned to his work when I have been looking for visual solutions to ideas that require the compacting of very different sensibilities. He is a very gifted drawer with a sophisticated touch, one that I suspect he has to work hard at to stop it getting in the way of what he has to say. I'll try and explain. 

The raw imagery set into the corner of a gallery with rough red horizontal and vertical lines scrawled into the background is by the same person who made the delicate drawings on the page above. 

Simon English: Details and salon hang of a block of drawings

There are two sides to sexuality. One is the tender caring side and the other is the rough sexual ride that sometimes seems to overpower a relationship. My experience is that these things are never easy, in fact their fascination is the roller-coaster ride of life's far edges. English is gay, but same sex couples have to face the same complex set of issues that all relationships have to face. Caring is good but sometimes boring, violence is bad but sometimes inescapable, even if inexcusable. Life is a contradiction and Simon English's drawings embrace that contradiction. 

Simon English: Single images and combination wall

Even within a single image English will have delicate and rough, or sophisticated and naive drawing sensibilities mashed up together. We often approach aesthetic judgement as a sort of overall framework within which we can sense an artist's touch or sensibility. Here we have the aesthetics of clumsy fragility, of crass sophistication and dumb intelligence. His images operate like lost fragments of a love story, we have to make up the missing bits, why did that face seem so ugly and disjointed one day and yet remind you of the pleasures of Classical Art the next? Why is the sweet memory of last year's love sullied by a feeling of physical rejection? Every bright moment has its shadow; and it is often the case that the brighter the light the darker the shadow. Cupid's arrow can pierce the heart as well as the arse and being blind his aim is rarely true. 

I have been trying to reconcile the visualisation of interoceptual experience with my perceptual experiences, the inner and the outer and am sometimes puzzled as to how to reconcile the various languages that emerge, Simon English helps me to think through possible answers. 

See also:

Fuseli and modern women

Drawing and sexual politics 

The split

A line of disjuncture: the tear

The salon hang

John Craxton and Jake Grewal

Electroplating as drawing

I've decided to use electroplating technology to further my ideas about energy flow and transfer. I often draw three dimensionally with clay and so it makes sense to me to think about how I might bring fired clay into the electroplating process. I have now found out that in order to create a surface on my bisque fired ceramics that can undergo electroplating, it is necessary first to coat them with something that can carry an electric current. Looking at industrial processes this seems quite difficult as you need to submerge your object in a bath of electrolytes which then act as catalysts to enable nickel to coat the ceramic material. Once this is done it can be electroplated with the metal of your choice. However I am going to try and short circuit the process and use a graphite spray to coat unfired ceramic material. However there are various sorts and so I am trying a couple of different ones out in order to see what works and I have ordered more graphite power, so that I can also try rubbing it into the surface of forms more directly and then using the spray as a final coat. I like to use graphite as it seems to fit into the extended idea of drawing and I have used it in the past as a lubricant during casting, coating the interior of a plaster mould with graphite powder, so that the cast object could be released easily. I was at that time casting in lead, and it was about 50 years ago, so I'm interested to see how graphite application has changed over the years. Graphite is a crystal allotrope of carbon that can conduct electricity and in order for it to do that, graphite powder can be mixed with a binder such as an acrylic glaze to make a conductive paint.  Apparently there is a commercial version of this material called 'wire glue' available which is used for no-solder electrical connections but I'm initially going to look at graphite spray as I want to keep the surface as thin as possible, so that the texture of the fired clay is not lost. As I'm very much a low technology person I shall just play around with these elements until something happens, it being for myself a process emanating from a form of thinking closer to alchemy than chemistry. If you want to try electroplating yourself there are lots of 'how-to' videos out there. 

How to do it at home electroplating videos

However I'm also thinking of diagrams about how electroplating works and how these can be developed metaphorically; in this case I'm thinking about Benjamin Brett's diagrams that emerged from his explanations of the geometry of the unconscious. These thoughts sit alongside memories of Dada diagrams, that remind me that the diagrammatic form is a very persuasive form of visual rhetoric and that we should be able to play with it. 

Benjamin Brett

The unconscious geometry of the liquid electrolysis of thought

Francis Picabia, Portrait of Marius de Zayas, 1915

Francis Picabia was a car fanatic, he had the money to buy them and they fascinated him. The diagrammatic drawing 'Portrait of Marius de Zayas' is a crazy diagram of a car's electrical circuitry. The two headlights that hang like bells are linked by a black line circuit diagram and a spark plug is connected into a red line version. Schematic electro-mechanical components and circuitry vitalise a women's anatomy and corset in order to give life to a portrait of the Mexican multi creative Marius de Zayas. Yes of course its nonsense, but it is a nonsense that arises out of an understanding of Pataphysics. Pataphysics has been described as the branch of philosophy that deals with an imaginary realm additional to metaphysics. It has also been described as a "philosophy" of science invented by French writer Alfred Jarry, and it is intended to be a parody of science. Difficult to be simply defined or pinned down, it has also been described as the "science of imaginary solutions".

I like the fact that I have had to mix up a solution in order to achieve my electroplating idea and that I am also trying to acknowledge the science of imaginary solutions.

The electroplating is only one part of the sculptural 'solutions' I'm trying to work with, as I'm trying to build objects in a similar way to how you might write a novel. I've been reading Ali Smith again and I love her way of weaving various stories together and how some voices might just have a page within which to articulate a thought and this can be interjected into a main story line or simply put there as a sort of marker or breathing space that allows another idea to emerge. I see no reason for sculptural objects to also have that sort of complexity. 

Drawings for sculpture made to be shown at night

You can just about see that fish tanks sit beneath these drawings for sculptural objects. The images are an attempt to depict how they would be seen at night; these are objects/situations that are designed to both reference furniture and animal forms, the idea being that they give birth to new forms by various processes, including electroplating. I am thinking about this as a type of morphogenesis, or the shaping of organisms by a metaphorical embryological processes of differentiation. The process uses the development of ideas according to the genetic “blueprint” of the initial 'potential' organism, (a drawing) and then it becomes about adapting each object to whatever environmental conditions emerge in the studio, or wherever else I'm drawing or making these objects. 

The forms were initially thought through as a series of drawings, but they are now emerging more on their own volition as objects down in the studio. All of them had to be in some way connected to an electrical power source, either to drive an inserted component, such as a TV or computer screen, or to power other things such as crystal sets or an electrical plating set up. 

Drawings of ideas for furniture/animal objects

I have already drawn an animation that is designed to be run on embedded screens that sit within these constructions and this has been passed on to someone else who will 'upgrade' it from hand drawn cells to CGI using sophisticated animation software. Both versions will eventually be played on the embedded screens. The final sculptures will then become 3D realised diagrams, sort of sculptural versions of Kurt Vonnegut's idea of diagrammed stories. 

I'm not really a sculptor, even though I'm a member of the Yorkshire Sculptors Group. I tend to think as a drawer, whether I'm painting or making. This is why this blog is called 'Drawing', although more and more things are touched upon that might not come under the umbrella of 'drawing', in my mind they emerge out of the practice of drawing as a way to externalise thinking. 

Sculptural constructions in progress

See also:

Kurt Vonnegut diagrams the shapes of stories

Benjamin Brett and geometrical psychology 

Freud and drawing invisible forces

Drawing it all together

Just do it

 

Sol LeWitt letter to Eva Hesse

Way back in the mid 1960s, Eva Hesse wrote a letter to Sol LeWitt about the fact that she was facing an artist's block, She had moved from New York to Germany and things weren't going well and she needed some sort of guidance from LeWitt, an artist she had in the past known and trusted. He wrote her a letter back, a letter that should I feel be read by anyone facing a similar problem. In fact I need to include myself in that list and I have found his reply useful time and time again when I have felt despondent and unable to come up with a new idea or take work into a more surprising or interesting direction. What you need to do is to just immerse yourself in what you are doing, something that applies as much to life as art. As LeWitt put it, "Just do it". 

If you don't want to read LeWitt's letter, it also works very well when someone else reads it out aloud and there is a wonderful video on YouTube of Benedict Cumberbatch doing just that.

Benedict Cumberbatch: Letter from Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse

There are similar things said by other artists and perhaps the most famous is the basic instruction about art making as set out by Jasper Johns. In 1964, Johns wrote himself a note in his sketchbook: “Take an object / Do something to it / Do something else to it". Both Johns and LeWitt stress doing as being essential to what it is to be an artist and LeWitt is at pains in his letter to Hesse to tell her to stop thinking about it. 

Georgia O'Keefe tells us, "Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing." O'Keefe is reminding us that you need to get lost in what you are doing if you are to discover anything. There is a something that emerges out of doing that wasn't there when you started the doing, because it emerges out of the conversation between yourself and all the other things involved in that doing. It might emerge from other people, from the materials you are working with, or from just the way your hands work with the limitations of your body. The important thing is to be on the look out for what it might be and to go with it as you sense its arrival. 

Without being active and doing stuff, nothing will happen and thinking very quickly becomes procrastination. There is a deeper thing here, something about the ethical nature of life itself. Doing led thinking is also about being totally immersed into the world. Actions require responses to the ever changing physical environments encountered. Some of the world rubs off on you as you interact with it, You are also like the moving charcoal that makes a drawing, as the drawing emerges, more and more of yourself is rubbed off into it. Thinking about the world implies a separateness from it; but you will never make a good drawing without engaging totally with the paper. Before making a drawing you might think that you have a good idea, but thinking without doing leads to ideas such as possession, rather than discovery; you think you own an idea, a bad thing, rather than allowing a thing to emerge from interactions between yourself and everything else, which is a good thing. 

If you ever stopped to think about what you are saying as you say it, you would never say anything. 

See also: 

Iterative drawing

Art as experience

How to pay attention (Includes a reminder of who actually wrote John Cage's 10 rules)

Drawing and healing traditions

 

Wong-Baker faces are meant to be a very clear and useful guide for patients who are having trouble communicating levels of pain to their doctor or other relevant medical professionals. As they are drawings they are supposed to cut through verbal and written language problems and can be used by a wide range of ages and people of different cultural backgrounds. However I suspect they are as ridden with problems as any other supposedly 'objective' language and that what we regard as a fixed set of expressions are still prone to a wide range of interpretations by others. These faces are another example of atomisation, or a need to reduce complex reality to easily understood components. 

Another attempt to visualise pain is the Schmidt pain index,  which has four levels of pain and is targeted at insect bites.

From the Schmidt Pain Index

I have been trying to use drawing to visualise interoceptive experiences for the past three years and although some of the drawings seem to be communicative of basic feelings such as a pain in a particular place, I have been finding that it is very hard to reach a consensus of opinion in regards to more nuanced feelings. However this is perhaps a challenge rather than a disappointment, as it is obvious that we all inhabit very different internal imaginative worlds and therefore one person's image of pain is another person's image of excitement. 

The longer I work in this area the more I become aware of parallel developments in relation to visualised body images in other professions, in particular in psychotherapy. Psychotherapists use the term 'guided imagery' when referring to a situation whereby a patient is helped to recall images from long-term or short term memory. They also work with patients to create imagery from fantasy or to make them from a fusion between imagination and memory. Guided imagery is defined as 'the assisted simulation or re-creation of perceptual experience across sensory modalities'. (I.e. this is not restricted to vision alone)

The use of imagery has been central to world wide rehabilitation traditions and is a critical component of many healing experiences. When we investigate the roles played by the placebo, suggestion or faith in a recovery from illness, it is clear that as well as using modern medicine and its procedures, people often use both positive thoughts and particular imagery that can carry those thoughts, in order to help themselves recover from both mental and physical problems. Those that do, often recover much faster than those that don't. (Robson, 2022) My own work has resulted in a range of imagery that is mainly the product of self analysis, however I am very aware that when I have conducted workshops with other people the nature of the images produced keeps changing. 

In his article, 'Raising Pain Tolerance Using Guided Imagery', David Bresler points out that mental images are formed long before we learn to understand and use words. He states that they 'lie at the core of who we think we are, and what we believe the world is like', His article also raises awareness of how belief systems as a whole can be shaped by our mental images and that therefore they play a very powerful role in our ability to tolerate pain or heal ourselves when ill. He defines a mental image as 'a thought with sensory qualities' and then introduces various types of guided imagery as ways to put into effect an 'active imagination' whereby elements of the unconscious are invited to appear as images that can communicate with the conscious mind. He states that:

'if people can derive not only symptomatic relief, but actual physiologic healing in response     to treatments that primarily work through beliefs and attitudes about an imagined reality, then learning how to better mobilise and amplify this phenomenon in a purposeful, conscious way becomes an important, if not critical, area of investigation for modern medicine'. (Bresler, 2010)

Bresler points out that the body responds to imagery in the same way as any other external experience and in particular the autonomic nervous system easily understands and responds to the language of imagery. Therefore if you imagine you are very ill, or that your pain is hard to bear, you are very likely to find that you become very ill and that your pain will be hard to bear. 

It is Bresler's statement that 'elements of the unconscious are invited to appear as images that can communicate with the conscious mind', that really resonates with myself. This could be something stated by a Surrealist artist back in the 1930s and as I strongly believe that Surrealism is still and always has been, one of our most powerful visual thinking devices, is a central plank of my personal artistic manifesto. 

There is of course a dark side to this, the harsh reality is that the most common way that people develop imagery is by worrying. What we worry about is never happening in the real world, only in our imagination. In my case I have plantar fasciitis in my left foot and heel and I have to get on and do things like write this blog to distract myself from worrying about it and thinking that it will go on forever. The reality is that this is a temporary problem, but I can make it worse by worrying about it. As Bresler puts it, 'people in pain worry all the time. They worry that their pain will never end and that they will remain helplessly immobilised by something they cannot control and cannot endure. As a result, they usually have little difficulty describing an image of their pain at its very worst. Bresler quotes patients as describing their pain as being like, “a swarm of fire ants are chewing on the nerve”, or “a gigantic elephant is sitting on my chest.” If you worry about something its image becomes in effect sharper and more real, and then it can become a major focus of your life experience. In this case we need to beware of self-fulfilling prophecies, for images have the power to create their own reality in the body.  Bresler goes on to state, that if a person has developed really clear images of pain, these images can have profound physiological effects on them that can increase their experience of suffering and interfere with their body’s natural pain relieving abilities. So I have to be careful not to fall into this trap and to find ways of using images to guide myself and others away from wallowing in pain, and to instead provide the imaginative waters that will allow them to swim away from it. 

Getting rid of these images can be a powerful healing tool and this is where my experience of working with votives can make a difference. By making images of people's pain or problem and then ritually removing these pains by either breaking them, burying them, burning them or doing something focused on externalising the feeling that was put into the image, you are in effect also helping them resolve and perhaps remove their association with the 'real' pain or problem. For instance in one case someone I was working with imagined their cancer as a 'little man' that resided inside them, this 'person' was clinging on, and needed to be told to go. 

The 'little man'

Once visualised as an actual drawn and in this case a printed image, its reality was such that it began to overpower the previous mental image they had. The ritual process of tearing it in half and throwing the pieces away, helping to release the grip that a mental image had had on themselves and their own well being. If this area of visual thinking is to be of help to the wider disciplines of medicine and psychotherapy, then it will have to be capable of incorporating these sometimes quite difficult to visualise images that can arise from people's imaginative view of their inner feelings. This is a recognition that the subconscious workings of each person's own healing processes need to be supported and recognised if they are to access and utilise the insights, resources, and solutions that arise from their own interoceptive awareness.

If we are to develop a shared ‘visual’ vocabulary for symptoms and sensations of pain and other interoceptive sensations, we need to stockpile these various representations in order to see if there is indeed a common language or if there is not, to see if this image bank does at least help release the potential of others to visualise their interoceptive experiences. If so, because visual representations have the ability to communicate a wide array of feeling tones or intuited things more efficiently than verbal languages, especially in a situation where medical professionals are linguistically challenged, such as dealing with patients who have no or limited English; images can generate insights that otherwise might be missed and they may also develop possibilities for visually augmenting written information.

When making a more detailed analysis of the images produced, the fact that drawings are stable artefacts that can be returned to and examined in detail, means that we can use them to avoid the problems of image decay that is associated with any mental maintenance of an image in someone's head. 

This issue also relates to the fact that in workshops I have found that people are at their most inventive and sensitive during the first hour or so and that after that their awareness levels drop and very few new visual ideas emerge.  However the time spent in the later half of a workshop can instead be profitably spent adjusting the various images made during the first half of a session and exploring the various visual languages used, and most importantly to test out their communicative possibilities. 

However it is also important to remember that the use of this process in alleviating pain or helping people improve their existing condition, is often associated with using these images to externalise inner feelings and to in doing this help in the removal of these 'bad' feelings or thoughts. 

The drawings and objects made can help enormously in guided image meditation, giving people time to inspect the imagery, and to then move on to a transformation stage whereby they take control of the imagery in some way. 

Once generated and maintained, a mental image and associated drawing can be reflected on interpreted and its understanding transformed and a shift in perspective made. 

With the assistance of a guided imagery practitioner or in this case an artist, a participant can be helped to transform, modify, or alter the imagery, in such a way as to either substitute images that provoke negative feelings, or that reaffirm disability, for those that elicit positive emotion, or to even get rid of the negative imagery by doing something to it, such as breaking it or throwing it away. I.e. they begin to rewrite their own internal stories whilst keeping the essence of what their stories are about. These processes are similar to imagery restructuring or imagery re-scripting, (Holmes et al, 2007), all of which are about people taking control of their own journey. 

Through this process, people can hopefully change their relationship with the images that have been in the past indicative of the distressing, painful, or debilitative nature of a condition, and in taking control of the image making process or sharing it with someone else, develop their capacity for self determination and the ability to cope with life.

Helping people to use their own imagination in this interactive way maintains a focus on the depth of emotional feelings that are central to therapeutic growth. Working with another person that takes them seriously is a wonderful affirmation of them as individuals and by opening doors for them into how visual imagery can carry important information, it can also become a process that leads to the development of a new interest in art itself. 

These approaches acknowledge many other drawing and healing traditions, some of them being disciplines that are thousands of year old. 

Payne, Levine and Crane-Godreau, (2015) point out that somatic experiencing as an aspect of interoception, is a concept that is embedded into ancient embodied wisdom traditions and their more recent offshoots. Listing Yoga, T’ai Chi and Qigong, as well as the Alexander Technique and the Feldenkrais method. When drawing and making we use our bodies to externalise our thoughts and perhaps central to the awareness that we have of the relationship between the body and the mind, is the way we breathe. This connection with breathing can take us back to the traditions of the Ayurveda, considered by many scholars to be the oldest healing science. Ayurvedic healing traditions originated in India more than 5,000 years ago and recognised that mental and physical health come together and that their interrelationship is based on the need for regulated energy flow. This awareness of the deep interconnectivity of all these ideas takes my mind back to older posts, and I don't want to duplicate what I was thinking about then, but I do want to highlight ideas about the use of drawing or image making to externalise thought and how in that externalisation hopefully we are able to have some sort of control over things that might otherwise stay hidden and undermine us from within. 

However drawing and image making is not at its best when trying to illustrate a concept developed via academic research. The research can inform the background out of which an image may emerge but if the image is to be alive to its own emergence into being, it has to feed off whatever it is becoming and that means unpredictability and a certain amount of chaos is always embedded into the process. My own 'medical diagrams' tend to be records of conversations, such as the one immediately below which was made in conversation with someone who was dealing with tinnitus. 

Once the initial conversations have settled down and been assimilated into a visual language, final images become free floating and emerge as a product of their own internal necessity. The further away in time they are from the initial making process, the more I forget what they were initially a response to, and the more they become things in their own right. They operate as a type of animist extension of a thought, a thought that materialised itself and then went its own way. 

Various images that arrived out of a process of visualising interoceptual experiences

Bresler, D. (2010) Raising Pain Tolerance Using Guided Imagery, The Behavioural Medicine Report Dec 4th Available at: https://www.bmedreport.com/archives/18655

De Vignemont, F. (2010). Body schema and body image—Pros and cons. Neuropsychologia, 48(3), 669-680.

Holmes, E. A., Arntz, A., and Smucker, M. R., (2007) Imagery rescripting in cognitive behaviour therapy: Images, treatment techniques and outcomes. Journal of Behaviour Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, Vol. 38, No. 4, pp. 297–305.

Kosslyn S.M., Ganis G., Thompson W.L. Neural foundations of imagery. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. Vol. 2, No. 9, 2001, pp. 635–642.

Payne, P., Levine, P.A. and Crane-Godreau, M.A., 2015. Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Frontiers in psychology, 6, p.93.

Pearson D.G. Mental imagery and creative thought. Proceedings of the British Academy. Vol. 147, 2007; pp. 187–212.

Robson, D. (2022) The Expectation Effect London: Cannongate

See also:

Minjeong An

Drawing and healing

Still thinking about what I do

Why interoception

Schmidt pain relief index for insect bites

Ibrahim el Salahi: Pain relief drawings