Kirby dots and Kirby crackle

 

Jack Kirby

In my last post on invisible rays I mentioned the fact that Jack Kirby had devoted much of his career to the depiction of both physical and psychic energies. I have also decided to devote a full post to this issue because a blog on drawing at some point has to acknowledge the influence of Jack Kirby on any artist who read American superhero comic books when growing up in the 1960s. I have in the past referred to Steve Ditko's surreal visionary landscapes, that made up the backgrounds of Doctor Strange comics, but it was Jack Kirby that developed visual languages that gave me an insight into the possibilities of depicting invisible energies.  

An explosion of Kirby Krackle

Jack Kirby in cosmic visualisation mode

I'm not alone in recognising Kirby's importance when it comes to visualising cosmic energies, Jeffery Kripal has stated;

 'For Kirby, the human body is a manifestation or crystallization of finally inexplicable energies... What Mesmer called animal magnetism, Reichenbach knew as the blue od and Reich saw as a radiating blue cosmic orgone becomes in Jack Kirby a trademark energetics signaled by "burst lines" and a unique energy field of black, blobby dots that has come to be affectionately known as the "Kirby Krackle" ... The final result was a vision of the human being as a body of frozen energy that, like an atomic bomb, could be released with stunning effects, for good or for evil. These metaphysical energies, I want to suggest, constitute the secret source of Kirby's art'. (Kripal, 2011, p. 286 ) 

Kirby Krackle is also known in the comic book trade as Kirby Dots, when depicting a directional energy ray rather than an energy field. These overlapping dots are a way of visualising a crackle of energy such as a lightning bolt or what has been called in comic book jargon, 'a battle aura', This is a visual sign that lets the comic book reader know that the hero or villain is psyching themselves up for battle. They are drawn as emitting a coruscating, Kirlian-like glow around their bodies as a sign of great inner power. 

The technique consists of drawing a series of overlapping spots or dots along the edge of the energy effect being created, and as you do so you create a white negative space that begins to optically oscillate. 

Bridget Riley

The Op artist Bridget Riley was using a similar effect at the same time, but Kirby was more organic in his approach, which allowed him to be more suggestive in his metaphoric impact. When I was teaching, an interesting visual exercise for Foundation students, was to take a regular grid and begin to set out dots within it. Then to distort the grid and to make the dots follow the distortion. You can do this within a grid made by using curved perspectives if you want to be spatially playful.

Once you have begun to achieve something like the forms directly above, you can start to copy elements and overlap or push some of the dots together.

There now exists a CGI tool for automatically creating Kirby Dots, and an analogous technique called 'particle emission' is used in video game graphics for rendering particle emissions and energy fields. 

Screenshot from a 'particle emission' CGI showcase

Kirby Crackle

The illustration above was adopted from an online Kirby dot tutorial. The negative space around the dots is vital and you can see how they can either represent moving, directional energy or the porous edge of an energy field.

By combining the dots with lines, especially if the lines were in a deep perspective, Kirby (and other artists working with him) was able to give an idea of a sudden blast of energy, as in an explosion. 

Kirby and Sinnott: Captain America

I was first introduced to this idea of spots as a visual language by my school art teacher, Paul Rudall and I reflected upon it in a previous post on Dots and spots. Both of these approaches to using spots or dots as visualisations of energy, came into my life during the mid 1960s and they have stayed with me, becoming more personally meaningful as I get older. 

Live objects breathing and embedded within an energy flow

References

Kripal, Jeffrey J. (2011). Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. pp. 286–287

Foley, Shane (November 2001). "Kracklin' Kirby: Tracing the advent of Kirby Krackle"Jack Kirby Collector. No. 33.

Pencil Jack online tutorial for Kirby Krackle

See also:

Parascientific visions and Rayonism

Dots and spots

Stitched, dashed or dotted lines

Visualising energy flow

Lines as symbols of invisible forces

Parascientific visions and Rayonism

Mikhail Larionov: Rayonism: Pencil on paper

Mikhail Larionov: Rayonism: 1908 watercolour

Parascientific theories had a lot to do with shaping Mikhail Larionov's theory of Rayonism. These theories, although long debunked, have always held great fascination for myself, because of their poetic potential, rather than their failed scientific veracity. Larionov's imagery was based on “invisible” rays, that he said were similar to ultraviolet waves, x-rays and radioactivity. 

Alternative thinking traditions, especially those that had embedded into them ideas of energy and invisible forces, as ways to understand what constitutes reality, were often associated with ideas about the nature of matter and space. “Radiant matter” was an extension of the concept of Röntgen's X-rays, this, coupled with the discovery of radioactivity and the effects of radium as discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie, was in Larionov's time, fuelling an interest in how to visualise invisible forces. The theories which we now accept as truths, such as electromagnetism and cosmic rays, were at the time in competition with other theories, such as Mesmer’s universal principle of fluid matter or Reichenbach’s Odic force. Invisible rays were very popular and Prosper-René Blondlot’s N-rays, Louis Darget’s V-rays and the Y-rays of Serge Youriévitch, were all at one point or another taken seriously, before being dismissed as quackery, as non of them stood up to experimental testing. Rayonist forces it was argued, were invisible rays emitted by the human body. A similar concept, but this time rooted in the human brain, was Naum Kotik’s invisible ray concept, which was focused on “brain rays”, things he believed were emitted as the brain occupied itself with thinking processes. His theory reminded me of the Jean Grey character in X Men, who was often, like Professor X, shown in the comics emitting psychic mental waves of energy.  Larionov also taps into this idea and he stated that Rayonist pictures are born from the intersection of radiant thoughts and the ether’s invisible radiant forms, thus uniting the human / nature divide. In essence Rayonism engages non-human actants alongside humans operating as invisible ray transmitters, in this interplay of invisible forces. 

Jean Grey of X Men

Professor X

The Rayonist visualisation of triangular emissions seems very closely modelled on Julian Ochorowicz’s “rigid rays” or “physiological polar energy”, which he developed from visualisations of the magnetic fields that you can see surrounding the poles of magnets. These rays it was argued, were transmitted by all living organisms, a concept that reminded me of the Élan vital or vital force of Henri Bergson, an idea I then tried to visualise myself. 

A visualisation of body energy

Ochorowicz wrote a fascinating account of how as a scientist he became aware of the power of invisible energies. In his text, 'Mediumistic Phenomena' from 1913 he writes of 'A New Category of Phenomena' and asks himself "What Is Impossible?" He reflects on the fact that in 1878 he was investigating the reality of the discovery of the microphone, in which three pieces of coke, arranged in a certain way and connected through an electric battery with the telephone, were to send speech over a distance. Together with an engineer, Mr. Abakanowicz, and Mr. Bodaszewski, an assistant at the Department of Physics, they experimented doing everything according to the description, but their attempts failed. Ochorowicz wrote in his records at the time, “Humbug,” I thought to myself, “how could a piece of coal transmit speech?” Several days later it turned out that the pieces of carbon were poorly connected and under better conditions the microphone did transmit speech. During the same time period Professor Bouillaud had accused Edison of ventriloquism, stating that a metal plate could never imitate an instrument as complicated as the human larynx. These experiences persuaded Ochorowicz that invisible energies did exist and that there were a whole range of them. The transmission of sound and the popularity of the new technologies emerging as theoretical understanding became technology, such as the telegraph, the telephone and radio, was a model that was often used during this time.

One way to explain that various invisible energies could be seen to occupy the same space, was made popular by the invention of radio and then eventually further refined by the introduction of TV. It was the concept of 'tuning' that explained how all these invisible rays and forces could be in place but not in evidence. Think of a radio initially not plugged into the electric power system and turned off. It is subject to all the 'normal' energy forces and we see it via the reflection of electromagnetic light, can feel its temperature or solidity by touching it. It could be licked if we wanted to continue testing it out as an object. However if we now turn it on and begin to tune into the invisible radio waves that are out there, (which we can think of as invisible rays continuously passing through ourselves and the radio), then we can access vast amounts of information, each type of which is stored within a different band width, which the radio can then be tuned to. Because we cant tune ourselves into these invisible waves, doesn't mean they don't exist, it simply means that we don't have the right sensors. However, in very rare cases a person's mouth can act as a radio receiver and their body as an antenna. A metallic filling can act as a semiconductor that detects an audio signal, and the speaker may be bridgework or possibly a loose filling, basically anything that is loose enough to physically vibrate and convert electrical energy into vibrating kinetic energy, that would in turn then create sound waves. These rare cases, were often used as evidence that the body could in certain circumstances pick up subtle energies. 

Many religious beliefs include divine energies. For instance the uncreated light of the Godhead, the light in which Christ was transfigured before his disciples on Mount Tabor, the so called 'light of Tabor,' or the “Taboric light”, which is a hesychast  concept that emerged from Eastern Orthodox Christian Church practices. Saint Gregory Palamas in reference to Christ’s Transfiguration says, “And His face did shine as the sun, and His raiment was white as the light”. This wasn't the light of the sun, (created light, as in God said 'Let there be light'), it was the uncreated light; the energy of God himself, the energy that comes from God’s being and is transmitted to man. It was thought that Christ affected the eyes of the Apostles so that they could be able to see this uncreated light. In the icon tradition these rays of light energy were often depicted as triangular emissions. 

Russian Orthodox icon of the Transfiguration: Theophanes the Greek ca. 1408

As a Russian, Larionov would have been very aware of the orthodox icon tradition, and the triangular emanations that surround Christ in the icon above, are not too far away from the triangular rays that we see in Larionov's work. 

Larionov: Rayonist drawing: 1913

Rayonist drawings were not always made up of triangular rays, in the image above we have intimations of cell division and a more biological approach to the problem of how to depict the 4th dimension. This idea is perhaps linked to then current visualisations of etheric energy. I have posted in the past on Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater's depictions of 'thought forms' and sound, and they also wrote about a subtle energy-based force that was a transitional point between the flesh and spirit body; an 'aura' or plane of existence composed of etheric energy. Alice Bailey expanded the then thinking about etheric energy and her book 'Telepathy and the Etheric Vehicle' is still available, as well as there being an active Facebook page devoted to quotations from her work.

The seven layers of the aura

The alignment of the etheric body, the astral vehicle and the mind nature:

From Alice Bailey: 'Telepathy and the Etheric Vehicle' Facebook site

The conjunction of positivist science and occultism was an essential aspect of turn-of-the-century culture and I think this was what T. S. Kuhn was writing about in his book, 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions', where he described the proliferation of esoteric theories that often emerged, just before there was to be a paradigm shift in scientific knowledge. During this time Newtonian physics was being questioned by new discoveries and the new science of quantum mechanics and concepts such as spacetime and the forth dimension were yet to be fully articulated. As Mikhail Matiushin, who in his text 'Reference of Colour', developed his own theory of the 4th dimension, states in his memoirs, 'The question of dimensions was an issue that was on everybody’s mind, especially in the artist’s. There was a bunch of literature being written about the fourth dimension. Everything new in the arts and science was seen as something coming from the depths of this dimension'.  The expression “materialisation of the spirit”, which Larionov uses, refers to a specific term that was widespread among spiritualists. 'Materialisation', as understood by Theosophists, was produced by what they called the larvae, the eidolons, or Kamalokic "ghosts" of the dead, the occasional apparition of such shells was, it was argued, as natural as that of electric balls and other atmospheric phenomena. 

In relation to Rayonism, Larionov stated, that what he was seeking as an artist was “A form that results from the intersection of different objects and the artist’s will. The fourth dimension. Spiritualism, transversality”, and that, “All living things are immersed in a sea of radiant matter”. He believed that “All bodies give off rays, and the universe is therefore filled with a myriad of overlapping rays”.  This was how Larionov imagined the radiant space in his paintings and drawings, often drawing lines that operated as rays that speed out of objects, instead of objects as such. It looks to me as if the rays from the objects he draws find themselves criss-crossed by the rays coming from other objects, a process which generates new forms that emerge in the space between them. 

Natalia Goncharova: Rayonist composition 1912

I actually prefer the Rayonist drawings by Natalia Goncharova, who was Larionov's wife. I think that she had a better 'touch' or feeling for the materials she drew with. 

We still try to visualise invisible rays, high-energy gamma rays and cosmic rays being our more current rays of interest. Comic book artists have depicted them and of course scientists also use computer aided visualisations to do so but they still often have to rely on artists to make their ideas visual. 

Jack Kirby visualises cosmic rays

Cosmic-ray muons: simulation of a particle shower hitting the atmosphere 20 km above Earth

An air shower photographed in a bubble chamber

I thought it fascinating that an image of an air shower, (a cascade of subatomic particles and ionised nuclei, produced in the Earth's atmosphere when a primary cosmic ray enters it), is not that dissimilar to Kirby's idea of using broken lines to depict cosmic rays. Jack Kirby went on to develop a very powerful body of work that was focused on how to visualise invisible energies, but I shall look at that in a separate post. 

Jack Kirby visualises invisible energies

Lightening is another visual trope that has often been used to depict invisible forces, because when seen, it is always dramatic and suggestive of great power unleashed from the unknown. 

Gaspard Dughet: Landscape With Lightning

William Jennings: The first known photograph of lightening 1882

An artist's rendition of the detection of a cosmic ray by the Telescope Array experiment. When high-energy cosmic rays reach Earth's atmosphere, they collide with and break apart atomic nuclei, creating a shower of particles that is picked up by detectors on the ground. 

Osaka Metropolitan university and Kyoto university 

Ryuunosuke Takeshige

In Ryuunosuke Takeshige's illustration we can perhaps glimpse a faint memory of Gaspard Dughet's 'Landscape With Lightning', as well as more recent photographic images of lightening and it is perhaps in our exposure to the reality of natural forces, such as sunlight glinting and reflected off water and lightening strikes, that our drawn visual languages for these ideas emerge. 

Sunlight reflected on water

Somewhere behind all this I see an ancient Egyptian artist trying to depict the invisible light ray arms that emanate out of Atan, the Sun God. 5,000 years ago someone was creating a visual idea of how to depict invisible forces, a concept that then over thousands of years, weaves its way between astrological, religious, scientific and occult understandings of what things could be like that sit out there beyond our senses, but which still effect us; the most powerful in reality being of course the rays that are captured by green plant life on Earth using photosynthesis. If only plants could draw.

Atan

There are still a variety of approaches to 'invisible ray' healing practices amongst alternative medicine practitioners. These cover such things as energetic healing, subtle-energy fields, acupuncture, radionics, crystal healing, electrotherapy, radiology, psychic healing and other energy therapies all of which attempt to conjoin the physical with spiritual perspectives of health. 

There has recently been more interest shown in the work of these 'outsiders'. In particular William Reich and his theories of orgone energy were for many years seen as pseudoscientific, however as research into an integrated understanding of our mental and physical health has developed, it has been argued that his theories were not totally false. Orgone was described by Reich as an esoteric energy or universal life force. It was conceived as the anti-entropic principle of the universe, a creative substratum that pervaded all of nature. Orgone was seen as a massless, omnipresent substance, similar to luminiferous aether, the postulated medium for the propagation of light, a substance that explained the ability of wave-based light to propagate through empty space, something that waves should not be able to do. Orgone was in Reich's mind, a central component of a universe consisting of living energy, rather than inert matter. (Something that recent scientific discoveries as to how matter works on a sub atomic scale might agree with). Orgone could work as an organising force at all scales, from the smallest microscopic units, or "bions", to macroscopic structures like humans or anything made of matter such as galaxies, it was the glue that held everything together.

Reich argued that deficits or constrictions in bodily orgone were at the root of many diseases. In order to study these forces, he designed "orgone energy accumulators", that operated to collect and store these invisible energies as they flowed out from the surrounding environment. He stated that this knowledge could be applied medically to improve general health and vitality, in a similar way I think, to an understanding of vitamins. A lack of vitamin 'C' and the onset of scurvy and a lack of orgone energy and the onset of bodily fatigue, would be an analogy familiar to Reich's followers. These accounts of subtle forces or psychic healing were dismissed as pseudoscience at the time, and a United States judge at one point even ordered the banning and destruction of all orgone related materials. Only as a butt of humour was Reich's work brought back into popular culture; Woody Allen's film 'Sleeper' reflected on the fact that in the future Reich's work would be vindicated. When it was released in 1973, the film included a working 'orgasmatron', a fictional orgasm inducing device based on Reich's work.

The orgasmatron from Sleeper

Whether understood as a joke, or as an analogy or believed in as some sort of spiritual force, these ideas fascinate me. They reflect the fact that our human sensory capacity is very limited and that much of what is happening is totally invisible to us. For example, the earth's magnetic field's interaction with electrically charged particles generated by the sun, is at times visible as the aurora borealis and recent sightings of this as far south as Leeds have for many people been magical. The slippage between these sightings understood as scientific as opposed to magical phenomena, is very easy to make and the need to believe in something spiritual is real. Art, is perhaps much more capable of reflecting on these issues than science, its images do not require verification before they are responded to and art has a long history of being able to accommodate both spiritual and scientific understandings of the world. Indeed, people have a right to be wrong and when they are, they are sometimes far more interesting than when they are right. 

A visual exploration of the impact of wave energies on a form found on a coastal walk

See also:

Abstraction as an idea

Quantum entanglement

How to understand the virus Drawing the invisible enemy

Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc's theory of iconography, 

Benjamin Brett's idea of geometric psychology, 

Besant and Leadbeater's Thought Forms,

 Morgan Russell and Stanton MacDonald-Wright's Synchromism movement, 

Edwin Babbitt's   'chromo-mentalism', 

Lines as symbols of invisible forces

The visualisation of embodied thinking

An infection is surrounded by epithelial cells that produce an antimicrobial peptide

Both mental and physical experiences are imprinted into our bodies. This is partly why I have recently posted on the tattoo, which I was thinking about as a sort of analogous process, suggesting that tattooing can be thought of as a metaphor for how the body's internal cells are imprinted by external events. External experiences are held in the body/mind as imprints and memories, and because they are now inside the body, they effect physiological change. 

Our nervous systems are layered, and we have inherited older parts that still work because they were effective during the early part of our evolution as an animal and they helped us to survive.  These primitive reflexes still mobilise our fight-or-flight decisions and they are integral to our inner emotional feeling tone. This feeling tone is an embodied awareness as experiences are encoded in this system non-verbally and non-consciously. This is why I have decided that drawing and other material processes such as making things in clay, are so essential to the awareness raising needed if we are to engage with how our body/minds are working to keep us well. 

I have been looking at my own history and there were times when my experiences of life were traumatic. I feel sometimes as if I still carry these events within myself, even though they are events that took place a long time ago. It is as if these past experiences are somehow still 'fixed' in the body, the problem then being that some of my actions and reactions to new experiences, can be still in some ways, responses to situations that are no longer the case. 

I recently undertook an awareness exercise to help myself identify whether or not my body might be working harder than it needed to when operating automatic self defence mechanisms. After going through the symptoms, it did seem to be the case. I sometimes get cold hands or feet, a common sign of blood being diverted away from the periphery towards the core muscles that help us flee or fight, when we are stressed. I am very sensitive to bright lights and loud noises. I sometimes lose spatial awareness and become dissociated, and I often have that feeling of having my head in the clouds. I have also in the past had panic attacks, but thank goodness I have had none during the last few years.  All of these are signs that my mind/body is over compensating and that it goes into survival mode much too quickly, because it has not been able to 'forget' past experiences that are no longer threats.

Drawing and making things are activities that enable me to feel safe, they are my main health resources, or at least it feels that way to me. Those inner body feelings of an anxious stomach and tight chest, disappear when I am engaged in drawing or making ceramics. I have been for a while now exploring images associated with interoception, perhaps an awareness of how these images came to be, can help others overcome their own embodied anxieties. 

One of the books I have been reading about embodied stress suggests that if you are to move on past your self defence mechanism triggers, an extremely useful skill is to learn to check whether you can inwardly visualise the size, shape and weight of your body. the book suggests that an awareness of the boundary of the skin, helps differentiate who we are; the skin being a transition place between me and not me. The book explains that a layer of our nerve rich skin grew from embryonic ectoderm, which also forms the brain; therefore the skin it is argued, is another outpost of the nervous system, as is the stomach. However, when you try and envisage the body, there can be bits missing. Some people on trying to visualise the body realise that in their body/mind they are missing legs, or limbs are far too small, images of their bodies may be diffuse, abdomens absent, one side of a lung absent, or bones far too soft. In fact it is in the spaces between what feels known and what feels unknown, that some sort of visual understanding is being forged and the unknownness of these elements, is what makes the images made from these feelings so interesting. They are sort of the opposite of photographic realism, they are glimpses of things that are felt and then in order to catch the glimpse, you need to re-invent the form that it is coming in. Even with all this ambiguity and missing elements, there is something about this process that feels much more 'realistic' than copying photographs, because at least I am directly being in touch with myself or others feelings, no matter how tenuously. 

The short condensed text, 'Finding Safety via Embodiment' by Steve Haines (The Body College, 2019), sets out questions that are designed to help you visualise your body...This is the verbatim text...  "Initially it can be useful to go through them as a sequence, using the mnemonic WOSI; Weight, Outline, Skin, Inside. with more experience you can be much more flexible. Often the simple question ‘how does x compare to y’ can open up a realisation of an incomplete mapping of the body. Weight ‘How does the weight of your body feel on the table?’ ‘Do your shoulder blades, hips, knees and ankles feel even on the table?’ Outline ‘Can you feel the outline of your body, the silhouette it makes?’ ‘Does the outline feel the same from the inside with your eyes closed as it would if you were looking at your body or touching it?’ ‘How close or far away are your hands and feet. They are not too big too small or too close or too far away?’ Skin ‘Can you feel your skin as a clear boundary between the inside and the outside?’ ‘Does your skin feel sharply defined and easy to contact or is it a bit blurry or amorphous?’ Inside ‘How does the inside of your body feel?’ ‘Does the inside of your body feel full, flowing, alive or are there bits that feel empty, fixed, numb or hard to contact?’ " (Haines, 2019)

However, I had a few questions myself about the questions asked. Haines presumes that the inner body map in some way resembles the way we see or feel our bodies from the outside. The work I have already done in relation to interoception and how to visualise inner or somatic experiences, has pointed to a wide variety of ways for people to visualise inner body feelings. Drawings that have been done in workshops, as well as images I have made myself, point to a wide range of possible approaches to visualising feelings.

Images made during a workshop

The issue for myself is that by attempting to visualise a somatic experience, the person involved begins to 'own' the experience and to actively engage in building up a relationship with feelings and inner body sensations that they would normally ignore. 

A visualisation of stomach pain

Identification of pains within a crude body map

I have been undergoing pilates sessions, in order to come to a better understanding/awareness of my own body and at the same time attending therapy sessions to get a better grasp of how my mind is working. Hopefully by undertaking the two approaches at the same time, I can gain a better grasp on my own mind/body relationship. I am of course still drawing and having conversations with other people about their own feelings/understandings of these issues. 

Somewhere in the mix, whether it is in the workshops with other people whereby they make interoceptual images, or in my own self reflections, at some point images will hopefully emerge that can help with some sort of communication of what is an eternal conundrum; the fact that we cant see inside anyone else's head.  We do however need to have empathy for others and we need to operate in ways that enable cooperative actions, these things are central to our collective human condition. The making of art, is I feel, something that illuminates our experience of life, that it enriches it and gives it more depth. The mind/body relationship is something humans have had to consider over and over again, each society and time, coming to different conclusions as to how to make sense of consciousness. 

Above all, I'm trying to find answers to the development of a practice that ties together all the various parts of my life experience, a way of working that acknowledges that environments will effect both our bodies and our minds. I also believe that we are inseparable from nature and an integral part of it, which means that you cant step outside of it, a situation that leads me to also believe that everything is interconnected and that this reflects a powerful quantum interconnectedness, which is based on an argument that subatomic particles are in some form of intimate connection with one another, no matter how far apart they may be.

Because these beliefs are not scientifically verifiable and don't fit any one religion, I'm forced to tiptoe around the frayed edges of science and this is why I often post on esoteric ideas such as Mesmerism or Rayonism or am looking to non western traditions, such as a belief in chakra points. I sense that there is some other way to tap into the energies that surround us, and that art can be helpful, as it gives legitimacy to practitioners such as myself, as metaphor inventors and makers. There is a word, 'grok' which means to understand profoundly through intuition or empathy, which was coined by Robert A. Heinlein in his 1961 book 'Stranger in a Strange Land', which is a good word to use in these circumstances, as it suggests a grasp of a something, that you know is there, but you cant put your finger on it. 'Grokking' can be used in a sentence as you would a word like running; to grok being to empathise so deeply with others that you merge or blend with them, even though you might not agree with the way they set out their beliefs. For instance I can empathise deeply with a religious person, even though I don't believe in their religion. 

References:

Barrett, L. F. (2018) How Emotions are made London: Pan

Biernoff S, Johnstone F. (2024) 

What can art history offer medical humanities? 

Medical Humanities Published Online: 30 May. doi: 10.1136/medhum-2023-012763 

Available at: https://mh.bmj.com/content/early/2024/05/30/medhum-2023-012763

Crawford, D. H. (2009) The Invisible enemy: A natural history of Viruses Oxford: OUP

Menzam-Sills, C. (2018) The Breath Of Life: An Introduction to Craniosacral Biodynamics New York: North Atlantic Books

Pert, C. B. (1999) Molecules of Emotion London: Pocket Books

See also:

Drawing and quantum theory

Why do we draw?

Object orientated ontology and drawing

Lines as symbols of invisible forces

Visualising energy flow

Drawings as aesthetic transducers 

The fine art of the tattoo

Tattooing is now featured in major museum exhibitions. In the tradition of the tattoo artist, the Romantic outsider artist as a lone genius stereotype disappears and an even older tradition based on a more communal art form re-emerges. In particular the tattooist works very closely with the client, because they will be 'wearing' the images created on their body for the rest of their lives. The client is in effect, curating their skin as a developing image and the tattoo artist is working with them to do this. This is a symbiotic relationship, but of course the tattoo artist still has to have all the skills necessary, to ensure that once agreed upon, the design can be created. Skills in the use of the equipment, whether traditional or new approaches, need to be combined with excellent design skills and good hand eye co-ordination. The conceptual skills needed to create images that make us think about the human condition or that tap into deep mythic traditions, are also just as much in evidence in the world of tattoo design as they are in other art forms. 

There are some overlaps with the art world. For instance Coco Loberg is an Australian artist who develops tattoo ideas by taking images from a wide range of contemporary sources. For example the sardine tattoo below, is based on one of Kate Jarvik Birch's paintings, who is an artist that lives in Salt Lake City, USA. The internet now eliminates distances and artists can tap into influences or copy images from virtually anywhere. 

Sardines: Kate Jarvik Birch

Coco Loberg

Loberg's images are not too far away in style from the line drawings of Michael Craig-Martin. In order to arrive at an essence, they both strip down their subject matter to a few clear lines. Michael Craig-Martin is of course a world renowned fine artist and Coco Loberg is a tattooist. It would of course normally be argued that Craig-Martin was there first and that as a fine artist he laid the ground for the public's appreciation of such stripped down line imagery. 

Michael Craig-Martin: Sandle

Craig-Martin's 'Sandle' is one of several images he developed that were regarded as a type of conceptual commentary on the nature of imagery, rather than a depiction of a type of shoe. However, the 1950s designer drawn images of food, (below) were done so that they would reproduce well on paper as printed images, using what were still in those days mainly black and white printing processes. It could be argued therefore that the graphic designer/illustrators of the 1950s were preparing the public for the Pop-Art imagery of the 1960s.  Indeed Warhol's experience as an illustrator in many ways prepared him for his fine art career.

1950s objects line drawing

Warhol: Shoe drawings: 1956

All these types of line drawings need to go through a process of visual simplification. Formalist thinking is therefore central to all three outputs. Hokusai would have understood this process, as it is clearly central to the production of his own stripped down drawings of everything from plants and animals to people and objects. 

Hokusai

Because of the nature of Japanese art, it lends itself very easily to tattoo designs and you can find traditional Japanese images, adjusted for tattoo use in tattoo studios all over the world.

Foo dog / Fu Dog / Shi Shi / Chinese Guardian Lion by @wootattoo_1

Koi Dragon by @horisumi

Heikegani / Samurai Crab by @sootattoo_1

The tattoo designs above are recreations that exploit hybridity as a powerful inventive force. All of the studios cited above also do highly complex body and sleeve designs and as these have to wrap around arms or backs or chests, an excellent knowledge of how two dimensional forms will work when following a spatially curved surface is needed. In the tattooists' jargon this means that designs need to consider 'wrap'. An inner forearm design must consider the visual drop off at either side of the area. A wide design will appear narrower as it curves around the arm, therefore when for instance, designing for the inner forearm, it is thought of as having a flat surface from the ditch, (in tattoo jargon, the indentation behind your elbow) to the wrist, an area around 3 to 4 inches wide. Then as the surface area curves around and becomes the outer forearm, any design that is wider than 3 to 4 inches, will start to distort, the more it extends out on either side. In order to visually work with this, good tattooists locate key visual elements on a centre vertical line, well inside the 3-4 inch flat plane, locating less important details in the areas that fall away on either side. Body maps are sometimes used to help think about these issues. 

Tattooist's body map: From https://www.tattoospace.com/

Tattoos are now seen as a major art form, and art galleries are beginning to think about how they can be displayed. 

Tattoo. Art Under the Skin: CaixaForum: Barcelona 

The ‘Tattoo. Art Under the Skin’ exhibition held at the CaixaForum art centre in Barcelona, documented tattoos past and present and explored the development of the art form as a global artistic expression.

I was as interested in how tattoos were presented as much as the various different approaches to the medium. It is a very strange thing to see a disembodied leg, standing alone in a clear perspex vitrine. Once you get past the dismembered body feeling, you then have the secondary experience of the tattoos themselves and how they combine to form a three dimensional surface. In this case the Spanish tattooist Laura Juan, shows how to combine colour and realism, in an emotively hot blend.  

Laura Juan

Laura Juan's work is 'painterly' in its application, her use of colour is a result of the way she lays in the early layers of her work, which allows her to simplify form and yet at the same time suggest a very lively and accurate understanding of light reflecting off her various surfaces. I suspect she has looked at a lot of Impressionist paintings.

Kari Barba

Kari Barba has made it her mission to highlight the role that women can play both as tattooists and as skins. (A skin or canvas is the tattoo jargon for someone who has been tattooed) Her scenes are dramatic, and they feel as if they could come directly out of illustrations from adventure fantasy novels. Her work was exhibited in “Tattoo: An Exhibition,” at The Natural History Museum in Los Angles, which provided a historical overview of the social and religious significance of tattoos worldwide. The museum text describing tattoo art as “a process [whose] results can be a sign of identity, a rite of passage, a type of protection, a form of medicine, a memory made visible, or a piece of art to be collected and worn on the most intimate of canvases, the human skin.”

Colin Dale

I personally really like the work of Colin Dale. For instance when working with a beekeeper, he developed a "Honey Hunter" pictograph image that could be put onto the calf of the leg. The designs come from European cave paintings from about 10 thousand years ago and they depict people climbing vines to harvest honey from hives in the upper branches of trees. 

Jee Sayalero

Jee Sayalero in contrast is a post-modern artist, in the image above he combines the contemporary Japanese Nintendo game figures of Super Mario and Yoshi with a traditional Japanese tattoo design. 

The Quai Branly Museum in Paris held a large exhibition of tattoo work a few years ago and this exhibition toured both the USA and Canada and in doing so raised the profile of the tattoo as an art form. This was the exhibition on which was based the “Tattoo: An Exhibition,” selection at The Natural History Museum in Los Angles, and the echoes that have been resonating out from such a prestigious series of exhibitions are yet to fade away and tattoo artists are beginning to be seen as the keepers of very important world wide folk art traditions. 

An introduction to the Quai Branly Museum tattoo exhibition

My interest in tattoos has resurfaced because I have been thinking about them as a way to hold images as they pass between the inner world of the body and the exterior experiences of the world. For instance, some tattoos depict the inner body on the outer body, thus sort of making the skin invisible.

Other tattoos make you aware of the skin, but then create an illusion of the skin being opened out or pulled away to reveal what is inside the body. 

I first encountered this particular aspect of the tattooist's art in Barcelona. We had been for a swim in the olympic pool on Montjuïc hill; from the hill you can look out over a magnificent view of the city and on this particular day we needed to cool off after going to the Miró Museum. At one point we were inside the building, looking down on one of the pools, it was empty except for one lone swimmer. The man was swimming lengths, very powerfully, and smoothly, using a good front crawl stroke, but what fascinated me was the fact that he had a full-sized body tattoo of the inside anatomy of his body and as he swam, his back activated illusionary muscles and bones. 

Back Tattoo: Matt Doherty: Empire Tattoo Studio 

I can still see the man's body in my mind as it swims, and in my chemical memory it becomes a deep metaphor for myself, the body cleaving its way through the water, cutting into the pool's blue skin, whilst the body is revealing its own inner reality as it stretches itself to its physical limit. 

On the other hand some tattoos bring the outer world into the body. 

Paul Owen: Naughty Needles Studio

Jolly Octopus: Christchurch

I still remember back in the mid 1960s reading Ray Bradbury's short story "The Illustrated Man", it had a deep affect on me at the time, A creepy, overweight carnival worker is given tattoos by a  witch who creates images with magic needles. She tells him that they will show the future. One of his tattoos is of the man strangling his own wife, something that does come to pass and another is of the man being attacked and beaten by the other carnival workers when they realise what he has done. There is something very disturbing about the idea of the body being able to tell a story about its future life. There was also a film made based on the story, with a slightly different plot, whereby a man sees his own fate on his murderer's body. 

The Illustrated Man: 1969 Director: Jack Smight: staring Rod Steiger

The body can be a surface on which to place images that remind us of our encounters with the world. My grandfather had served in India during the time of the First World War and he had tattoos from his time of travelling out there; he had had one done at each port that he had docked at and so he then had a mnemonic of his experiences, which, over 30 years later, he was still able to use to help tell his grandson some amazing stories. 

However, the body also tells stories about its life, without any outside interventions. The skin ages and as it does it communicates the facts of its own mortality. Certain illnesses, infections and diseases communicate their existence through the skin; eczema, psoriasis, acne, shingles, moles and fungal infections all have unique visual properties. Sometimes the skin displays pigment distribution abnormalities such as in the case of people with vitiligo and this reminds us that skin colour is simply a result of the distribution of different amounts of melanin. When someone has an irregular distribution of melanin they can in effect be more than one colour, a state that asks many questions as to why humans attach so much importance to skin colour. 

Old human skin

Guttate psoriasis

Acne

Shingles

Vitiligo

The skin has its own memory, which we call 'scarring' and different cultures use this process to decorate bodies using various scarification techniques.

Operation scars

Scarification

Recent images of sunburn tattoos have been circulating on Instagram, Playboy magazine even markets its own “sun tattoo” bunny stencils, however the fine artist Dennis Oppenheim had the idea way back in 1970, when he decided to make a before and after image of himself 

lying in the sun. 

Reading position for second degree burn: 1970 Dennis Oppenheim

My thoughts are still coming together about this, I have yet to decide how to use these various ramblings, but I have an intuition about how inside and outside experiences, can combine to make us what we are. Somewhere in my making process I'm attuned to this instinctively, but have yet to clarify exactly what this means to me. These types of posts are a sort of edging around the subject, precursors to the main event, which is about me finally deciding what to do.  

Notebook thoughts on possible use as tattoo 

See also:

The tattoo: drawing and the body

Michael Craig Martin and line drawing

Paper and skin

Rendering skin colour

Between art, geometry, emotion and science

Benjamin Brett and Geometrical Psychology

Flesh