Hopper, Seurat and the study

A study is a drawing done in preparation for a finished piece, either as a sort of visual note taking exercise or as a form of practice, so that when you come to make the actual artwork, you get it right.

Studies can be used to understand the problems involved in rendering subjects and to plan the elements to be used in finished works, and written notes alongside visual images can allow the viewer to share the artist's process of getting to know the subject. In a recent post I looked at the studies made by David Reed for his paintings; his annotated drawings are central to his creative process, helping not only with the development of his ideas, they also document the creative process itself.

Sketches are typically drawn quickly to capture basic information, to rough out compositions or put down an idea before it is forgotten. Studies are more finished pieces made to get a deeper understanding of a specific aspect of the work, such as colour, tonal range, or how things are shaped, they are much more deliberate and bare a close relationship with the intended finished work. A relationship between Seurat's and Edward Hopper's work can help to give us a clearer idea of the difference between a study and a sketch.

The studies below for Hopper's 'Nighthawks' and 'Office at night' tell us about composition and tonal value, the light sources are all in place and shadow as an essential part of composition is clear. All that is missing is the colour.

Edward Hopper: Study for Nighthawks

Edward Hopper: Study for office at night

However with Hopper there is never a clear dividing line between the sketch and the study. In the image directly below, it is slight enough to be a sketch, but it is also a study of the main light source and the basic forms of the overall composition. 

Edward Hopper: Sketch: Nighthawks

Hopper: A sketch that has become a study of shadow and composition 

You often find in Hopper's drawings that what might start out as a sketched out idea, very soon becomes a meditation on something. In the case of the drawing above, he reminds us that in our perceived reality, shadows are just as substantial as walls and floors or seas and skies. By looking at these preparatory drawings, we can see his mind working. Each drawing works as a layer of meaning, one that can help you to think about how Hopper's visual language creates meaning for you as an individual. 

This is why his painting are things you can come back to over and over again, because each time you do, you can sense another layer of material thinking. You might visit his work and become fascinated by the underlying geometry of forms, then at another time the way he composes uses mass, by using forms that push themselves across his two dimensional surfaces as if they were tectonic plates. Light and shadow are for Hopper key signifiers, they allow exterior and interior spaces to interpenetrate each other and help to build an emotional world for his people to inhabit. Placement is vital, not just in terms of geometrical relationships but in terms of emotional presence. Each human figure occupying a solid space that says 'I'm here' and yet at the same time they are placed with such internal firmness that although a body position may indicate awareness of others, their internal world seems to be wrapped up in themselves. In a Hopper you get a sense that although others are in the room, and even if it appears that they might be speaking to each other, they are not really listening. This is where hopper's layers begin to kick in, as it is at this point that he offers us a view of the human condition. One whereby we know, no matter how hard we try, we can never know what others are thinking of us and that there are moments when we realise that everything is staged. His painting are staged by going through a process of being sketched and then these sketches become studies, studies that are really rehearsals, in the same way that each encounter we have with others in life, can become a rehearsal for the performance of who we think we are.

Seurat:: Young Woman: study for 'Un Dimanche à la Grande Jatte'

The Kröller-Müller Museum has within its collection one of Seurat's charcoal studies of a young woman, that he used to think about the essence of someone. He tries to sum up the presence of this young woman in the simplest terms possible, she is reduced and yet not reduced, to a mass, a mass that is also as you look at it dissolving back into the paper surface that it is constructed within. There is something eerily beautiful about this image. It is definitely not a sketch, it is a study of the human condition. 

The people in Seurat's painting are 'on parade' they are not just out for a stroll in the park, they are presenting images of themselves that they wish others to see. Roles are again being played out, but Seurat visualises these roles in a different way to Hopper. He senses that the roles are ephemeral, that beneath the posing and fashion lies something much more fundamental. He is like Hopper seeking the frozen moment when we become aware that the curved arc of a dog's tail, is as important to an experience as the shadow of a tree or the shape of a hat, but at the same time what is captured in that frozen moment, is a reminder of the insubstantial nature of everything. It is as if the clouds we watch were to one day form themselves into a vision of a day in our life, a moment that would be gone as soon as it arrived. 

We can date both Hopper and Seurat's images by examining the clothes people wear. But we are not time bound by these details. Just as we are not time bound by the details of clothing carved into a Egyptian statue, in all these cases we are overpowered by the timelessness of the image. Seurat's seated figures are always seated, their forms are emanations that flow out of the shadows they sit within. 

Like Hopper, Seurat also produces studies of the space he is going to people with figures. He probably went to the park early in the morning when long shadows are cast by the rising sun, a time when a lone dog was let out to exercise. The shadows help him to think about structure and the relationship between light, mass and space. Shadows hold for all artists some sort of wonderment, they impose themselves on the visual field, with the same force as the objects that cast them. The insubstantial ghost of an object which is its shadow, being in perception as solid as a rock. 

Seurat's trees are like ghosts of trees, his monkey is the ghost of a monkey, or one seen through the early morning mist. All of the information Seurat was deriving from these drawings will be brought together with his colour studies in his monumental painting 'Un Dimanche à la Grande Jatte'. However for myself, as someone who holds drawing as central to the way I try to understand the world, it is the studies on paper that move me far more than the final painting. 

If you look closely at Seurat's drawing of a monkey above, you can see a texture formed partly by the ridged lines of the paper running through the image. This tells us that Seurat was using a laid paper. This type of paper was made by hand, using a wire sieve stretched across a rectangular mould. A papermaker would dip the mould into a vat containing a diluted pulp of fibrous material, then lift it out, tilt it to spread the pulp evenly over the sieve and, as the water drained out between the wires, shake the mould to lock the fibres together. In the process, the pattern of the sieve's wires was imparted to the paper sheet. The laid pattern itself consists of a series of wide-spaced 'chain' lines lines parallel to the shorter sides of the sheet and more narrowly spaced 'laid' lines, at right angles to them. In effect the paper sheet is a thin cast of the mould, a ghost of an activity involving workers who endured often very poor working conditions, whereby paper fibres were breathed in all through the long working day and which therefore brought on various and serious lung illnesses. These workers would also need a break on a Sunday from their hard labour, and perhaps, just one of them was out first thing in the morning walking their dog when Seurat made is first study of that space in the park that would eventually become the such a celebrated painting. 

See also:

The preparatory sketch

Composition in landscape drawing

Sensibility as structure

David Reed's Drawings

Drawing hands More thoughts on Seurat

A history of drawing as thinking

In my position as a research fellow, I'm embedded into the Leeds Arts University's research department. My activities do though resonate out from there into the rest of the institution. My interest in drawing, therefore has a sort of mnemonic effect on other people, a reminder that drawing as a thinking tool is not just the property of art and design professionals, but that it is a fundamental tool in any human being's toolkit, as well as being something that other animals can use too.

I was reminded of this when Gary Embury and Lucy Ward were talking about 'Drawing Review' during the recent conference in Porto. At the end of their presentation they spoke about the forthcoming 'Bloomsbury Handbook on Drawing'. This will be a manual designed to reflect on drawing as it is used across disciplinary boundaries and cultures, in my mind it will be a survey of best practice throughout the world and as I began to think about what that might mean from my position, I began to ruminate on what I would include in it. 

Perhaps I would start by looking at animal drawings, ones that use materials found in the world, markings made for instance to delineate boundaries. I've mentioned before how animals mark territorial boundaries, and that this is one of the most basic forms of drawing. 

Bears mark out the boundaries of their territory to communicate with other bears and to establish dominance. They do this in a variety of ways, some visual and some olfactory. This combination of approaches is actually the norm amongst animals and when we want to do something similar we will also use a multi sensory approach. Bears use scent glands and urine to define a boundary, but they will also use their own tracks to communicate their presence, in a similar way to how we might make a line in the sand by digging in our heels, or running in a circle. They are deliberate about where and how often they mark and they can do this to the same tree year after year, sometimes by biting and at other times by clawing through the bark. 

Bear claw marks

Various sensory sign-posts are used by animals; olfactory, auditory (loud calls etc.) as well as visual, often used in combination in order to communicate their presence to a possible territorial intruder. The rhinoceros is an interesting example of an animal that uses visual 'deposits'  to mark out boundaries. It uses dung, laid in well defined piles to signal that it has occupied a particular territory. Another method rhinos have of visually marking their territory is by wiping their horns on bushes or the ground and scraping with their feet.

Various types of rhino dung deposits: C is a territorial male dung pile with scrape marks

An ancient boundary using rocks to make a line

Some of the first drawings made by humans would have been simply markings that defined the edges of a territory, whether these marks were made by scraping or digging into another material, such as a line drawn in the sand by using a stick, or by digging a channel around the edge of your territory or a line made by the laying down of things one after another, such as stones or branches. These early drawing held a one to one relationship with reality, and they could be thought of as some of the first materialised ideas. 

A contemporary example would be the way we use painted lines to mark out a road system. A dashed line down the middle of the road tells drivers to keep to one side, a double dashed line tells drivers to stop and that drivers on the road they are approaching have priority. These are all aspects of territorial signalling and they work so well because as animals we intuitively recognise how boundary lines work. 'Do not cross this line of marks, if you do you will face danger!' We also use a multi sensory series of signals on the roads, for instance we will sound our horn if someone gets too close.

The fact that the road marking lines are dashed means that they are permeable and that they can be crossed when it is safe to do so. This permeability is another useful animal learnt activity, as it allows for flexibility, whilst still maintaining enough space between each actant to allow them to proceed in some way. 

A territorial model of coyote populations. 

Coyotes move in packs whilst avoiding scent markings laid down by members of other packs, as they do they define separate territories but there is always a slight overlap between them, if not there would be constant strife and fighting. Animals intuitively understand the need for negotiated space.

Once it is accepted that a series of marks can become a line that can be used to define a boundary, then the idea can be extended. For instance we can think about possible future boundaries.

Watermarks Project

Watermarks was a public art project that used a series of projections of flood level marks on to the sides of buildings, showing how high water levels could potentially rise as global warming increases. 

The Egyptians were used to the Nile flooding and they used lines strung out across the Nile valley to measure where fields might be best placed and more importantly the boundaries between each field and therefore they could also signify 'ownership'. From this stringing using a one to one correspondence with reality, was developed an early form of geometry and this included proportionality. I.e. that you could make a drawing to represent the size and shape of a field, it did not have to hold a one to one correspondence with the field. This must have been a mind blowing idea, as it meant you could go away and design ideas and make plans, for things like pyramids. 

Use of a diagonal to show how a rectangle can keep its proportions at different sizes

The architectural plan view, or map of a territory would therefore have been a very early thinking tool, that allowed people to represent spatial possibility. The fact that you can see the stars and their relative positions more easily because you are a long way from them, also meant that star maps would also have been developed very early on in the history of drawing. It has been argued that the oldest image that has been discovered of a star pattern, that of Orion, is 32,500 years old. A slice of mammoth tusk is carved with a man-like figure with arms and legs outstretched in the same pose as the stars of Orion.

The carved tusk fragment also has notches cut into it. It has also been argued that these could represent a "pregnancy calendar" and if so it makes us very aware of how early complex ideas could be communicated through externally visualising thought processes. 

Magdalenian hunter-gatherers at some point engraved a stone's surface in the Abauntz Lamizulo cave in Spain and represented the location of animals such as red deer and ibex.

The full abstract of the paper, "A palaeolithic map from 13,660 calBP: engraved stone blocks from the Late Magdalenian in Abauntz Cave (Navarra, Spain)." by P. Utrilla, C. Mazo, M.C. Sopen, M. Martínez-Bea, and R. Domingo, which was published in the Journal of Human Evolution, 57 (2009) 99-111 is copied out below.

"An engraved block from the cave of Abauntz is interpreted as a Magdalenian map in which the actual surrounding landscape, including mountains, rivers, and ponds, is represented. Some possible routes or avenues of access to different parts of the geography are also engraved on the landscape. The engraving seems to reproduce the meandering course of a river crossing the upper part of side A of the block, joined by two tributaries near two mountains. One of these is identical to the mountain that can be seen from the cave, with herds of ibex depicted on its hillsides, on both sides of the gorge in front of which the cave of Abauntz is strategically located. In the southern part of the gorge, there is a completely flat area where the watercourses slow down, forming meanders and flooding in springtime. The following elements are also represented on the block: tangles of concentric strokes and bundles of lines forming very marked meanders. In short, all of these engravings could be a sketch or a simple map of the area around the cave. It could represent the plan for a coming hunt or perhaps a narrative story of one that had already happened. This paper is provided in the context of recent discussions on early modern human capacities of spatial awareness, planning, and organised hunting."

This immediately reminded me of the indigenous peoples of Australia and their maps, which are designed to tell stories about the land. A map-painting can tell a variety of stories, all interwoven with thoughts about where events took place. They might be guides to hunting practises, a snake myth to remind people which ones are deadly and where they live, or where to get good witchetty grubs. They are about the lakes and hills of the local landscape and in one case ancient underground waterways formed 30,000 years ago after a series of Ice Ages started drying out the continent. These below ground waterways feed springs that emerge in a huge desert, one so large that the UK could be set very comfortably inside it, but these people have a map that tells the story. These maps are therefore about survival they pass on knowledge and as far as we know these types of painted maps have been made for the past 40,000 years. 

Rabbit Proof Fence, Acrylic on Linen, Judith Anya Samson.

I realise encounters with the Western art world have shifted the use value of these traditional practices, but even so they still remind us of some of the first uses of drawing as a boundary making and mapping tool. 

Drawing helps us to locate ourselves in the world, it then allows us to embed thoughts about this world into its structures. The fact that a dot, could be a star, a point on a pregnancy calendar, a place to hit an animal when you shoot off an arrow, as well as a point within a map that indicates where something is, shows us not just how sophisticated drawing is as a thinking tool, but how wonderful it can be as a carrier of poetic ideas, whereby wider and deeper meanings about how all these things are interconnected, are played out, in order to help people find their own psychic connection with the world around them. This rich loam of meaning can be embedded within what could at first appear to outsiders as a very simple mark making system and we need to ask ourselves, do we have anything better than these early drawing systems? In our world of amazing media technology, is the mobile phone helping us to find our way through life as psychically well adjusted creatures, as well as I suspect those early maps did? 

See also:

Lines, warning signs and barriers

Mapping as thinking

Maps made by our nervous systems 

Mapping as translation

Lines in the road

Curtis Holder at Leeds City Art Gallery

Seki Lynch, coloured pencil on paper, 150 × 123 cm, 2024

An exhibition of Curtis Holder's drawings, ‘Silent Echoes, Spoken Truths' has opened at Leeds City Art Gallery. Curtis has been an artist in residence at the gallery and the exhibition documents his time in Leeds meeting and drawing people. 

On his website Curtis states about the exhibition; "The title of the exhibition reflects the deep – yet often unspoken or overlooked – past histories and emotions of people of the Global Majority in Leeds. It highlights the process of bringing their voices to light with the sharing and revealing of personal stories through dialogue and drawing. "

The sitters for him have also chosen works to accompany the exhibition they felt emotional towards or saw themselves reflected within. I was particularly interested in the exhibition because not only have I followed his work for a while, but one of his 8 sitters is a friend of Sue and myself, so I can get a sense of how as a person someone has been 'captured' by Curtis' work.

As I walked into the main exhibition space I was immediately taken by the portrait of Professor Emily Zobel Marshall. She is an expert on the trickster figure in folklore, and she has also established a Caribbean Carnival Cultures research platform, which I was fascinated by as I am a long term Chapeltown resident, the area of Leeds that hosts a West Indian carnival every summer.  

The media Curtis Holder is using is central to how these portraits communicate. His main material choice is coloured pencil on paper and sometimes acrylic gouache is used to give solidity to certain colour areas, drawing therefore being central to his visual thinking.

These drawings although made of thin eel like crayon lines, also feel as if they are woven out of fine threads. The fine lines of crayon colour spread out across the white paper and gradually they find form and as they do so they mass together and as the mass comes into being, the colour range begins to optically blend and what was a quivering network of open lines, gradually becomes a soft mass, a quivering entity that is very slightly out of focus. The process of finding the figure also means that we are given alternative possibilities, hands are in several places, a profile might be suggested and then a more frontal image pursued and pushed further towards a particular identity. Earlier or alternative suggestions are usually made in red crayon, which suggests that all of the images start that way, and indeed there is a red shift in the final colour range. The coloured pencils are kept pretty sharp, and the weight of his hand is such that he can keep that sharpness for a long time, i. e. that he is not pressing very hard, thus allowing his hand to sweep across the paper with a sensitivity to the paper grain. I was reminded of Cézanne's struggle to depict his 'petit sensations' and Curtis Holder I suspect is also fascinated by those small shifts in perception that are constantly happening.  If he is to become sensitised to the situation he is looking at, he needs to keep his crayons active, all is therefore rhythmic movement and to capture this, the hand needs to dance with the eyes. 

He is.a past winner of 'Portrait Artist of the Year' and I did ask him about some participants use of cameras and iPads, a practice that he also finds very strange, it feels on the one hand disrespectful, the artists rarely looking at their subject and on the other hand, what the artists are doing is making images of images, rather than having to deal with the reality of getting to know another human being over a period of time. Portraits should be about intimate connections and listening to the feeling tone of others, not copying a mechanical image.

Professor Emily Zobel Marshall

It's interesting to look at how Holder's approach is then realised within individual portraits. The portrait of Professor Emily Zobel Marshall is a particularly sensitive combination of the sitter's chosen stance, (hands on hips, staring out into the space she occupies, body very erect and alive with potential) and his application of drawing technique to capture this. Her hair and its interwoven relationship with Holder's approach to the seeking line, became for myself a 'punctum'. (I'm thinking here of Roland Barthes use of the word, whereby he would become attracted to a specific detail in a photograph and this would have a powerful impact on his reaction to the rest of the image.) The fine searching lines of crayon become strands of hair. There is a wonderful synergy between the massing of individual lines and the massing of hair, the one effectively becomes the other, the open energy of the mark making becomes the slightly unruly face framing hairstyle. I am what I am, says both the hair and the crayon mass that represents it. What is then fascinating is how these marks then go on to construct the face. 

Rembrandt: Margaretha de Geer 

If we look at a Rembrandt portrait, we can see how he treats facial detail, in such a way that we are given a fluidity of emotional engagement, interwoven with a fluidity of paint. Bone structure is clearly in place, but the paint flows over it, in effect therefore forever animating our relationship with the sitter, who is always coming into being, the paint never settling down and therefore remaining alive. The dark space of Rembrandt takes us into an awareness of the sitter's deep psychological inner world, while the interlacing lines of Holder's drawings emerge out of white paper and vibrate with an energy that suggests a more lively inner state, one that in the professor's case is reflected in her stance, suggestive of action, and a confrontation with the light of day, rather than an interiority moving back into the dark. 

Background detail: Professor Emily Zobel Marshall

In the space around Emily Zobel Marshall flowers are growing. These echo the ones on her dress, which have been reinforced by the use of acrylic gouache. By being liberated from the dress fabric they appear to grow out of her body, perhaps ghosts of an idea she might once have had. they are made out of the same red crayon lines that she emerges from, an earlier form that like a fossil tells us much about the past. As my gaze flits back to the face, the line of a cheek bone reasserts itself, a sign of a firm skull underneath the soft woven texture of line mass. Her dress has red flower heads painted into the line matrix, this change of media, changing the speed of read, making this fabric more of a holding frame for a body standing proud. Her lips are firm but perhaps, because of the moving lines within which they sit, they are also on the edge of a tremble, after all, the lines of dancing rhythm, like all tricksters, never do quite stand still, they never do create unyielding solids, and as they search the figure out, they perhaps also reveal something of a person's fragility as much as their solidity. 

Because I know Doctor Rommi Smith the poet, performer and writer, I wanted to see how Curtis had managed to depict such a dynamic character. 

Doctor Rommi Smith

The first thing you notice is that she has many hands. Constantly moving hands create waves of flowing energy around her. In the drawing she has three heads and all revolve around the yellow V of her shirt front, or is it a blouse? Unlike the Emily Zobel Marshall portrait, Rommi's body does not extend down to the bottom of the image, it dissolves in a swirl of marks, as if the waving hands are also breaking her image apart, wiping it away as they gesticulate her thoughts, or try to reinforce an utterance. The hands become like birds about to fly away and have their own independent lives, an idea that could only emerge from a drawing technique that uses marks that flow so fluidly over and through the spaces of the white paper. These intermeshing lines opening out the types of spaces perhaps only seen by birds as they fly through a thick set hedge. 

In the portrait of Rommi, arising out of the mazy energy of the crayons' application, there is a strong suggestion of spirituality. This is reinforced by the slightly upwards gazing head, a gaze that looks inwards as much as out. There is a tap on the chest given by the one hand framed in black, a tap that says, "Yes its me, I'm here", the central figure trying to reassure us that she is the one we need to listen to, not those others half formed in the background, not those ghosts of past selves.

In this portrait the punctum for myself was the one line that dropped down from the drawing to touch its bottom edge. A spindly line that the whole drawing is balanced on. Suddenly I became aware that underneath all Rommi's swirling energy, fierce pride and powerful intelligence, there was a thin line that somehow held it all together and that she was more fragile than I had thought. 

Rommi Smith: detail

It is Holder's technique that lends itself to these types of narrative. The flickering marks will always suggest a certain fragility, their smoke like haziness can so easily be read with some sort of spiritual implication, but therein lies the fascination of the technique and its need for careful control. The drawer has to finally establish enough coherence within the matrix of lines to convince the audience that some sort of likeness is emerging, not perhaps a fixed likeness, but one that still looks how the sitter appears. This is a likeness as a verb rather than as a noun, a capturing of moments, rather than a moment, which for myself is far more incisive than a photographic copy. It is only in conversation that we get to know someone. In my own work I prioritise conversations as a way to find out what others think and feel, and sometimes these conversations also become portraits, very different in feel and ability to the work of Curtis Holder, but they have given me enough of a similar experience to know how important the one to one experience is to the creation of a necessary empathy if a portrait is to have any real conviction. 

Alongside the room of large scale 'finished' portraits which were excellently framed and set off against a wonderful dark blue is a room devoted to Holder's small studies. This room is essential viewing if you are to get a feel for the full range of his ability. 

Curtis Holder: Study

I was particularly taken by a small study of a seated man. It reminded me of my old colleague Peter. He has recently had a wonderful exhibition of his photographs, some of which occupied the same space as the drawing I was looking at. Whether it was of him or not doesn't really matter, because the drawing says things about the human condition as a whole, which is why I think Curtis is such an important artist. His drawings go beyond portraiture, they signify something in their very nervous search for truth, that says things about how fragile and yet full of energy life is. The image of a seated man tells us that whoever it was sat for a while had a very particular life force, one expressed through their face, their hands and their body as much as their words. My only reservation about the display was the use of the square magnets, a device that stops holes being put into the paper, but which visually intrudes into the paper space. Such fragile and sensitive marks need to be read unimpeded by any other visual interference. On the other hand it was a brave act to not put these drawings under the cover of perspex sheets and by doing this I really appreciated the close proximity this gave to the act of their making. 

The exhibition is open from 08 November, 2024 until 13 April, 2025 and if you can get there don't miss the Stuart Croft exhibition that is on at the same time, the films are extraordinary and deeply thought provoking, this is an excellent time to visit.

See also:

 Celia Paul, Gwen John and Curtis Holder

The Lamed Vavniks 

What is a portrait?

Drawings as aesthetic transducers 

Charmaine Watkiss at Leeds City Art Gallery

David Reed's drawings

David Reed has a very particular relationship with drawing. The drawings he produces are central to his creative process, but they not only help with the development of ideas, they actually document the creative process itself and as well as that they comment on it.  His drawings effectively create thinking spaces for his paintings.

 

Painting #543

Working Drawing for Painting #543, 2004–2006

Working Drawing for Painting #543 Page 2

Working Drawing for Painting #550, 2005-2006

David Reed: Painting #550

Alongside precisely dated questions on painting technique and artistic decisions, there are comments on visits to studios, private notes and colour tests. When viewing his working drawings it is as if we were witnessing a transparent painter's mind. 

The drawings he produces begin as a painting idea begins. They then accompany the idea as it gestates, document it and comment on it ; creating a thinking space in which painting is discussed as to its potentiality and its place within the long history of painting itself.

David Reed, «Working Drawing for Painting #649», 2015

David Reed: Working Drawing for Painting #661, 2016: Mixed media on graph paper.

Painting 661: Vice and Reflection

For those of you who paint, rather than draw and perhaps dismiss drawing as something that is not necessary, it may well be worth your while looking at David Reed's approach. I realise it is not for everyone, but in some ways it is not unlike Edward Hopper's use of drawings to document his work. 

Edward Hopper

Both artists reflect on their process, Hopper once it is finished and Reed as it begins, but drawing for both is a form of documentary evidence, especially of things that are usually lost in the activity of an image's making, giving each artist an opportunity to write about the process of image making as well as to make drawings that reflect on painting.

David Reed: Colour study 6

Edward Hopper: Study for morning sun

I tend to think of Reed's drawings as large sketchbook pages, but there is a difference between the sketchbook page and the sheet of a preparatory drawing. One is scale of course, but perhaps more important is the fact that a drawing on a sheet of paper can be pinned or blue-tacked to the studio wall. Because I am often working in ceramics or printmaking, I find sketchbooks a better option, because I don't have a permanently set up studio to work in, having to go to specialist workshops to get work finalised. Neither way is right, but at some point as an artist you will probably have to consider how your thinking process operates in relation to the final outcome.

Frank Auerbach's studio

See also:

The preparatory sketch

Sketchbooks

Using sketchbooks to think with

Garry Barker: Working observational sketchbook 

Garry Barker: Ideas development sketchbook

Garry Barker: Work development sketchbook

Escaping from the cage

 

I am still searching for a more significant way to visualise what I'm thinking about. I'm always trying to find new links between my various interests, my butterfly mind is looking for ways to visualise embodied thinking, but at the same time is trying to respond to the fact that I have always enjoyed reading graphic novels and comics, but then I begin thinking about the fact that the quantum universe is vital to our understanding of the invisible worlds that surround us, and then there's what I understand as the Wyrd, whereby all the events of your life are interconnected by some sort of invisible thread, and this perhaps is something also vitally important to the establishment of my practice, and I still haven't worked through the full implications of Abstract Expressionism....... I'm lost in the fact that the interconnection between matter and energy is realised every time a leaf unfurls itself, but also in the way we use our external senses to perceive, this alongside the role of interoception, unfortunately makes for a flow of everything and a conceptual grasp of the importance of nothing. At least the realisation that all is flux and that being and doing are far more important than naming and fixing, keeps me in a permanent state of wonder.

It's always good to find a fellow traveller who has also been puzzled by what its all about, even if that person is so famous that they have become a cliché. 

In 'The World as I See It', Einstein wrote:

“A human being is part of the whole called by us ‘universe,’ a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. . . . The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self . . . . We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.”

Calaprice, A. (2005) The New Quotable Einstein Princeton: Princeton University P. 206.

It's good to see that Einstein also thought that our personal experiences, thoughts and feelings, should be understood as interconnected with everything and not separate from the rest of the world. As he puts it, the optical delusion of consciousness is a kind of prison for us, and in being caged, we tend to build cages for other things too. We fall into our own traps, still not recognising them as the cages they are.  

We make cages both for ourselves and other creatures. 

We have gridded the world

We have tried to develop the cosmic grid

We have also gridded ourselves

A caged mentally ill man

We have invented the grid of control, both as a formal principle and as a construction made of real metal bars. This is a high-functioning understanding of consciousness, and it emotionally aligns us  to the unforeseen implications of our own actions. As the philosopher Epictetus taught;

“In our school, we picture the philosopher’s goal more or less as follows: bring the will in line with events, so that nothing happens contrary to our wishes and, conversely, nothing fails to happen that we want to happen. Pursue it, and the reward is that neither desire nor aversion will fail in their aims; and we will fill all our roles in society—as son, father, brother, citizen, man, woman, neighbour, fellow voyager, ruler or ruled—without conflict, fear or rancour.” 

One of the defining characteristics of the Stoics was an unwavering commitment to focusing only on what was in their direct control—their will, their actions, their effort. This taking responsibility for your own actions and becoming aware of the things that you cant control and thus not bothering with those things, seems pretty grown up, but it suggests that discipline is central to how we ought to live our lives and in that very conscious control, it seems to me that we sow the seeds of Fascism. Dictatorial leaders, centralised autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, and the subordination of individual interests for the perceived benefit of the group, are all possible outcomes that can begin, simply with the decision to 'take back control'. 

From Doctor Strange

There is a very different type of control exhibited when you begin to dance. You need to emphasise with your partner, and to pick up the rhythm that is now in place and the controls you need are ones of refinement in response, the fine tuning of yourself to the world, rather than the iron will of self determination. I see dancing as process for an animist connection with the universe; can you waltz with the seas, tango with the stars and twist to the trees?

Cosmic dancing

The image that opens this post was one I made as I thought about how we might attune ourselves to the wider universe and of responses to both micro and macro visions of ourselves and our place in the cosmos. It was also an attempt to capture a moment within a cosmic dance that can be both planetary and human in scale, a thought that is both related to our clinker like internal architecture and the dark external sea within which we all float. This being a flow of forces that are as much a homage to the figure of Eternity as initially drawn in the Doctor Strange comics of the 1960s, by Steve Ditko and then by Gene Colan; as a reflection on the universe that was derived from the Chinese God Pan Gu’s gigantic corpse. In death his eyes became the sun and moon, his blood formed seas, his hair grew into trees and plants, his sweat turned to rivers, his body became soil and human beings, most interestingly, evolved from the parasites that infested Pan Gu’s body. A reminder if there ever was a need for one, that we are not some God's favourite children. 

The image of Pan Gu allowed Chinese thinkers to develop images of the universe that were in some ways like a Russian doll. I. e. that the macro and the micro are both connected and in many ways mirror each other, in a similar way to the climbing of a mountain being for a human like crossing a man's back is to an insect. I have remarked in an earlier post that several cultures at different times in history have come to a conclusion, that there is an analogy between the human body and the structure of the cosmos. In European traditions the head is analogous to the coelum empyreum or highest heaven. The chest to the coelum aethereum which is occupied by the planets and wherein the heart is analogous to the sun and the legs to the dark earthy mass (molis terreæ) which supports the universe. This layering of meaning is useful, as it allows us to find moments of epiphany in the everyday. The Chinese word for 'spirit', 'shen' offers us another way to think about how this idea might work. 'Shen' can be translated as 'spirit', but it has three distinct spheres of meaning. The meanings differ in degree or realm of application, but not in kind. 'Shen' is at a human scale, our "spirit” or “psyche" or the life force. 'Shen' is at the scale of our environment, and refers to the invisible 'spirits' that surround us; things intimately involved in the affairs of the world, but beyond the human realm. These spirits are associated with objects like stars, rocks, trees, mountains, and streams; they exercise a direct influence on things in this world and provide an animist framework for everyday life. 'Shen' in its third meaning can be translated as “spiritual”; in the sense of things beyond us inspiring awe or wonder and it cannot be comprehended through normal concepts. 

The fact that these three fields of meaning (“spirit,” “spirits,” and “spiritual”) can be traced to a single word has important implications, it indicates that there is no unbridgeable gap separating humans from gods or nature. All are composed of the same basic stuff, 'qi', and there is no ontological distinction between them. I would hope that this awareness allows us to grasp moments of epiphany in our everyday lives, that it helps us to create deeply meaningful and rhizomatically interconnected structures and gives to existence a flavour that wants us to taste life in its full potential.

For myself the cage of consciousness is that of perspective. 

The single eye, the tunnel of looking that is epitomised by the camera, is my idea of a visual trap or cage.

Advanced perspective is often compared to the photographic viewpoint. 

The screen of the camera is not unlike the grill through which you look into the prison cell

The camera viewpoint fixes the world down

Perspective lines pin down the world, just as as we do when we pin down a butterfly

Every photograph hides within it a holding grid

David Hockney was well aware of these issues when he decided to work on his photographic 'Joiners' which challenged the traditional perspectival spaces that had by now become the norm when people were thinking about how the world looked. A multidimensional viewpoint challenges the conventions of representation.

David Hockney: The Desk: 1982

However I'm very aware that an artist's work is very unlikely to change the viewpoint of a mass of people who now seem to use the selfie as a way of confirming their own existence. At first I found it a mild annoyance that people would step in front of paintings and get themselves photographed in front of them, but then I realised these moments were being treated not unlike the butterfly being pinned to a board; they were collected, owned moments, that you could stack up and place in a vault somewhere, to be added up and counted, rather than experienced and enjoyed. 

I must get out and walk about and draw more. When I do, all these worries quickly disappear. 

Moments

See also: 

The grid as a cage

Using viewfinders

Macro and micro embodied networks