Drawing war

In an earlier post, Drawing as Testimony, I referred to drawings done by an ex principal of the Art College, Eric Taylor, made when he was a War Artist. The human condition is such that we are always entering a time of war and the role of artists and drawing, is still I think something worth exploring, and in a time when social media seems to dominate communication, drawing might be one of the few ways to slow down the ways we have to reflect upon what we do to ourselves. 

Drawing made on experiencing Belsen concentration camp: Feliks Topolski 1945

Mazen Kerbaj's graphic novel, 'Beirut Won't Cry' was published in. 2017 and some of the images Kerbaj made for this book reminded me that graphic artists memorialise events in a very different way to photographers or people who write reports. War is with us always and Kerbaj joins a long tradition of artists, who attempt to process the experience of it and distil its visual texture, in such a way that those of us from outside a war zone, can begin to make some sort of sense of what happens within it.

Mazen Kerbaj sketchbook pages

'Beirut Won't Cry'

I'm always interested in the relationship between the production of art and its dissemination. Because Kerbaj's work is printed in black and white, it can be easily disseminated. As 'Beirut Won't Cry' was put together in a diary format, it was a straightforward task to take two of his books and cut the pages out, so that all the images became 'released' back into the world. Sometimes his work was shown using the original drawings, in which case they would be framed and presented as you would expect for an art exhibition. This more traditional format suits museums, such as in the example immediately below, and at other times the simple expedient of the images taken out of his book being attached to pegs on a washing line would do. Each presentation format reaching different audiences and eliciting I would presume very different responses. 

The New Museum: New York 

Maxxi Museum: Rome

The street of Madrid

The streets of Barcelona

I went to a 'Situation Leeds' meeting last night at the Hyde Park Book Club, which was focused on how the city could once again become host to a wide range of art practices, which would be presented/performed/shown in situations and places that were outside of the normal gallery environments; which is probably why I was reminded of the times when Kerbaj's work was hung in the streets using washing lines. There was also an opening of the Wrangthorn Enquirer, an exhibition of work designed to reflect upon the Hyde Park area and which would be integrated into the streets by poster and flyer inserts during the time of the exhibition. The meeting and opening neatly coincided, as the work on display was a clear example of what was possible. 

From the Wrangthorn Enquirer exhibition: Hyde Park Book Club: Leeds

Although not about war, the exhibition was a reminder of how news reaches us about war and other 'news worthy' events. Usually the media only focuses on the worst of our lives, and the Wrangthorn Enquirer response, is an attempt to show that what is actually happening is always far more complicated and that humour and just plain oddness are always there if we look for it, and without these things life could feel as if it is too dreadful to face. 

When making art that acts as some sort of witness to a traumatic event, there will always be an issue about 'taking sides'. Arguments will proliferate about which side of a conflict's views are being represented, but at the end of the day, the reality is that the images we see of any situation are the response of one human being to finding themselves there. If they are living in the area that is being bombed, they will see the situation from the viewpoint of those being bombed, being a witness comes with all the problems associated with having to deal with the situation that has been witnessed. 

Kerbaj has a new book out, 'Gaza in My Phone'. This time he has made drawings in response to social media images of Israel’s campaign in Gaza. I work in ink, and like many artists who do, often regard the process a little like developing a sensitive divining rod. Keep drawing and eventually the drawings will just draw themselves. Kerbaj is able to distill, from the images that arrive daily on his mobile phone, some sort of humane understanding of a process that is perhaps beyond understanding. There is an ideological shroud that has been drawn over Gaza, that makes it hard to look at what is going on there with any clarity and it is also a disaster that paradoxically I feel the media is somehow asking us to forget; information overload makes it harder and harder to hold on to any sort of reality. 

Drawing inscribes things, it puts ideas down on paper and as it does it externalises them, and therefore forms a particular type of memory. Photographs somehow don't seem as real, and now that they come alongside A1 software, we become more and more suspicious of what they represent. 'Gaza in My Phone' recognises the new reality that faces all of us, that so much of our life experience now comes modified and focused by our mobile phone screens. Kerbaj, like myself, is getting daily updates on his phone about what is happening and he will, again like myself, be getting some sort of algorithm inflected stream of images to look at, a fact that means that whatever information he is receiving, it will already have been filtered, in one way or another. We always knew that reporting was to some extent biased, whether this was unconscious or conscious, but we used to have an idea that there was somewhere a measure of some sort that could allow us to test out the degree of bias; I'm not sure that exists anymore.  

Algorithms have been running for years now in relation to myself. Every book, every ticket for an exhibition or concert, every plane ticket or accommodation paid for, has been sifted and graded as to how likely I might buy a similar experience again. My posts on all the media platforms will have been analysed and again assessed as to what I am more likely to buy, in relation to my various views on the world. If it is seen that I'm interested in culture, I'm inundated with adverts about travel to Venice or other cultural hot spots. Above all what the algorithms are doing are gradually bringing together an idea of who and what I am. They filter the world in terms of myself, so that eventually all the books, images, experiences, points of view and whatever else is out there, begin to coincide with what I feel the world should look like, simply because some algorithm has decided I wouldn't like something or other. Therefore my computer and my phone, whether I like it or not, are giving me a particular, slanted view on life, which there will be an obvious tendency for me to agree with. 

When Joseph Beuys came to the old Jacob Kramer college whilst he had a drawing exhibition in the Leeds Art Gallery in 1982, he gathered the students together and told them to stop painting and to go out and buy all the different newspapers and read them all. In particular to read the ones that were written from points of view they did not agree with. Guardian readers were made to read the Mail, Sun readers the Mirror and all the other types of magazine literature such as Private Eye and Horse and Hounds, were to be thrown into the pot. We then questioned the students on what they were finding out. What the students realised was that people fed themselves news based on what their interests were. The world was out there for all people to experience, but people preferred to use media to reassure them that their take on it was the right one. Socialists read the Socialist Worker, as it offered them constant reaffirmation as to why the system was so unfair and needed changing, whilst the reading of Horse and Hounds reaffirmed how important your horse's welfare was and that the most significant dates to remember coincided with the best horse trials. We need to be part of the 'tribe' we belong to and the media offers us as many possibilities to fit in as there are 'tribes'. Capitalism then fills each slot up with things to buy that reinforce your idea of yourself. We buy the Sun because we see ourselves as a Sun reader, which is an idea that goes much wider than the newspaper. 

The Sun targets the lower middle social classes, most of whom haven’t attended higher education. Two thirds of its readers are over 35 years old, 54% are male and its biggest audience share comes from the C2DE demographic. N.b. C2DE refers to the three lower social and economic groups in the UK. The Sun is written for a reading age of 8 years old. Using words in bold, lots of visuals and smaller chunks of text means they are purposefully making their product accessible to everyone and especially appealing to members of our society who have weaker literacy skills. (Nb this is not a measure of intelligence, just type of approach to literacy; most of the people I used to work with in the steel works never read books, but they were smart and witty and could think with their hands).The Sun's editorial policy is focused on stories that are often critical of elite groups and political stories are often framed around issues affecting ‘normal’ families and the idea of 'normal' and 'not normal' is often used as a measurement of whether or not something is right or wrong. I.e. is this something we would like to make part of our family or tribe or something we would exclude? This is no different to how many of the other newspapers operate, there is the term "Guardian reader", which is used to imply a stereotype of a person with modern progressive, left-wing or "politically correct" views. I would be put into that class, as the Guardian is one of the very few newspapers I ever buy and read and my views would be seen as left of centre. This doesn't mean I am more or less right about things, it does not mean the Guardian is more or less right about things either, it simply means I feel more comfortable with certain viewpoints, and how they are expressed, especially ones that suggest there could be alternative answers to the world's issues. I have always been a 'what if?' person, "introverted intuition" (IN) personality type, rather than a 'let's do it! "extraverted sensing" (ES) one. Social media relies on these differences and feeds them, so that gradually what just felt a bit more comfortable, becomes a certainty and right. This is how positions are formed and when a group with one way of thinking has power, it can believe that it is right to impose that way of thinking on everybody else. What is always needed are checks and balances, to ensure that no one way of thinking predominates. The reason we as a species have such a range of personality types is probably because the tribe needed them. We need leaders and information gatherers, fighters and nurturers, empaths and artists and at various different times we need to be able to work together. 

Charley's War

When my son was a boy he followed the Charley's War stories that had been first printed in the comic 'Battle Picture Weekly' and which were then continued in 'The Eagle'. 

The strip follows Charley's life in the trenches and his experiences during the first world war and was an extremely graphic portrayal of the horrors of it. The writer Pat Mills added a political slant in the strip, that had not seen before in British war comics and the artist Joe Colquhoun, drew the black and white images with an appropriate texture that reminded me of the way horror fiction was drawn for American EC comics in the 1950s. There were none of the heroics that I had come across in my own war comics reading when I was a boy.

Charley's War: Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun

This reflection on war was made 70 years after the event, long enough away from the war to enable its reality to be at last confronted. The War Picture Library comic books I read as a boy, had a totally different take on war. It was of course the second world war that was depicted, the one my father had been conscripted into and the British troops were always wise cracking heroes and the enemy evil. These comics also had adverts in them and they were often concerned with what it was to be a man. 

The War Picture Library

Charles Atlas

Charles Atlas still figures large in my imagination. His "Dynamic Tension" method of body building was a physical training method emphasising the pitting of one muscle group against another to build strength. I remember at one point in the early 1960s my father took up a course and I'm reminded of the concept every time to go to a Pilates session. The comics of my boyhood were mini-training manuals for what it was thought I would need to be like as a man. There were no women in these comics, just camaraderie, the idea of loyalty, of what bravery consisted of and of how you needed to conduct yourself within a troop of other men when at war. 

Drawing by Hugo Pratt

Some of the illustrators for the War Picture Library were very good, Hugo Pratt the great Italian creator of the Corto Maltese comics, cut his teeth on drawing for War Picture Library. For boys like myself they were a constant source of information as to how you could graphically represent the world, just using black and white mark making techniques. When I'm trying to draw any sort of explosion of energy, or invent a patch of land, part of my hand memory will always be based on copies I made in pencil of the images I found in these comics. I wish I had been told at the time that artists drew these with fine brushes and black ink and that they were drawn slightly larger and reduced down in size for reproduction. 

Yet again I find myself weaving together personal history, drawing and how I relate to it, with reflections on what makes the world the sort of place it is. When I initially saw Kerbau's work, I immediately thought of George Grosz. Many of you might be puzzled by that, as their work looks very different, but I'll try and explain.

Grosz: Wartime slaughter watched by bureaucratic overseers

After being in the German army for two years Grotz became so distressed by the experience that in 1917 he unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide. He ended up in a military hospital, under the care of which he recovered, only to find that the authorities had on his recovery decided to execute him, as an example to others that death was no way to escape war. A wealthy patron of his, Count Kessler, finally intervened and the death sentence was commuted, he was from this point a walking dead man. 

Grosz: The everyday reality of war.

Within the grip of warfare death is an everyday reality. In Europe during the First World War the sight of a dead body, washed up on the side of a river near you was the new normal, in Gaza, children now write their names on their arms, so that people will know who they were if they are killed, another new normal. Born in Lebanon in 1975, Kerbaj spent the first 15 years of his life living amongst a war. "It was, 'That is a shoe, that is rain, that is the sound of a bomb,'" he stated. "It seemed natural", it had become normal. 

From: 'Gaza in My Phone'

Mazen Kerbaj now lives in Berlin and responds to what is happening in Gaza by interacting with social media. George Grosz moved to New York from Berlin during the rise of Fascism in the 1930s. Both artists eventually working at some remove from the situations that first impelled them to make work. 

Disturbed While Eating (1947), George Grosz

Grosz was by far the more troubled man. Surviving suicide, only to be told that you are now going to be executed, must mangle your inner psyche and the image above made in the relative safety of the USA after the end of the second world war, really does feel as if it was made by someone who knew what starvation was all about. 

I am also at some remove from any war zone. In the safety of my room here in Leeds I can watch endless hours of war news footage and no matter how much empathy I might feel I have, I can't really understand what is happening. 

I respond, because I have to. As an artist I can't shut my eyes, but how powerful or useful my responses are I'm not sure. Kerbaj is a voice of resistance, Grosz a reminder of the fact that it is always the poor and the ordinary people that suffer most during wartime and that the rich, nearly always escape. Both artists tell me in their different ways that there is something insane and totally illogical about war. 

In my own work, constant media footage of devastated towns has finally found its way into my image banks and I have made a lot of drawings, several of which have been turned into prints.

Drawings

Prints

I was trying to come to terms with the empty shells of buildings and the human lives they represented. For each and every family, be this in Ukraine, Russia, Gaza, Iran or Israel, when your home is destroyed and your family attacked, the trauma is terrible, media arguments as to whether or not one side or the other has right on their side, in no way alleviate the pain and suffering of those on the ground. 

Unknown soldier

Around the edges of war news footage are always soldiers, hanging about, just being there, as if waiting for the film crew to leave, so that they can get on with the reality of war. I sometimes try and draw these men in the brief moments of their appearance, as some sort of way to give them a life, to release them from their electronic media existence. 

Unknown soldiers

As I drew these images I was reminded of my first encounter with drawn images of soldiers in comic books for boys and I began to doubt whether my experience of life, had prepared me to take on image making that could do justice to the situation. My life has never exposed me to the harsh realities of war, but even so, I have made a body of work about it and still occasionally still do make images based on my responses to how the media presents war. It is my own way of attempting some sort of connection with something that the media always seems to disconnect me from. Above all, I have this feeling that the further away from war's reality we think we are, the more the possibility grows of its dark tentacles spreading out and engulfing everything and everybody and that it will one day arrive on our doorsteps totally unannounced. 

See also:

Drawing and politics

Trench art

RIP Cabu, Charb, Tignous and Wolinski

The Blue Danube

Fumage: Drawing with smoke

Drawing as testimony 

Life drawing as contact improvisation

A fast biro sketch made in my notebook to remind students that the model stands in space.

I recently hosted a celebratory life drawing session in honour of the achievements of an ex student of mine. He has for a while now been holding life drawing classes in Hull and has developed a core following of students, but is now moving on and another tutor is going to take over the classes. He wanted to mark the occasion in some way and so he invited me to teach a session in recognition of how a metaphorical baton is handed on from one artist educator to another. This reminded me of an another event I was invited to participate in back in 2017. The 'Fully Awake' Exhibition held in Glasgow at 'House for an Art Lover', was focused on the legacy of Fine Art teachers and I was chosen for my contributions to an understanding of the processes behind idea and image generation. In particular my contribution to opening out possibilities as to how stories can be translated into a visual simultaneity. In this exhibition I represented an older generation of art tutors and I was chosen by Steve Carrick, then Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Chester, as an important influence on his own practice, and he in turn chose one of his students as being someone who was themselves now carrying on the baton. The exhibition concept had been put together by Sean Kaye and Ian Hartshorne another two connections from my time working on the Foundation course at Leeds College of Art, Ian was a past student and Sean took over as head of the fine art strand, when I was pulled out of teaching to undertake management tasks, something that I spent a couple of very uncomfortable years doing. 

In Hull, I felt I needed to do something that reflected how things had changed in relation to life drawing practices and that there was now much more awareness of the role of the model in the situation and I wanted to put on a session therefore that gave the model more agency and that brought the drawers into a three way dialogue, (drawers, tutor and model), that broke through the myth of life room objectivity. 

The life model had decided to wear a thick black dressing gown made of a wooly material, which made him sweat. So I decided to use this as a starting point for the session. He was shaking his hands in some sort of attempt to cool himself down, so I asked him to just go through the moves he was making as cool down exercises and to now think of these actions as the focus for the session. He had a towel with him and he didn't know where to put it, so we agreed he might as well carry it over his shoulder, as he would normally do if he wasn't modeling.  Whilst doing this I also engaged the drawers with their own body languages as they began setting up to draw. I asked them what they were thinking about and started to bring the model into the conversation. He told a story about how during one class he wished the session would end quickly because a nice looking woman was 'looking at him', which meant that he was starting to think that he might become aroused. He made it to the end of the session he said with relief and he had therefore decided that he must try to think of nothing when he was modelling in the future. His story reminded me of a life room conversation from back in the 1970s. I was as a young man hosting a life drawing session at the Swarthmore Adult Education Centre in Leeds, when the model came up to me and said, 'That man is looking at me', and I knew exactly what she meant. All the other drawers were engaged with the task in hand, which was trying to locate the figure in space, but this particular man was hardly drawing, he was looking at her. I then had the difficult job of informing him that it was better if he left the session and that I could tell that he wasn't capable of working in the required way, which was essential if students were going to progress into higher education. This was in fact an embroidered falsehood, only a few of the students in the group wanted to progress, but it worked and he left with a refund that came out of my own pocket. I wonder with hindsight if I could have handled the situation better? That story being a reminder to myself of how difficult life drawing sessions were and still are, in relation to the implied sexuality of the situation. I can't remember the number of times that some anonymous man I have met in a pub or waiting for a train, has grunted some guttural noise in response to the fact I had let them know I was an artist. In their mind all they could think of was that artists spend most of their time gazing at naked women. It's a sad indictment of our culture that this comic stereotype is still in place.    

Back in the room booked out for the life drawing session, I began miming the various stances now taken by the drawers as they set up to draw. I suggested that one set of poses the model could take in the future could be based on these mimes. I was of course asking the students whether or not the life class could be used to reflect upon the situation itself? 

The next issue was to expand on an idea of figure drawing as some form of contact improvisation. I worked with the model to get him to undertake a range of classic poses, poses I would first take up and then he would if asked copy.  As he moved, I moved an imaginary drawing implement with my hand, sometimes sweeping my arm in an arc and at other times twisting my wrist movements to make tiny hand turns. My drawing movements were echoing his body movements. If he held his arm out, I would extend mine, my imaginary drawing implement tracing an invisible line in the air as I moved. We then looked at how people were standing or sitting in relation to the situation and I asked how in their minds they inhabited their own bodies and whether they imaginatively could inhabit other people's bodies. Drawing in this case, could become a sort of 'inhabitation' of another's form. We also discussed mirroring, the way that we copy body movements of those we encounter, the classic being how we fold arms or cross legs in response to our perception of others doing the same. 

Eventually we began drawing, and for the whole session I simply asked the model to continue with his cooling down routine, breaking every 15 minutes to ask questions of the various student approaches to their drawings. I took the approach of every picture tells a story. The drawings reflected the various abilities of those in the room in relation to measurement, control of medium etc. Several people still starting with drawing a head and finding as the drawing went on that they couldn't get the feet in. So lots of basic stuff to teach like how to measure, as we went on, but what these attempts did highlight were certain psychological implications in relation to how we see each other. I pointed out that in 'normal' conversation with another person we would not look at their feet and that we would concentrate on their face to check out whether or not we were in communication. However when one person in the room takes their clothes off, immediately the conversation is warped. Some broke their drawings down into flat areas, others developed centralised images, some were focused on mark others on tone. Each approach suggested a different narrative about relationships and how they could be visualised through drawing. 

It felt that by the end of the session everyone was more aware of the possibilities for change in relation to the way that situations of this sort were constructed and that the key issue of how to make images of another human being was opened up anew for the students. In particular the man who was going to take over the life drawing sessions in the future took part and I would hope that what went on helped him to think through how he will host his sessions in the future. 

We have been aware of these issues for some time and in particular Nina Kane unpicked many of the narratives surrounding life room practice when she worked for the Leeds College of Art Adult Education department during the time when I was its manager. I thought her work with the Leeds Art Gallery and its collection was exemplary and her reflections are still available. (A link to her work can be found at the end of this post.) 

This was also a time (I think it was 2008) when the management at the college decided that life drawing would no longer be supported as a key component of the art curriculum and the life room was discontinued and the space put to other uses. The idea of continuing to fund a contested space was perhaps in the minds of a management driven by finance, as well as being faced with many mainly feminist voices calling for life drawing to be removed from the curriculum, difficult. Instead of using the situation to open out the issues as Nina had done, it was much easier just to drop what was a quite expensive activity, as both a tutor and a model had to be paid for, as well as changing facilities made available. There were also incoming health and safety regulations that highlighted potential dangers in having a nude person on the premises, regulations that demanded answers to hypothetical questions that made life too complicated for the average part-time tutor. So having been employed by a principal who insisted that I be able to draw from life and teach life drawing, I had now become one of the last people to ever undertake any life drawing within the institution. 

Things were so different when I started teaching in January 1975. Frank Lisle, the then principal, (in an earlier role teaching in Bradford he taught David Hockney to draw), employed three full-time models, Ann, Mavis and Rosalie. Life drawing was central to all the courses and I was employed, not just to teach printmaking but also to teach life drawing on Fridays to Foundation students. I'm again reminded of those times, because a film crew are in the university at the moment, developing a documentary about Lem Mierins' life. Lem was the inspiration for the well known comedian Leigh Francis' comic character Avid Merrion. Francis was taught by Lem as was the director behind this documentary, Phil Dean and as I'm one of the last members of staff that would have worked alongside Lem, I was interviewed. Lem is remembered for his language, a mixture of Latvian and English grammar, his iron will that he imposed on the life room and his very dapper appearance. He taught students how when drawing to reduce the model down to as few lines as possible. These lines had to be smoothly drawn and the model had to be placed perfectly on the page. I used to watch him draw, every line controlled, never a wobble and if it was Mavis, he had a model that had a shape that fitted perfectly into an imperial sized sheet of cartridge paper. (In 1975 metric paper sizes were introduced, but it took a few years for paper stocks to reflect this and we worked on imperial sized paper up until the later part of the 1970s.) He was an abstractionist and the life drawing studio was where he abstracted human beings down into formal essences. Then once your eyes were trained, you could apply this skill in other ways, such as in the precision kerning of the space between two letter forms. (This was in the days before computer typesetting) As you might guess we disagreed fundamentally on our relative approaches to drawing. I began with searching for space and then mass, he looked for flat pattern and formal organisation. Neither of us was at that time questioning why all three life models were women and it was accepted that whoever ran the life class, their philosophy would be the controlling factor. Things have though changed over the years; in Leeds in particular, the influence of Griselda Pollock's work was huge and as early as 1976/7, I remember Kate Russell, one of the Foundation staff, coming back from one of Griselda's sessions over at the University of Leeds totally fired up with the need to bring Feminist ideas into the course thinking. 

Lem Mierins: Life drawing circa 1978ish

Lem Mierins: 

Even after all these years, I still have the need to look at and draw naked people. I understand that people want to know how to visualise the various ways that we sit or stand and how the muscles and bones within our bodies come together to support us. But most of that understanding could be developed by using a clothed other person. When I undertook the 'copying other people's body movements workshop' hosted by the choreographer Katja Heitmann, the fact that everyone was clothed was an integral part of the way that people moved. Clothing and body movement are entwined. Perhaps by beginning any life drawing session with a 'how to get to know another person's body' set of dance type exercises, we could begin the process of 'knowing' another person's body in a different way. If someone really needed a longer time to look at a body, they could sit themselves in front of a large mirror in the privacy of their own space and then set about analysing how to draw that wonderful complexity we call the human body, from their own image. But at some point, someone will want and perhaps need, to draw from a naked other human. 

Life classes are still being held in libraries and pubs and education institutions right across the city of Leeds, and I am aware that at times I feel the need to practice my ability to render the wonderfully complex form of the human body and that these types of classes offer an opportunity for me to do that. But I wish that more thought could be put into what the situation entails, as I believe that if that was done, eventually much more interesting drawings would emerge. I would hope that images that had far more to do with how we communicate through our bodies, would evolve out of a situation that was less about a myth of objectivity and more about the very subjective and emotional struggle we all have to communicate with each other. 

See also:

Katja Heitmann and embodied memory

Kimon Nicolaides and the natural way to draw

Life drawing: a reflection

Drawing as translation

The art of the life model: Nina Kane

The art of the life model: Nina Kane a further report

Drawing consciousness

Thinking about my body while walking through landscape

I’m still thinking about how to justify the fact that when I’m working to visualise invisible sensations such as pain or certain emotions or feelings such as being worried, angry, thirsty or too full, that I rely on intuitive responses more than any form of logical analysis. This is the case in both my responses to visualising my somatic awareness of my own body and in my work done in conversation with others, whereby we jointly try to work towards the making of images that are meant to communicate interoceptual experiences. One problem is, as I have pointed out before, that my conscious awareness of the sensations I have is an interpretation, sometimes the interpretation might seem like a visual image but at other times the same information, could be received through my skin as heat. (The infrared issue) This feeling of consciousness seems to be something science can’t help me understand, or at least not the science we are used to using. Which is why I have in these blog posts occasionally reverted to the exploration of pseudo-science or outdated beliefs, in an effort to feel for a way of understanding something, that has I have come to believe, only to be understood intuitively and not logically. This is another attempt to approach the issue, this time though using some of the theoretical work produced by Regis Dutheil and his daughter Brigitte in France and first published in French in the 1990s.

Regis and Brigitte Dutheil (2024, p. 55) stated that there was an ‘incontestable correlation between physical parameters (e.g. wavelength, intensity) and the quality of the sensation (e.g. 700nm wavelengths evoke red, while 450nmare bluer).’ However as I have pointed out before this 'correlation' is suspect, because the same wavelength received via the eyes, can evoke an infrared colour for a snake or human wearing infrared goggles or contact lenses, yet also evoke a feeling of warmth if detected via the skin's thermoreceptors. However, Regis and Brigitte Dutheil go on to question whether or not sensations can be quantified. They state that it is not possible to map sensations back onto the physical effects that stimulated them into existence. They also believe that there is no functional representation of the real world mapped onto the senses; there being a discontinuity between cerebral activity and its registration in conscious awareness. (p. 56). They go on to argue that this phenomenon therefore lies outside of the ability of science to understand it; which does suggest that like myself they agree that the mind creates the sensations we become aware of. 

As they advance their argument they point out that the mind can hallucinate and as it does an individual’s conscious awareness may well tell them that what they are experiencing is true, even though those around them can clearly see that the experience is not coming from any outside the body stimulus. I. e. that the mind shapes our reality, not any outside experience. They then go on to propose that this ability of the conscious mind to shape reality is very similar to quantum mechanics, whereby an observer also shapes reality, via what is known as a superposition collapse. (p.57). In quantum mechanics, superposition is the ability of a quantum system to be in multiple states at once until a measurement is made. Its collapse is the process where it is reduced down into a single, definite state upon measurement or observation; i. e. the potential outcomes described by the superposition are reduced to a single, actual outcome. In the same way our minds when stimulated by sensations decide what these sensations are going to be represented as. For instance, that scarf on the chair which is being activated by a gust of air blowing through the window, was for instance first seen out of the corner of my eye as a cat, however when I look again, it is redefined in my consciousness as a scarf. 

I found all this very interesting, as it for myself allows art back into the frame and their descriptions of altered states by particular drugs or meditation practices, reflected my interest in how a shaman might operate as a conduit between the everyday and the spirit world. A role that Joseph Beuys argued was something that artists could appropriate. My work to find an intuitive visual language to represent interoceptual experiences, was I felt not so strange after all and that what I was doing was also illustrating something about how consciousness itself works.

However this last week I have been out in the landscape walking and drawing. I often need to do this as it charges my batteries and feeds both my perceptual and my interoceptual imagination. When I'm drawing from the perceptions that flood in as I engage with landscape, I use my artistic interests as a filter and this last week I have been trying to see the landscape as a body, finding organs in its embedded forms, my internal somatic awareness operating as a compass to help me navigate the external world. The more I work to visualise internal worlds, the more I see the internal in the external. What I invent in drawing to capture my perceptual experiences, is I realise limited to the extents of my personal visual language and this language has been shaped by all the other drawings I have done up until the moment of making a new one, including therefore my recent attempts to visualise pain and associated emotions, which are in the background of my visual thinking as I begin to record the landscape.

I began drawing on the first day in West Wittering by looking at the coastline as something constantly being reshaped by the sea's waves, a shifting boundary that is permeable. Then once I had attuned myself to its ebb and flow, I began see the landscape as a body that flows around me as I walk through it; its fine grain the equivalent of blood platelets or the fibles I see within a split bone when looking through a magnifying glass. Sound, ground, air, vegetation all flowing past as I walk and draw, whilst bird noises talk to me and I begin to sense that they also need to tell stories of the land and what passes through it. Perhaps their songs are like drawings, I learnt recently that birds have a particular chemical high as they learn their songs, being rewarded by successful tuning and vocalising when babies, with dopamine releases. I also feel better when I get a drawing right, could this be a similar effect?

As I invent my way through drawing, I invent my way into how I might in future draw myself. I see the space of landscape as an opening for my emotions to enter and a place to give form to the body's feeling tone. Gradually my mind begins to quiet itself and accept the situation, the drawings become more focused and I feel that I am becoming entwined with my surroundings. I feel my body becoming fully immersed back into landscape and as it is, it is something to quietly and gratefully accept. 

Sketchbook drawings

Reference

Dutheil, R and Dutheil, B. (2024) The Superluminal Universe London: Watkins 

See also: 

The geometry of consciousness

The topology of dreams

Seeing and feeling

Drawing and quantum theory 1

Drawing and quantum theory 2

Freud and invisible forces

Geometrical psychology

Contemporary landscape drawing

Principles for art during the time of the Anthropocene

Value the hybrid and the clone. 

Twelve Principles for making art in a time of the Anthropocene

After undertaking a course in permaculture design last year, one of the things I promised myself I would do was to go back to the 12 principles of permaculture that I tried to apply to my then art practice and to see if they could be further reshaped, as I began to develop a more research led aspect to my work. I might of course continue to change them as my work unfolds, but the process does help to remind myself that I'm unable to extract what I'm doing from the wider ethical and ecological concerns of my time.

Things to consider when making art in a time of the Anthropocene. 

The Anthropocene is the geological epoch that we currently inhabit. A time when human activities have had a significant impact on the planet. The word is a hybrid, combining the Greek anthropo (human) and cene (new) and it suggests that in order to inhabit our world in a proper manner, a drastic change is needed. The reality we seem to be faced with, is that we have already impacted upon the world's ecosystems to such a degree that the future of our species is cast in doubt. Science tells us that there have been several extinction events in the past and that the majority of them involved climate change. We therefore face an existential threat, far beyond war or localised environmental disaster. If faced with such a dilemma, I believe we have to construct some sort of resilient framework out of which we can still operate on a day to day basis, without just lapsing into despair. I have just spent a week walking and drawing in the landscape, observing the flow and ebb of vegetation in relation to landforms and changes in soil, as well as simply standing looking at the wonder of leaves moving in the wind and trying to make marks that capture the experience, not just from my point of view but from that of birds, insects and the tree itself. As I draw, I become lost in the moment and become aware that all experiences are in reality as significant as that moment of a breeze moving through the dense masses of a tree's leaf structure. The moment of a life of some extinct creature from before any of the previous extinction events, was just as wonderful, as will be all the moments of being in the world that all the creatures of the future will have and in that realisation, perhaps there is a reason to be hopeful and resilient as we all face an unknown future. 

1. Observe and Interact
Humans are not the centre of everything. Try to observe the processes of the world through the senses of others. How would a tree feel about the situation, a snail, soil, a bird, a mountain or a fish. Use process led observations that immerse us into the lives of others, rather than using an objective fixed viewpoint in order to measure something.
As an artist making observations and responding to what has been seen is often central to the way work is developed. The more we look, the argument went, the more we can learn, but perhaps we can focus more on observing the nature of systems of interaction, be these about the interaction of people, people and things, people and other animals, things and animals, things and things, i.e. trying to open our vision out to include non human others, and events, so that we can move ourselves away from always being the centre of everything and valuing the world in relation to what we can own. We can experience events and interact with them but beware of seeing things simply as nouns, try to keep an eye on how processes are shaping the world around us.

2. Catch and Store Energy
As well as exploring the possibility of projects that can directly respond to the storage of energy, such as creative planting and growing, art making can itself be seen as an energy store. Operate to make artwork like a battery; create work that can recharge others, by layering and folding within the things you make, ideas and thought forms that unfurl in others minds as an energy release and not an energy drain. Look for the channels of energy movement that allow you to communicate without wasting energy, and let nature be your guiding principle.

3. Obtain a Yield
Non-tangible yields can be happiness, health, joy in making or mental well-being. Practicing the close observation of nature can lead to mental well-being. Develop processes of art making can be used as mindful exercises and these coupled with more sustainable approaches to art making, can become embedded into a lifelong approach to working with, as opposed to working against nature. Always check that what you are doing is leading towards a positive outcome for both humans and the rest of the world. Make things that the community needs, not just what you want.

4. Apply Self-Regulation and Feedback
A regular critique of what we do needs to become central to art practices. Increase an awareness of how your work impacts on sustainability, and build more robust tools with which to analyse your various working practices in relation to their impact upon the world. Use iterative processes. Make it, test it, tweak it, repeat. Make it, test it, tweak it, repeat.

5. Use and Value Renewables
By using the power of the sun, the wind, or water, we can harness non fossil fuel based energies to make our artworks. We can also in the reuse of materials ensure that the work we make does not use up any unnecessary energy or bring into the world new objects that use up the worlds limited supply of resources. To make full use of renewable sources of energy: and to move to a more sustainable way of operating as an artist. To include these issues in any proposals for future artworks and to use renewables whenever possible within art practices. Recycle, rebuild and repair whenever possible.
Renewables are sometimes ideas, rather than materials. Never discount an old idea, it is always possible to renew the way we approach our familiarity with things.

6. Produce No Waste
Moving towards a zero waste lifestyle means looking at all the artwork we make and eliminating any associated waste. We can do this by reducing the amount we buy, by buying wisely, by reusing or recycling wherever possible the materials we use to make our art. To look at waste throughout the entire life-cycle of all the products that we use we can reconsider what we make our artworks from. Are there possibilities for recycling when making work, how can the idea of recycling be embedded into the conceptual development of an artwork? Does an artist need to make anything? Do we need to move away from making objects and work towards the freeing of art from a material framework?

7. Design from Patterns to Details
Whether designing a new vegetable garden, or an entire new sustainable way of life, we have to look at the big picture before we get bogged down in the little things. Thinking holistically, about all areas of our lives, can help us move forwards in a positive direction. By being aware of the bigger picture we can develop a much more robust framework within which to work. Many artists historically have developed manifestos for practice, permaculture principles could be the pattern for the development of these. Are there other ecologically sound frameworks that could be used as models for art practice? Do the details of your work reflect the shape of the overall concept?

8. Integrate Don’t Segregate
Think about collaboration in all its forms. Collaborate with other artists, with non artists and with non humans. Work with the land, work with the air and the sea. Create work from a number of perspectives and use a variety of ways of making and thinking. Think of how to exhibit diverse forms together in the same space. Think about how your art practice can be integrated into and with others. Check on how your work effects others, and then bring all stakeholders into the fold of your practice. Explore who and what you could cooperate with. Value the hybrid and the clone.

9. Use Small, Slow Solutions
That scrap of paper with a sketched out concept might be as powerful as a huge sculpture. Begin small and gradually grow your ideas in conjunction with sustainable thinking. Work slowly, savour the process of the gradual growth of a concept as it moves from one stage to another. Take your time. Work with complicated ideas that take a while to ferment. Don't expect instant gratification. Big is rarely better. Work at the pace of the Earth.

10. Use and Value Diversity
Diversity is vital to how you communicate your ideas. Who's culture are you celebrating? Who's aesthetics are you working with? Does your work communicate beyond your subgroup preoccupation? Who are you talking to and how do you value others? Try to work through as many media as possible when trying out ideas. Allow other points of view to enter the development process of your ideas. Above all remember to value the culture of others, not just other humans, but other creatures too.

11. Use Edges and Value the Marginal
Use of all the resources that you have at your disposal, not just the ones within easy reach. Whether we’re talking about land use, materials, ideas, work places, art or society in general, making use of all we have involves valuing fringes and fringe elements. This might be as simple as using a neglected corner of your outside space to grow more food, or something more abstract, like thinking outside the box. Artists have traditionally been able to operate within and around the edges of society. Can this position be fostered and strengthened so that you are actively working to bring ideas from the edge of society into its centre? Artists have traditionally been the people that see things that others don't, can we can use this principle as a way to develop value in the marginalised?

12. Creatively Use and Respond to Change
Finally, change is an inevitable part of life. It’s important to remember that permaculture isn’t just about now, but about the future. We design for change, understanding that things will alter over time. The changing seasons, changing attitudes, our changing climate. How we respond to these changes will shape sustainable progress in the years to come. These principles are a starting point for an understanding of a permaculture influenced approach to art making, and can begin to give us an idea of how we can translate thought into action, an action that in itself might help in the transition to a more ethical – and truly sustainable – way of life. We should make art to discover our future, not to sustain the past. Many of our approaches to art making are rooted in models that are now outmoded. We don't need to make art for museums, we need to make it to survive.

If not we are simply waiting for the barbarians. 

See also:

Drawing and the 12 principles of Permaculture
Sustainability resources 

Object orientated ontology 

Sustainability

The pencil and sustainability 

Human plant hybrids