Erasers, rubbers and scrapers

Using a razor blade to erase parts of an ink drawing on Bristol Board

I have devoted several posts to various drawing mediums and suggested that their medium specificity was something you need to explore if you need to think about the full range of expression available to you. However except for a brief mention of erasers in my post on the pencil , I haven't given much time or thought to the importance of erasure techniques. So perhaps its now time to address this.

Erasure is of course also a conceptual idea and just as there are a variety of technical ways to remove the marks made to construct a drawing, there are just as many theoretical implications as to why we might erase and what the activity itself might mean. In my post on The Magic Slate I highlighted the importance of Freud's essay A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad and explained that he reasoned that especially traumatic conscious thought could vanish into the unconscious, but that it would always survive in the mind in a similar way to the faint impressions inscribed in the wax. I. e. that erasure usually leaves signs of how it has been done and that as a drawing medium in its own right, it can also act as a metaphor for how we think.

As Freud pointed out, the act of erasure can be related to how our subconscious operates, therefore as I go through the various ways that you might technically erase something, don't forget that as you apply a new process of removal, you are also creating a new story or narrative of removal. Perhaps these narratives can be seen as ghost stories, I'm always more frightened by a trace of what might have been than by most direct confrontations with reality.

Trace of a human erased by an atomic bomb blast

In Hong Kong cleaners are employed to hastily remove graffiti by painting over it with bleach, washing it off with a high-pressure water gun, or by taping over the graffiti with sheets of black or white plastic. They are not skilled enough however, and they still leave traces of what was written, therefore they in effect highlight the attitude of the Chinese government to what the people of Hong Kong are saying, rather than erase what they were saying from history.

Typical drawing erasers are made of synthetic rubber, nylon, or other man-made materials, but before these carbon heavy and not very sustainable petrochemical manufactured erasers were invented, stale bread was often used for removing chalk marks from paper.

Rubber was called 'rubber' by the English chemist Joseph Priestley because of its effectiveness in “rubbing out” marks on paper, and it soon supplanted bread as a correction tool. However bread can still be used.

Bread prepared for use as an eraser

Partial erasure of graphite with bread

As a remover of dry art materials from paper surfaces bread isn't great, (see this pdf for a full analysis) but if you know this, bread can still be used to 'ghost out' sections of a graphite drawing. This ability, coupled with an understanding that stale bread was used, perhaps even retaining the breadcrumbs in some way, could well become central to an image's meaning. For instance Anthony Gormley in his 'Bread Works', such as 'Bed' 1980, involved a programme of erasure by eating, during which he ate his own volume in bread.

Anthony Gormley: Bed

Rubber erasers are soft and gentle on paper, and are often found on the top of pencils. They are typically pink in colour and are usually found in wedge shapes. The Faber pink pearl is probably the most well known of this variety and during manufacture it has pumice added into its rubber mix, thus giving it more abrasive power, whilst keeping the soft pliable nature of the rubber. The example below is of a double ended rubber or of course eraser if you are from the States. Notice it is latex free, a sign of the times, therefore made from synthetic rubber. The softer pencil erasing end is still pink and the harder ink eraser blue.

The Faber Castell ink and pencil eraser

I find this type of eraser OK but on charcoal not as effective as a kneaded one for ease of control. However kneaded erasers will not remove everything, so you need to get back to a pure white, use something harder, like the Pink Pearl. The Pink Pearl has pumice added into the rubber to ensure a better bite, which means that it is on the way to being an ink eraser. Sand ink erasers are often made out of rubber mixed with sand or silica, and these erasers are the toughest.

A sand eraser

Through the application of charcoal and chalk, and the extensive work to remove them, Auerbach creates an ebb and flow of creation, damage and repair, a cycle that reflects our everyday experience of being worn away by life's reality.

Frank Auerbach

The erasures in Auerbach'a drawings are as much about the creation of space, as the modelling of form, as much about the re-creation of a sitter's energy, as the establishing of planar direction. Touches of colour remind me of William Kentridge, another artist who has spent a lot of time erasing charcoal surfaces, but with a different intent. Kentridge uses erasure to establish and make a series of decisions, that could easily, as they sometimes do, become an animated series of consequences, whilst Auerbach is engaged with a philosophy of looking as opposed to a narrative about looking.

William Kentridge

For Auerbach to remove so much charcoal, I suspect he used a tough rubber eraser, whilst Kentridge may well have used a gum or kneaded eraser, because they can be stretched, compressed, split, and moulded for more precision erasing, pruning lines, cleaning edges, creating highlights through subtractive drawing, or performing other detailed work. They can completely remove light marks, but are ill-suited to fully erasing dark areas; notice the lack of deep tonal contrast in Kentridge's drawing. In fact, I suspect he often just used his fingers to wipe away charcoal, so that the ghost of the previous drawing activity is very clear. The other reason you might use a gum eraser, is that it leaves far less detritus on the drawing surface. A rubber eraser breaks down as it pulls the graphite, chalk or charcoal off the paper, so you get lots of crumbly bits on the surface, which you have to keep removing.

Notice this kneaded eraser is in various languages also a malleable gum eraser 

A gum or kneaded eraser can be stretched without breaking up

A gum eraser typically comes with a clear plastic cover

A putty eraser that crumbles if you try and pull it apart

These kneaded erasers or gum erasers are also sometimes called putty rubbers, often the same but not always. Try and tear one in half, if it tears more like bread, it wont stick back together again, so is not a kneaded eraser/gum eraser and will break up as you use it. The other aspect of a kneaded/gum/putty rubber is that instead of rubbing to remove a layer of charcoal or graphite or chalk, you can press the eraser down and then lift it up to remove a thin layer. Done subtly this can be used to make very delicate refinements. To clean these erasers you can simply stretch a clean part over the used dirty part, hiding the layer of removed dust inside your ever changing flexible ball of kneadable gum/putty.

Gum Eraser

The other eraser that gets confused with the kneaded eraser is what is sometimes called the “art gum” eraser. A gum eraser has a soft, gummy texture and can have a slightly translucent-looking appearance. They absorb graphite and crumble as they erase. The eraser itself is a little bit softer than a typical rubber eraser, so it is better suited to use on some soft, easily broken up paper surfaces. The thing to think about is that the kneadable eraser is malleable like chewing gum, while a gum eraser looks like a solid block of gum Arabic. 

Vinyl Erasers

Vinyl erasers are the hardest ones and can even erase ink marks. They feel smoother when erasing as they do not catch the paper so much as you work the eraser backwards and forwards. I often use Steadtler Mars Plastic erasers to remove underlying pencil drawings from images that have had watercolour built up over initial pencil marks. Their plastic 'crumbs' are finer than the ones that come off rubber erasers, so again you have less mess. However you do need to keep cleaning them by rubbing them over a clear paper surface, if not they can begin to smear dark marks back onto your drawing.  

My old friend Richard Baker used to use an electric eraser to refine his pencil drawings and found it a very powerful tool. It has a small tip, so it lends itself to detailed work. 

Richard Baker: Collection only; Graphite

Electric erasers

Electric erasers usually come with both 5mm and 2.5mm tips and these tips can be sharpened further with a piece of sandpaper if you need a really precise erasure.

Glass erasers were originally designed to remove ink from transparent papers, and they are actually made of' 'fibreglass'

Glass eraser

As well as for ink removal, they are often used for tarnish removal of battery terminals and getting rid of corroded solder when re-soldering. You can draw with them in a similar way to the use of an electric rubber, especially if you want fine white lines within a grey graphite texture. As rubbers they are good for working on a wide range of hard surfaces. 

Eraser shields. If you are looking for precision then you might look at using eraser shields. These are thin sheets, usually made of metal or plastic and designed with different shaped spaces. An erasing shield is a mask used to control the effects of an eraser, like a reverse stencil, instead of adding a new surface through a cut stencil, you remove one. The tool is made of a thin, flexible material such as transparent plastic, or stainless steel shim stock for durability and it is used for very precise work, so usually you will see them in an engineering drawing office. But like all tools they can be used by an artist in any way you want, for instance to create precise gaps within an image. This video shows how they are normally used.

• 
  
Using an eraser shield
• 
  
• Blackboard chalk can be erased using a blackboard eraser.
  
  

  

Blackboard erasers are made of laminated felt pads made mostly of nylon threads. They make a very distinctive erasure surface and are often used not just to erase an image or writing but as a symbol for an idea being erased. But remember a wet rag is sometimes better, again it is the quality of the mark on erasure that is important as well as the association you want to make with it. 

The textures of blackboard erasure.

Poster for a Cy Twombly exhibition using the idea of the blackboard and its erasure

The origin of the word erasure is radere, to scrape and scrapers and scraping are also important erasure processes and tools. 

Scraping into oil pastel 

Artists often draw with scrapers, and this is sometimes done by laying one colour down first and then going over it with black. On the other hand if you are working in ink on Bristol Board or a similar tough surface, a razor blade is an effective way of removing any dry ink you don't want before proceeding to re-ink the surface. (See image at the top of this post)

To scrape away an image can make it feel as if you are conducting some sort of speeded up erosion of a surface, but by cutting into the surface by changing the angle of the blade, suddenly it begins to feel as if you are plowing it up and then a little more angle and push and then you are digging into the surface. All these approaches can be further facilitated by laying gesso grounds of various thickness onto your papers before beginning to draw. See link below on drawing grounds.

Each form of erasure will come with its own associations and metaphorical possibilities, the issue being that the removal of your marks is as important as their initial application and it is one of the main ways that artists embed time into their images, because you can read each faintly visible erased mark, as a frozen moment of the past. 

Lucienne Rickard: extinction studies

Extinction studies is a series of drawings made by the artist Lucienne Rickard, whereby she erases each image of a species as soon as she has constructed it. The ghosts of previous drawings build up behind the image she is presently making, all reminders that the actual animals she is depicting are also gradually being erased from existence. 

Roy Eastland: Silverpoint on gesso

Roy Eastland often deals with fading memories and he will sometimes sand away his silverpoint drawing in order to emphasise the delicate nature of memory; his images emerging out of their gesso surface as if they are coming out of a morning mist. The drawing above is of an old toy, it dissolves back into our collective memories, just as easily as it emerges from them, Eastland is one of the few people who I think can work effectively from photographic imagery, his approach transcending the idea of copying and replacing it with a material memory, one that is able to embed the frailty of humanity into a reflection upon a mechanical process, at the heart of which is something to do with mark making and erasure. 

See also:

Drawing grounds
Asemic writing More thoughts on Hong Kong graffiti erasure
The pencil and sustainability
Pencils and erasers
Silverpoint drawing

The geometry of consciousness

The geometry of consciousness 

I have been fascinated for some time with attempts to use diagrams to visualise invisible forces and the projective consciousness diagram (below), which uses projective geometry to describe consciousness, has inspired me to have my own attempt to visualise consciousness in diagrammatic form. The image directly above, 'The geometry of consciousness' being a first attempt to make a diagram of what is surely the most important invisible force to affect us. When I attempted to visualise a field of perceptual experience earlier, I had to include the idea that there was never a static moment that could be picked out of that experience. Therefore I used an idea of oscillating eyes to explain this in a static diagram, which I have included top left, in the image above. This was I felt missing from the diagram below of projective consciousness, as developed by Rudrauf et al.(2023). 

Projective Consciousness: Rudrauf, et al. 2023

This is how the Projective Consciousness Model is explained by Rudrauf, et al: 

'Modelling approach: from metaphors to computation. (Left Tier) Two principles to be combined: A Global Workspace (GW), integrating and processing multiple sources and types of information and priors, and a Subjective Perspective (SP). (Right Tier) Field of Consciousness (FoC), projective geometry and active inference, as a GW through a SP. The FoC is structured by a 3D projective space, undergoing transformations through the action of the projective group (𝑃⁢𝐺⁡𝐿) for perspective taking (PT). Each possible perspective is associated with affective and epistemic values depending on the distribution of information in the space, with the values themselves yielding a value of FE. The projective transformation associated with the lowest expected FE is selected, providing the agent with a model for its actions (moving so as to adopt the perspective minimising the FE). The approach is based on the duality between PT and actual or imagined actions in ambient space. At the lowest level of processing, the FoC is calibrated (FC) to select the specific projective framing of information in the projective space (which modulates the precise representation and perception of information in space). This process underlies conscious access to information and is the basis for multiple perceptual illusions'.

Rudrauf, et al. 2023

The complex text above does not really help me to understand the diagrams that Rudrauf, et al. came up with, but I could sort of see what they were getting at. 

I think the diagrams of B. W. Betts and his use of them to explain geometrical psychology might be of more use in the visualisation of both a three dimensional model of consciousness and the many possible intersections and overlaps between emotions, perception (interoception and exteroception), drives and social constructions that underpin that strange thing we call consciousness. Strangely, by leaving out Betts explanations and simply looking at his images, I get a better intuitive grasp of the diagrammatic possibility of a projective consciousness.

From: Louisa S. Cook (1887) Geometrical Psychology or The Science of Representation: An abstract of the theories and diagrams of B. W. Betts London: Redway

Betts believed that consciousness was the only thing that we could actually experience and therefore it was the only thing that we could in effect ever explore or research, because everything else, all our interoceptual or perceptual experiences, had to be received via consciousness. Mathematical forms, such as geometry, are products of pure consciousness, and they don't need any external verification, therefore they will produce, according to Betts, the most pure images of our inner subjective activity. Geometry and mathematics underpin his “Science of Representation,” a system of symbolisation that was regarded as the mediator between the corporeal and the incorporeal. An idea that had its antecedents in the writings of Philo of Alexandria who believed that the Logos or mathematical world was in fact the shadow of God, and that mathematical thought was used as an instrument and a pattern of all creation. 

Betts seems to make more sense in terms of visualising consciousness to me, than Rudrauf. et al. However I thought what was needed was a dose of poetry, because if we have actual and/or imagined actions occurring in a space so complicated that in reality we cant understand it, we might have more success by resorting to instinct and feeling tone. In particular I was interested in how to visualise the overlapping awareness of two people who were in conversation; a situation that happens in my workshops, when we collectively try and visualise and communicate interoceptual experiences. 

An overlapping conversation gradually comes to an agreement

I also have also had to more rigorously theoretically support the recent work I have been doing on visualising interoception. In order to do this I have decided to look at the work of Catherine Tallon-Baudry a neuroscientist at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. She heads a research team that has been looking at the reverse hierarchical nature of conscious perception. I.e. it is believed that visual information is passed through a cortical hierarchy in a bottom-up fashion, with cells in the early visual cortex responding to simple visual information such as the direction of lines or edges, and the next or following set of cortical areas having increasingly complex response to edges or profiles in that they are read as faces or particular scenes. The reverse hierarchical theory states that; 'conscious perception of that visual information does not arise with the processing of local details, but rather emerges in higher cortical areas where global information about the outside world is represented.' Campana et al: 2016. This research used specially designed images containing local information (oriented lines) and global orientation (shapes defined by clusters of similarly oriented lines). Importantly, local and global information in those images could be manipulated separately.

Tallon-Baudry has stated that the brain on its own isn’t enough to generate subjective experience, and that without the body, the self simply wouldn’t exist. Interoception plays a major role she believes in not just creating emotions, but in how our thoughts as a whole come into being. Interoception it is argued, is in fact a fundamental feature of consciousness. She has stated that our internal organs, particularly the heart and gut, are vital in the creation of our conscious experience, both having their own self-generated rhythms, separate from the brain, on which the brain can hang its sense of self.

In her paper, 'The topological space of subjective experience', she asks, 'How many dimensions do we need to account for subjective experience, and how do those dimensions differ between individuals? What are the properties of the space defined by those dimensions, are they homogeneously distributed, or are there some regions with specific properties?' (Tallon-Baudry, 2022) All of these questions are ones that I feel overlap with my own far less scientific investigations, but which help me to push forward with some sort of intuitive fumbling, in a territory I realise many scientists would think of as foolish. 

However, Williams (2023) points out that Antonio Damasio has stated that internal body signals aren’t just involved in consciousness, they are consciousness. He states, “People continue talking about consciousness as the great mystery that will be revealed by understanding the brain, and that’s wrong", he says. “It’s not about the brain, it’s about what the brain achieves with the interoceptive system in the body.” (p.43) 

Gradually as I read around and at the same time make drawings based on how people talk about their interoceptual experiences, I begin to feel as if I'm getting at least a tenuous grasp on what I might be dealing with. I many ways it is best as an artist not to know too much, but by sniffing around the edges of science, I do feel that it gives me the confidence to keep trying things out. I like to feel that the early Cubists were in a similar position. They didn't really understand the mathematics of relativity but they did grasp some of its implications intuitively and that intuition led to some of the most powerful images to emerge from the early 20th century. 

The merging of two subjective worlds

References: 

Rudrauf, D., Sergeant-Perthuis, G., Tisserand, Y., Poloudenny, G., Williford, K., & Amorim, M. A. (2023). The Projective Consciousness Model: Projective Geometry at the Core of Consciousness and the Integration of Perception, Imagination, Motivation, Emotion, Social Cognition and Action. Brain sciences, 13(10), 1435. Accessed from: https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci13101435 22.01.25

Tallon-Baudry, C. (2022) The topological space of subjective experience Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 26, Issue 12, 1068 - 1069 December Accessed from: https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(22)00219-4?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS1364661322002194%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

Tallon-Baudry, C. (2021) From global to local in conscious vision: behavior & MEG Journal of Vision September, Vol.21, 63

Campana, F., Rebollo, I., Urai, A., Wyart, V., & Tallon-Baudry, C. (2016) Conscious Vision Proceeds from Global to Local Content in Goal-Directed Tasks and Spontaneous Vision. Journal of Neuroscience, 36(20), 5200-5214. DOI:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3619-15.2016

Williams, C (2023) Why the mind-body connection is vital to understanding consciousness New Scientist 10th May 

See also:

Drawing as research

Drawings as aesthetic transducers

Diagrams: visualising the invisible

Drawing: Analogue and digital processes

The inner and the outer

The tree of landscape embedded into the soil of the body

I'm often asked what the relationship is between my visualisation of interoception, my drawings made in response to direct external perception, such as landscapes and portraits and my visualisation of narratives that I have extracted from the stories told to me by people of their life events. They are in fact all very closely related. In the digital print above I have tried to merge all three, which on reflection wasn't the best idea as there are now too many approaches to an idea in the same image; but it does perhaps indicate something about how the three flow between each other. 

Interoception, exteroception and story telling are types of sensory perception and narratives that help us understand the world we exist within. Interoception includes sensing signals from within the body, such as changes in temperature, pain, or fatigue. It also includes the sensations that accompany emotions, like fear, excitement, or surprise and provides feedback about how the body is functioning, by signalling hunger, thirst, or sleepiness. Interoception connects our minds with our bodies. Exteroception is centred on the processing of information that we perceive as coming from the external world, and it is focused on how we use the five senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch to form predictions as to what is happening out there. In order to 'read' these sensations we often give shape to them by cloaking them in narratives. E.g. "I feel really thirsty, there must have been too much salt in that meal." We use stories to make sense of the information coming in to us, both as a filter and as an ethical or world view framework. All of which, the conscious mind receives as qualia, the phenomenal qualities of our experiences. 

The feelings that I try to visualise that sit within the body are invisible but are powerful shapers of how we understand and react to the world. The more I find narratives used to communicate these feelings, the more these narratives could I'm sure be used alongside the narratives that emerge from my own direct external perceptions and be fused with other people's stories. For instance a certain visual quality that I have developed and associated with an interoceptual investigation of anxiety, may at another time be used within an image about migration, so that the anxiety of the storyteller is accounted for. But there is something else, something perhaps even more important, and that is sometimes it's time to tell yourself a new story. So can hope be nurtured within anxiety? Can a belief in a better future be found in the visualisation of pain? 

Detail: textural surface used to visualise a ruined city

I was recently told of dreams of destroyed cities, including a future bombed to rubble Leeds, where both myself and the storyteller live. As I attempted to realise these dreams of cities, the textural surfaces that I developed to visualise the ruins had a particular value that I had previously used to depict inner emotions. The broken buildings were in effect being visualised as if they were broken bodies. Both the non figurative somatic images and narrative sets of figurative images, were in effect reflections of my self awareness of my own consciousness, as I attempted to work with what had been communicated to me. However I didnt want to make images of despair, in order to make them useful I tried to make images of ambiguous possibilities, things of hope. They are most importantly, attempts to materialise thoughts and our bodies are the first indicator of how we do this. We stand tall when feeling confident and fold inwards when anxious, therefore the underlying structures of art forms and key images, also need to reflect this. 

What goes on inside someone's mind is often not what you would expect and the internal narrative that responds to outside interests and appearances, as much shapes those things as is shaped by them. Inner and outer worlds are entwined, the shape of consciousness being found both within the mind and the body, as well as the world itself. A gradual dissolving of the barriers between external 'reality' and inner subjectivity is, I feel, sometimes a very useful thing, as it reminds us of how we swim in a sea of our own subjectivity. 

In psychology this inner and outer reality is communicated in terms of the sub-conscious and the conscious and I'm very aware that that duality still seems to make a lot of sense, therefore an integrated understanding of interoception and exteroception is what I'm trying to work with. 

Detail of an image of ruined buildings

Detail of an image visualising an interoceptual experience 

Just as in the 'real' world, the closer you get to the surface of a drawing, the more you become aware of a jumble of abstract forms. As we approach surfaces with subatomic visualisation techniques, they become even more abstract. The human body is not that dissimilar in topographic form to a torus (donut type form) and you don't think of a donut's hole as being separated from the surrounding space that the donut exists within. We are one contiguous surface, our outside skin, becomes the inside of the mouth or the anus, the donut hole being the tube that connects the two ends. So in effect inside and outside are in reality one. Formally this relates to how electromagnetic fields are then produced by our bodies. Electromagnetic fields are examples of those forces that we cant see and one of these is the weak nonlinear electromagnetic field that surrounds us and is a product of the fact that our cells need to communicate via electro/chemical processes. 

The heart and the brain are well known as organs that generate ion currents. The current from the heart muscle, when measured with electrodes on the skin, can be used to produce an electrocardiogram (ECG); the same current produces a magnetic field that mirrors our torus shaped torso, which when measured, can be used to produce a magnetocardiogram (MCG).

The heart's magnetosphere

In his 1975 paper "Magnetic Fields of the Human Body," David Cohen details the detection and measurement of weak magnetic fields produced by the human body, primarily from the electrical activity of organs like the heart and brain, demonstrating that these magnetic fields are measurable using sensitive instruments like superconducting quantum interference devices or SQUIDS; that is as long as the measurements take place in a heavily shielded environment. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) studies brain activity in relation to its magnetic field and it produces images of the fields explored such as the ones below.

A Magnetocardiogram

As far back as the 18th century, people believed that you could cure illness with magnetism. Dr Franz Mesmer advocated the use of “mesmerised” water and iron filings, to remove obstacles to the body's energy flow. What was at one time conjecture, has now been revisited as part of a growing awareness of the importance of the body's internal communication systems, Our present day awareness of the body and energy flow is however still being informed by the Indian tradition of chakras. The chakra's are often visualised as circular or wheel like forms, (Chakra = Sanskrit, "wheel") and they were first introduced to the West by C. W. Leadbeater, who I have referred to in the past as one of the authors of 'Thought Forms' an important influence on the development of abstraction. Chakras are understood as seven vortices of energy, that are located at various points along the spine. They are both physical and spiritual centres of energy focus and the key issue in relation to wellbeing, is that these energy flows can become blocked and when they are illness is the result. I.e. if the body's internal communication systems are not working properly, we will become physically ill. Here we can see a clear link between the images produced as magnetocardiograms and those produced to visualise chakra energy. In both instances, illness can be read as a problem related to energy being blocked or not flowing properly.

C. W. Leadbeater: Image of a chakra energy flow: 1927

I'm doing some work visualising pain at the moment. The more I talk to people who have had spinal injuries and attempt to visualise their interoceptual feelings of pain, the more I begin to feel that we collectively have an intuitive grasp of these issues. Some of the images that are emerging are not that dissimilar to those produced by Leadbeater, in particular when he was trying to illustrate body auras for his 1902 text, 'Man, visible and invisible'.

He of course had some pretty strange ideas but was a man of his time, with stereotypical views of what he thought of as primitive man and associated ideas such as the differences between 'savage' and 'civilised'. However his visual difference between the 'mental' body aura and the 'astral' body aura is an interesting one, and some of his other visualisations of invisible forces, such as a sudden rush of affection, still feel as if they do touch upon something, even if only as a hesitant guess at a possibility. 

Illustrations of auras from Leadbeater's 'Man, visible and invisible' 1902

The repeated downward sloping curve of the 'Miser' and 'Deep Depression', reminded me of what I had written earlier on Watteau and the inverted hemisphere line. 

The inverted hemisphere line. 

In Leadbeater's auras, as set out in 'Man, visible and invisible', intense anger and the shock of fear are visually translated by the zig-zag. Anger in particular feeling as if it is the zig-zag of the lightening strike that is being called to mind. Several people I have spoken to about how their pain feels have used the image of lightening strikes to get an idea across to me of how intense and sharp a pain might be. No matter how hesitant, I do feel as if there is something worthwhile here to continue exploring. 

Perhaps I'm far too subjective about these things, but as what I'm trying to do is to find some sort of balance between objectivity and subjectivity, it is probably a normal response in a time of the dominance of scientific method, to worry about moving away from objective measurement. But I am after all an artist not a scientist, and as such I want to find things out in my own way, even if it means taking several steps back into time, in order to think about how I can move forward. 

An emotional landscape of traumatic pain

References

Besant and Leadbeater: Thought forms

Cohen, D. (1975) Magnetic fields of the human body. Physics Today, 28(8), pp.34-43.

Kuman, M. (2018) Our Weak Nonlinear Electromagnetic Field that Rules Everything in the Body is Emotionally Sensitive: Journal of Complementary Medicine & Alternative Healthcare October 8(2)

Leadbeater, C.W., (2014) Man, visible and invisible. London: Quest Books.

Leadbeater, C.W. (2013) The chakras. London: Quest Books

See also:

Macro and micro embodied networks

Eye music Includes a reflection on Besant and Leadbeater's 'Thought Forms'

The emotional line

The zig-zag

Qualia

Between art, geometry, emotion and science

Benjamin Brett and geometric psychology 

Freud and drawing invisible forces

The inner body up close