Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at Leeds Art Gallery

It is a wonderful time to go and visit Leeds City Art Gallery at the moment, especially if you are interested in portraits. The new exhibition, 'To Improvise a Mountain: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Curates', has been developed by the artist in collaboration with Hayward Gallery Touring, and although developed as a touring show, it sets up a series of fascinating associations and connections with work already on display in the gallery. I have seen several exhibitions containing Yiadom-Boakye's paintings of people; her imaginary compositions developed from photographs, life-drawings and found images and was curious to see how she drew as well as painted. She has also curated this exhibition, so it was a chance to see her wider interests in terms of image making, something that we sometimes forget is very important to all artists if they are to continually refresh their eyes and their minds. The focus of this blog is of course on drawing, but sometimes artists who draw and hand make images, also need to look at photography, if only to think about the differences between the two representational systems. Yiadom-Boakye's curation does that well, in particular because of her interest in Sickert, she gives us a reminder of his role in stitching together relationships between the two practices. He at times painted portraits of well-known personalities and when he did, his compositions and images were often derived from press photographs.

Sickert: King Edward the VII

Probably the most well known example of Sickert's relationship with photography is his portrait of King Edward the VII, the cropping being probably something he learnt from Degas. As artists began to respond to the photographic image, one of the most interesting issues was how we were reminded of how composed paintings were. One of Yiadom-Boakye's chosen artists, Lisa Brice, is I sense very aware of Sickert, but is now taking the concept of the frame and how it cuts into reality, in another direction, this time using it as a way to reconnect with images of women as framed by men in paintings. She is not like Sickert, casting a photograph into paint, but re-casting the roles of women who inhabit older painting, this time giving them a much greater agency in the image. An agency I personally recognise that can be derived from the act of smoking, the taking up of which at one time, I felt to be an anti-authoritarian snub to my father. It's interesting how easily personal history interweaves itself into the way we find meaning in our experiences. We might love our fathers, but we need to take actions that ensure we don't end up living life under their shadow and I sense that is partly what Brice is saying in these images, she loves painting's history, but needs to re-cast it as something she owns. 

Lisa Brice

Lisa Brice's other painting was I thought just as powerful and in its handling of materials, was an image I could associate with even more closely. I first saw Lisa Brice's work at the Tate and was at the time particularly drawn to this image of another smoking woman.

Lisa Brice: Parting at Dusk (2018) gouache on polyester drafting film 

The blue gouache paint streaks down the drafting film, a surface I have often worked on myself, as you use it in printmaking to hold and transfer gestural qualities when making silkscreen exposures. She translates William Rothenstein's Parting at Morning's material handling into something far more visceral, the paint standing for itself, rather than being a vehicle for representing fragility.  Brice is also making another translation, taking Rothenstein's representation and shifting its meaning, this is no longer an image of a frail white woman left by a man in the morning, it now becomes a woman of unidentifiable race, that will leave before the night, and who stands her ground, smoking defiantly. 

William Rothenstein Parting at Morning (1891, chalk, pastel and bronze paint on paper

Yiadom-Boakye is obviously interested in how painting's past can be revisited and she has chosen to exhibit one of her own responses to this. 

Sickert: The Blackbird of Paradise

Sickert's 'Blackbird of Paradise' painting has long been part of the Leeds Art Gallery collection and it first drew Yiadom-Boakye's attention when she was undertaking some teaching at the Leeds Metropolitan University. During a break she had gone down to the Art Gallery and found a wonderful portrait that is suggestive not only of how humans can be bird like, but how paint itself can inhabit different creatures or materials, sometimes being feathery but at other times slimy like a wet frog or dry like sandstone or an elephant's skin. It was also a study in blackness, of how one colour can be many; blue blacks, green blacks, violet blacks, transparent, impasto, gestural and solid; a reminder of how great painters give life to the paint they use, in order to give life to the subjects they depict. 

Sunbird 2 and 3

Yiadom-Boakye's imaginary portrait drawings, 'Sunbird 2' and 'Sunbird 3' are direct responses to Sickert's painting. At the core of my fascination with her work, is the fact that her portraits are imaginary. She forces us to confront what I think is a central issue in our understanding of portraiture, how much of our understanding of it is due to our obsession with what someone looks like and how much is it a reflection of how we read human beings as types. If, she suggests, an artist is to give life to her subject, she has to first of all give life to the materials used to depict that subject and if that is successfully accomplished, this new life, will be read and responded to as any other human being. Sometimes understood as a stereotype, or cliché and at other times as a particular individual that you can have empathy with; the reading is in the power of the beholder. 

Upstairs in the art gallery there are two other exhibitions focused on portraits. One which has been there for quite a while and a new exhibition focused on portraits of women, an exhibition that has to be shown in very low light levels due to the fragility of the various papers on which the works chosen were made. Between the three presentations there are some very interesting comparisons to be made. 

Yiadom-Boakye: Charcoal on paper

Jacob Kramer: Drawing for 'Mother'

Two similar sized drawings, both using charcoal are to be found on exhibition. One by Yiadom-Boakye is downstairs in the exhibition 'To Improvise a Mountain' and one by Jacob Kramer, is in the drawings of women exhibition upstairs. Although both drawings use similar mediums and sizes the handling is very different. It is perhaps easier to see in a detail, especially as it is very hard to photograph images behind glass. 

Yiadom-Boakye

Jacob Kramer

Yiadom-Boakye's hand is a simple solid, the charcoal is blocked in and heavily worked with a rubber. The charcoal is pushed into the paper, using it feels like a good sized block of compressed charcoal, as opposed to a willow charcoal. Kramer's is softer and more delicate. He uses willow charcoal, smoothing out his tonal changes by smudging with his fingers and making highlights with a sharpened rubber. He is feeling for the form of the hand as an extension of the expression of the face, whilst in comparison Yiadom-Boakye's hand is more generic, perhaps even more mechanical, definitely a hand designed to punch more than to express a continuation of the 'read' of the face. Both artists are seeking some sort of authentic communication, trying to express something about what it is to be part of a community that has historically for one reason or another been overlooked. As people from my own family, came as Jews to the UK in the late nineteenth century, I am very aware of the pogroms that Kramer is asking us to remember. His family lived not far from where I live in Chapeltown, which was then home to immigrant families from eastern Europe and Ireland, as it is now for people from the West Indies and other parts of the old British Commonwealth. Kramer wrote that when he was looking at his subject, he saw both its physical appearance and its spiritual manifestation. His struggle, he claimed, was to escape physical appearances and to paint the subject's spiritual form, an idea that was very much of his time, being central to expressionist thinking and deeply influenced by Theosophy. His struggle to find a form of expression that could both elevate the human spirit and remind us of a people's history, give his images a particular authenticity, that can find parallels with Yiadom-Boakye's work. She is also concerned to address a history of a people's representation, or perhaps more accurately their non-representation and in giving form to invented lives, she peoples the walls of the galleries she exhibits in with the portraits that have historically been missing.

As Yiadom-Boakye's portraits are not of any particular person, being constructions made from various source materials, they are anonymous and this opens up their interpretive possibilities.  
Many portraits over time lose their associations with particular human beings and by the time we get to see them, the name of who was depicted has long disappeared. But we are still fascinated by the image of a human being, and perhaps once a portrait is unanchored from the particularities of a name, we can much more easily inhabit the image in our imagination.

An Egyptian 'Feyum' portrait of an unknown man

Perhaps the most powerful example of this effect on myself was when first encountering 'Feyum' portraits. They appeared so lifelike, especially as I knew that they were 2,000 years old, their freshness mainly due to their being painted using wax based encaustic techniques, a reminder of the fact that in comparison most contemporary art materials will fade and deteriorate very quickly. I felt I could 'know' these people, that they were alive to me and I was able to give them life stories in my mind. This aspect of historical distancing also operates with Ottovio Leoni's 'Portrait of a Lady' on display in the upstairs gallery; although drawn in the 17th century, I felt she could have just walked into the room. The drawing very subtly draws you into her gaze, the marks constructing it changing, as we move from the gestural impressions that form the outer edges, towards the much more refined drawing of the face. We are in effect, visually sucked in.  

Ottovio Leoni: 'Portrait of a Lady'

There are so many comparisons and stories that can be made out of this conjunction of exhibitions, that I find myself drawn back into the gallery at least two or three times a week, each time a new set of relationships suggests itself; a proof to myself of how important free access to art galleries is to the wellbeing of cities. In order to 'see' an image, you often need to go back and look again and then after letting it dwell in your mind, you need to go back and look again. It is such a privilege to have somewhere you can do this, without having to pay an entrance fee. This is an issue that does affect us in Yorkshire, I now rarely go to York Art Gallery where the entrance fee is £8.50 or to the Hepworth where it it £13. We should never therefore take our local gallery for granted. 

'To Improvise a Mountain: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Curates' is on exhibition until 5 October 2025. 

See also: 

Drawing from the old masters

Drawing on transparent drafting film

Tony Bevan

Portraits and time

What is a portrait?

The Lamed Vavniks

The portrait as stereotype 

Thinkfeel

In a post I wrote a while ago I referred to Timothy Morton's use of the term 'thinkfeel', which I took to be about 'grasping the ungraspability of a thing'. A few years later after getting involved with attempts to visualise things that are invisible, I'm even more impressed with Morton's ability to put words together in order to explain the unexplainably difficult nature of our reality. Morton told us that reality was populated by 'strange strangers', by which they (they use the 'they' pronoun) meant that the things around us, books, chairs, houses, soil, plastics, sunshine, water, trees and whatever you might encounter, are all weird. So how is the world weird? Perhaps its because we use language as a sort of screen behind which we hide from reality, we use words to single things out, 'books, chairs, houses' etc. which makes it seem as if there are nicely separate objects out there, but in reality everything is interconnected; a state that in Buddhism is termed 'dependent arising'. I have in the past when considering organic objects such as trees or humans, looked at the Markov Blanket effect, which explains how nothing living can ever in reality be an isolated fixed thing. This time, as I return to thinking about the issue, I'm more aware of animist approaches to the world, and that there is a long history of understanding everything we encounter as a fluid arrangement of energies. This both allows us to inhabit non living things mentally, (as in animist cultures as well as in the extended mind theory), and enables us to think about a life force energy, as something that gives agency to all things, not just organic forms. 

Starbucks cup

If we take a basic plastic cup, something we often use when travelling, we find that the cup is involved in a complex journey too, one that involves vast time periods and which is often interwoven with our own path through life. The primary component of plastic cups is polypropylene and the main reason you are given the cup you have been given, is its affordable price. Polypropylene is made from chains of the monomer (a small, reactive molecule, that can be joined with other similar molecules) propylene, which is a hydrocarbon obtained from natural gas and crude oil. The monomer propylene is subjected to a polymerisation process, where it bonds with other propylene molecules to create polypropylene. One journey is back into deep history and the conversion over millions of years of organic matter into natural gas and oil. Another is into the anthropocene, our current geological age and is associated with the greenhouse gas emissions released during oil extraction, plastic processing, and consumption. We also journey into the world of material properties, where we find that polypropylene's structure provides good insulation, allowing a disposable cup to contain hot coffee without you being burnt. A journey into economics, might lead some people to believe that its use is cost-effective. It has a structure that allows for both crystalline and amorphous regions, therefore it can be strong and resilient, as well as flexible and pliant. This gives it as a material great versatility, helping to make it quite straightforward to produce, which drives costs down, because there are a lot of manufacturers who can afford and know how to use the technologies of its production; which leads to significant competition, that further drives down prices. It also has a very low density compared to other plastics and less weight means less cost in terms of transportation. We can now begin to see the cup as an aspect of a series of wider economic processes, which are themselves driven by material properties. The cup is now in my hand and I'm drinking from it, so it is now totally interwoven with my biological processes and my ecological network. I have already observed how the boundaries of biological systems, from individual cells to people, can be thought of as places where one energy meets another form of energy. These systems are also where interactions take place that help to stabilise them. This being a situation that is operating alongside our perceptual awareness of the particular biological entity we are considering. A Markov blanket concept can be used to define the boundaries of this situation in a statistical sense. I.e. instead of a solid entity you have a series of probabilities whereby something is and isn't at the same time, something that can also be thought of as an active inference scheme. As you infer something is in existence, when you look at it directly it hardens up and becomes a fixed probability, called in this case a plastic cup.

Thinkfeel meditation on a plastic cup

Timothy Morton was at one time a Buddhist and therefore would have been very aware of the concept of 'dependent arising'. This awareness has I'm sure helped them to move away from the Western ideal of humans always attempting to master the world and its objects and to have more respect for the complexity of interconnected processes. What we might feel is a disturbing and difficult compaction, is perhaps a new 'beauty'. When we confront reality it is far too complex to experience, but encounters with objects always reveal something, even though they also make you aware that other things are not available to our experience. Everything and everywhere is real in its own way, and it is constantly interacting with everything else, including you.

There are diagrams that have been drawn to help us get to grips with the Buddhist concept of dependent arising and as I'm always fascinated by how diagrams help us rethink the world, it's perhaps time to look at some. 

Dependent arising three lives model

The diagram above uses a circular format based on the Tibetan “Wheel of Life”, with twelve links on the rim of the wheel. The circular format clearly illustrates the concept of “rebirth linking” connecting kamma (action) and consciousness. It also graphically displays the central role played by unwholesome roots (kilesa) of attachment (lobha), aversion (dosa) and delusion (moha). It uses the “three lives” elaboration. Links one and two are in a “past life” whereby ignorance or false knowledge sets the conditions for formations or pre-dispositions to arise. Links three to ten are said to be in the “present-life”, commencing with the arising of consciousness and the mind-body, which in turn condition further links to “becoming” (link ten). Links eleven and twelve are “future lives” linked to re-birth, old-age, death and inevitable suffering. Woven into an understanding of the diagram is both a macrocosmic viewpoint, encompassing “physical” rebirth and life in general; and a microcosmic viewpoint emphasising “moment-to-moment” phenomena of the mind and consciousness. Both perspectives are relevant to how kamma and rebirth relate to dependent arising. Kamma is associated with the idea that all actions (no matter how big or small) have consequences. However, for Buddhists it is more specific than that, as they believe that there are skilful and unskilful actions. A skilful action is one that produces happiness, whereas an unskilful action is one that produces suffering. It is this final point that has helped me to rethink my role as an artist within all this. The concept of 'skilful' action is I believe very important as it allows 'agency' into the framework. It allows for some sort of moral compass and helps us to think about the types of agreements that could be drawn up between humans and the Earth. It would be useful to have a contract on being born into this world, that states our responsibilities to it, as well as to each other. Well that's what I 'thinkfeel' at the moment, a time when I'm unsure about so many things and which finds me trying to 'thinkfeel' my way through a fog of uncertainty, any clarity or firm intellectual framework being blown away by current world events.

I see it more like this

Circular forms are useful when thinking about stuff of this sort as they imply never ending returns, suggesting wheels that rotate through themselves but also the axes that they turn around may lead to holes into which things can fall. I once thought of the lasso as something like this, perhaps more akin to a whirlpool or spiral galaxy, which was also a thing that could be tightened up until it had closed tightly upon the object that had been lassoed.

The lasso: Another of life's circles.

I produced these Western World cards at a time when an earlier US president was engaging in a Gulf War, a war that exposed a gap between world views, that seemed at the time to be a product of lies and wishful thinking, rather than a response to reality. Give us enough rope and we will repeat our mistakes over and over again.

Spike Milligan understood how 'thinkfeel' worked, he wrote as if he knew that poetry would one day leave science behind.

There are holes in the sky
Where the rain gets in
But they're ever so small
That's why the rain is thin.

The 'thinkfeel' answer to why rain comes in very small thin drops.

See also:

Art, eco-awareness and OOO

Object orientated ontology and drawing

Paul Klee and Markov blankets

Uncertain certainty 

The influence of the Tarot

Leonard McComb

Tulips: Leonard McComb

I have just been alerted that the Artspace Gallery is hosting an exhibition of the work of Leonard McComb. He is one of those artists that I often go back to, he is a sort of lodestone that sucks me into his world, as well as being someone against which I can test myself. Nature and energy were often cited as his subject matter, but I have always put him in the category of those artists that deal in uncertain certainties.

There is something about seeing and its relationship to touch, as well as a fluctuation between mass and space, alongside something of the spirit inside the body, all compressed into the best of McComb's drawings. A spiritual radiance can sometimes be seen emanating from his drawings of flowers. it feels as if he touches the petals with his eyes, caressing them with directional marks, as he feels around the mass of their reality. Small marks, like bricks, can make solid edifices; as I put it in a former blog post on his drawings; "marks that at their inception appear to be looking for the form, but as they build up, they energise the image, eventually space and mass interpenetrate, all now vibration". He can at times capture the material condition of an object and in the same moment make it as transient as a soap bubble.

Leonard McComb at work on 'Rock and Sea , Anglesey,(Benllech)'

I remember going to see his monumental drawing of the coast entitled “Rock and Sea , Anglesey,(Benllech)”, I think it was in Sheffield, but where I saw it doesn't matter, it's a giant drawing made out of pencil, brush and ink on watercolour paper. Because of what I was doing with my own work at the time, I was reinforced in my belief that you could create monumental art by gradually working across small sized pieces of paper and constructing a final piece from the fragments and although making images of interiors, I too wanted to capture the way I was immersed in looking as an experience and his work was a fine example. It was also an answer to working and living at the time in a small terraced house. But his work also had a profound experience on me in relation to a much wider idea of art as a doorway into the spiritual.  

I'll see if I can explain, as well as try to tie in some of my thinking about the visualisation of invisible forces. When I used to work on the foundation course at Leeds, one of the reoccurring themes was the drawing and painting of a fish brought from the local fish market. It was an activity often promoted by Gavin Stuart, the oldest member of staff at that time, someone who had worked alongside Tom Hudson, Terry Frost and Alan Davie. Fish were looked at as objects of wonder, their iridescence hard to capture and their life form in death a reminder of mortality. Students would struggle to make convincing representations, but in the struggle would begin to come to terms with what it meant to confront a serious subject. 

McComb took on the same challenge, several times. Sometimes I think he missed the mark, but at others he was able to touch one of those experiences that transcend the everyday and elevate it into myth. 

Fish: Leonard McComb

In this image of a fish on a plate, the plate receives the aura of the fish and becomes an aureole, that circle of light that normally surrounds the head or body of a person represented as holy. Energy radiates out through the brush-marks, the paint being applied in such a way that it indicates the mass of the fish and some aspects of its physical presence, such as its iridescence, whilst at the same time the paint marks are open enough to suggest that it is a vibrating energy form, perhaps even a ghost of its former self. 

Flower painting

McComb at one time stated that nature's 'forms and shapes radiate from a centre’. I'm not sure that is right, but he did 'see' some sort of radiant energy surrounding the forms he was trying to represent. In the flower painting above it is the air around the stems and flowers that is energised, the glass vase begins to vibrate to its own tune, whilst each flowerhead sits still, surrounded by now revealed invisible forces. It is easy to see this in a painting because the marks are more substantial, but some of his drawn images almost dissolve back into the paper out of which they were envisioned. 

Flowers

The image of flowers above is almost impossible to see as a reproduction. Something I curmudgeonly like in a time of easy image reproduction and the dominance of the screen. In my earlier post on that feeling of an uncertain certainty, I put McComb in the company of Cezanne and David Jones, both artists that had strong convictions about the world they were experiencing, but who as they struggled to articulate their visions, found their images becoming less and less solid and more and more like dancing energy fields. 

This work is a type of vanitas, a reminder of the fragile nature of life. McComb was also a trained sculptor, and as such he would have been very aware of the materiality of thought; so to produce the flat work that he did and to position it on such a delicate fulcrum, balanced between awareness of mass and of spiritual forces, he must have in my mind also have been an animist at heart. He was able to send his mind out into the things he drew, out into the sea and the rocks, where for a while at least he would have inhabited the world he saw, so that what he was drawing was not the sea or the rocks, but his own mind as it conjoined with the spirit of the world. 

The exhibition LEONARD McCOMB, Body and Spirit Paintings and Drawings, is on 9th of May to 4th of July 2025. Michael  Richardson  Contemporary  Art, the Artspace Gallery, 84 St. Peter's Street, London N1 8JS

See also:

The Artspace Gallery
The uncertain certainty

Body auras

Lines as symbols of invisible forces

Our death is drawn

I have been suffering from blocked ears this last week or so and it has been accompanied by sore throat and cough, you know the type of thing. The stuff you shrug off when younger but which seems to hold on for too long as you get older. I thought that I would be recovered as soon as I could get in to see a specialist ear wax removal person, but after they had tried hard for a long time they gave up and I have to go back again, after another week of olive oil in the ear treatment. Apparently I have a very narrow ear canal and the wax could not be pulled through it. However it was not a totally bad experience because they did have a tiny camera operating at the same time to see what was happening, so i did get to see down into myself from an unusual angle. I was able to then enter my head imaginatively from a new direction. I was left with earache for several days afterwards and an accompanying tinnitus like sound in my head, not unlike a roaring sea, which of course I have tried to visualise. One advantage of working on the visualisation of interoceptual experiences is that my own are just as important as other people's and I now have more empathy with those people who have tinnitus. 

As I tried to visualise the experience, I also began writing about it, to see if the one communication system could inform the other. This is a transcription taken from the notebook I keep at my bedside, alongside the visual notes I drew at the same time. 

I'm dream/thinking around 'soar', a word that sounds the same as sore and saw. I see a bubble trapped, and now several, all trying to rise up, wanting to soar up and out into the sky above me, but they are held down by the massive weight of a granular blanket that sits over the whole of one side of my head. 

The dull ache of pressure goes into a hole at the centre of my vision and then begins to spread out, I feel the soreness radiating as white light out from this dark centre. 

The soreness spreads out into the jaw, it now becomes a saw, sawing into the bone. It sits just underneath the left ear, which was the one the ear specialist had spent an hour with, trying over and over again to suck out recalcitrant wax. I imagine it massed up inside, hard and brittle, resisting the oil that tries to soften it. As the awareness shifts to the bone, it is as if there was a transfer of energy from one state to another, as if from liquid to solid or from rotary to linear movement. A spiral begins to revolve around the growing white centre of my vision, and a sound that reminds me of the whistle we had on a kettle many years ago, begins to come into my awareness, as if from a distant room in the house. 

Something is trying to get through, I feel it, rather than see it. Those bubbles are pushing to be released but they are not strong enough, things are stuck down, but something is still trying to lift them, as if the glue that holds them in place was still drying and not quite able to hold anything firmly. Things are trying to be repositioned, olive oil, is trying to have its say. 

Occasionally my other ear comes into focus. It is also blocked but has not been prodded and pocked about so much, so it sits in the background, but very solidly, a huge full stop, emerging like an iceberg from the other side of my face, but dark, not white, exacting a huge pressure and singing a gravity tune, one that is vibrating my cheekbone, as well as eating into my forehead. 

The next day, I began to work from my notes in order to visualise what I had thought /dreamt about during the night. 

I initially created a diagram so I could think about the head as a whole rather than just the ears. The diagram helped me to think about how when something goes wrong it shifts things off balance. One ear was far more blocked than the other, so it visually intruded into the hollow space of the head more than the other; in fact I can hardly hear anything in my left ear. So I decide to make an image of what it feels like, based on my initial notebook drawings. In the diagram I rotated the notebook images by 90 degrees to the left and right, so I kept the new image sided, it seemed to make more sense. 

Blocked left ear

Between the digram and this new drawing there was something missing, so I returned to making a new image, much larger this time on a A0 sheet of watercolour paper. 

Interoceptual portrait with earache 

I used the written notes as well as my initial scribbles, to develop the next image. Although using information from 'inside' it of course still adheres to a remembered body plan.  I was also reminded of an old exercise from my pre-diploma course in Wolverhampton, whereby we had to draw our faces by touch. I did like the fact that the head seemed very alive in its pain and how a very literal response to what I had written, had given the image a certain unpredictable something, that kept it in the now. 

Even a non-life-threatening illness takes us off balance, even if by just a few degrees, shifting us away from the upright vertical that is part of the bi-lateral symmetry that signifies that we are healthy and full of life. Perhaps what I'm drawing is a premonition of a future that I have to face at some point; illness being a sort of mini-death. 

Blocked ears mean you are often confusing what people are saying to you, you mishear, a phrase such as, "A breath is drawn" can be heard as "Our death is drawn". A small difference in sound, but enough of.a conceptual difference to offer up a bucket full of associations. 

To draw breath can be about giving yourself a pause, allowing for a moment that is about gathering your thoughts together before having to take action. A last breath or dying gasp, signifies the end. I was what was called in my day a 'blue baby' on arrival into this world and for a few moments there was a worry I wouldn't survive, but after some hard slaps from a nurse, apparently I began to breathe and have continued to do so ever since. It feels as if I needed reminding that breathing was going to be central to my life, I was at the time probably still dreaming of the comforts of being inside mom, and not really wanting to take on the responsibility of life. 

 I recently put up a post on drawing the dead and the dying, but I don't think I managed to say anything particularly useful, well not in terms of where I think I'm going with my own work now; so perhaps a return to the subject is needed. One of the most moving images of death that I know of is Claude Monet's painting of his wife Camille. She had been ill for some time and although her death was expected, it was still a tragic loss for him. He painted her as if she is slipping back into the life stream, dissolving back into the waters she came from.

Monet: Camille Monet on her deathbed: 1879

Seven years later another impressionist painter Marie Bracquemond, painted 'Iris in a Vase', another image of death. She made an image that is in its own way as powerful a meditation on death as Monet's. Monet tells us that death can be an individually tragic experience, and even though it is something we all have to face, when we do it is always a difficult moment. When we do face up to it, hopefully we recognise that death is actually what makes life so special, and in doing so, we embrace it. Bracquemond reminds us that everything dies and that in that moment of death, life returns back into the materials out of which it emerged. She extends our sympathy out into the wider world of vegetable life, a reminder that plants are a life-form too and that like ourselves they have to follow a cycle of living and dying. She was reworking an old vanitas tradition, but within the conceptual reframing of Impressionism, a moment of cast light, being as monumental as a cathedral, the sight of a cast petal, as weighty as a stone. 

Iris in a Vase: Marie Bracquemond: 1886

This is a bitter lesson for myself, in terms of what I am doing and how I do it. It's not so much the recording of sensations that is important, my blocked ears are in fact inconsequential; more important is the fact that I'm trying to visualise the fact that sensations flow between inner constructions and outer perceptual experiences and that this flow, will at some point need to stop and be translated into another state. One that I should be more accepting of, because at some point I too will return into the flow of materiality. In making images of what I think, I leave something behind, if only for a short while, and if those images help someone think about their life and find comfort or meaning in that thinking, then that's fine and my work will have fulfilled a purpose, even though I would have no awareness of it. 

See also

Drawing the dead and the dying

Drawing as a model for life experience

John Berger

Drawing exercises 

Why draw ears?

Gut feeling

Queasy: From a series of images searching for how a gut feeling could be visualised

We know the term 'gut feeling' so well that perhaps we ignore it. Our feelings lie inside us and often lodge themselves into or emanate from our stomach. A stomach that is filled with bacteria, another life form that has evolved in conjunction with ourselves and that is so entwined with our bodily processes that it could be thought of as both another brain and another body, our ghost or double, that is thinking for us or alongside us, as we predict what to do next in the world.

Writers are very aware of this and we often find passages in novels that suggest that our bodies contain the source of our intuitive feelings. For instance this from Vajra Chandrasekera's myth creating novel, 'The Saint of Bright Doors':

'He feels that familiar sensation in his gut: the sickening, queasy tugging that he has always thought of as his luck, his instinct, some deep sensitivity to the world that senses where he needs to go, what he needs to do, long before he can even articulate it. When it bubbles up in him, there is always something he needs to do, even if he doesn't know it yet.' (2023, p. 26)

In an earlier post, when writing about Turner and his relationship to weather I wrote, "I believe that at the core of art's image making process is the idea that the universe is made of physical stuff and that as Seth (2021, p.20) states, 'conscious states are either identical to or somehow emerge from, particular arrangements of this physical stuff'. Artists can therefore work with material processes to create metaphors by making their own arrangements of physical stuff (paint, drawing materials, clay, stone, found objects etc.). These arrangements or physical conglomerations are like in someway, those other particular arrangements of physical stuff that are not art, those organisations of materials that we call life experience. By making these arrangements, (art) we help ourselves come to terms with the chaos of the arrangements of materials we experience as 'life'.

So yes physical stuff moved around in similar ways to other physical stuff. Echoes of larger forces perhaps? Our microbiome is spread throughout our body, and concentrated differently in the various areas that bacteria and other organisms, such as fungi, collect. It is also important to remember that microorganisms form the bedrock on which every ecosystem on Earth is founded. Without them we would have no air to breath or food to eat; without them we would not even be able to digest food, even if it became available. At a basic level, they are linked to the atoms and molecules that make up the non-animate physical world, sitting between them and 'life', holding myriads of conversations between animate and non-animate worlds through chemical and electrical exchanges. Everything is connected and the trillions of entities that live within us, connect us together, and link us to the rest of the world, just as surely as gravity holds together the mass of substances that we call the Earth, and in its own small way, how the various blobs and marks that make up or compose a drawing, come together.

So can I fuse these various bits of awareness with the visual metaphors I use in the images I make? Towards what purpose? If we can begin to see our bodies as feeling tones, as thinking entities that operate as material texts, then perhaps we can begin to see how inextricably linked we are into the Earth's bio-systems and as one steps back and looks at the situation from a cosmic distance, how we are linked in to the universe itself. Portraits of humans could be more like star systems or molecular level clusters seen via electron microscopes, all linked by interwoven energies be they electromagnetic, nuclear or gravitational.  

Stomach ache linked to constipation

The Milky Way

Granite seen under a microscope

Self portrait as a material text

References:

Chandrasekera, V. (2023) The Saint of Bright Doors Oxford: Solaris

Gershon, M. D., & Margolis, K. G. (2021). The gut, its microbiome, and the brain: connections and communications. The Journal of clinical investigation, 131(18), e143768. https://doi.org/10.1172/JCI143768

Seth, A., (2021) Being you: A new science of consciousness. London: Penguin.

See also:

Up close and far away: The macro and the micro
Drawing texture
Drawing and quantum theory
Powers of 10
Macro and micro: Embodied networks