Drawings of nervous systems

Part of a vertical-transverse section through the rabbit pes Hippocampi major. 

I have recently discovered Camillo Golgi's Drawings of nervous systems. They are both beautiful and sublime. Golgi was faced with a difficult problem, how could he begin to see the cell structure within nervous tissue, as these cells were so tightly packed that if you tried to stain them in order to see them, you simply produced an un-analysable blob. No structural detail or lines of interconnection could be picked out. The axon and dendrites of neurons, the thin filamentary extensions of neural cells, were too thin to take up the stains that had been used in the past. However Golgi's method was to use a substance that would only stain a limited number of random cells. Using his method, dendrites, as well as the cell soma, are clearly stained for their entire length, which allowed him to visualise the complex networking structures of many parts of the brain. Interestingly it is silver nitrate, the key ingredient in early photography, that is central to this discovery. Because only random neurons were stained, it was much easier to see them, and then Golgi could speculate how they would collectively come together to determine their total structure. This reminded me of one of my first drawing classes at college on Wolverhampton, we were told to look at the situation with squinted eyes, and shown that in cutting down on the amount of light coming through to us, it was easier to see what we were looking at as details were eliminated.

Pes Hippocampi major

Part of a vertical section through the rabbit pes Hippocampi major

In reality there would not be as much space around each nerve, but by giving each one its own space, a very convincing series of images were produced, images that allow us to 'see' what is going on, in our minds.

If you pull away from this microscopic view of the nervous system, as in the video 'Powers of ten', you begin to see the brain itself as an organ. Golgi's sections are located in specific areas of the body's brain landscape, just as a stand of trees might be located in a map of Yorkshire, that is itself to be found within a map of England. 

Inferior and posterior cornua, viewed from above. (Pes. hipp. labeled at center top.)

From Grey's Anatomy 

As the body organs are isolated from their position within a body, it is as if they become creatures in their own right, the poetic inhabitants of an ecosystem, that have at some point been captured and stuffed for scientific examination.

Corpus callosum

The corpus callosum is a bundle of nerve fibres that connects the brain's left and right hemispheres. It allows the two sides of the brain to communicate and coordinate signals. The 'O' on the drawing above indicates where the pes hippocampi lies; a location that when I saw it in the illustration above, made me think of a type of lure, its position within the drawing reminding me of the thaumatichthys, the trapjaw anglerfish, that has a bioluminescent lure located inside its mouth. This 'wonder fish' lives in the deepest parts of our oceans, inhabiting a dark so far away from the surface that if any creature was to signify the inhabitants of our deep subconscious, this would be it. 

Illustration from the Ocean World

As we move in and out of the body, it is as if we are moving through a landscape with strange inhabitants. The organs and microscopic fibres illustrated above, are as much a product of an artist's imagination as they are a materialisation of a set of embodied functions and could, if we are not trained as medics, be anything and without labels, for myself they become 'free floating signifiers', things that suggest organic form, but whose functions I can only guess at; however  their poetic function is what I'm more interested in, together with their possibilities for imaginative invention. 

Please forgive my rambling mind, it is I know trying to get me somewhere, but as is often the case by a strange route. So do try to follow me as I attempt to make my next connection. In his paper on the biological bases out of which shamanism evolved, Winkelman (2004) argues that shamanism was the original neurotheology. Because, he argued, shamanism manifested itself all across the world, in many cultures and times, many of which could never have known each other; it was most likely that shamanic type thinking, has a biological foundation. He goes on to state that the brain has within it neurognostic structures, (the initial, inherited organisation of neural models from which more developed models grow) based on neural networks that shape basic forms of perception and that these structures also involve innate processing and representation modules that may underlie the reasons why we developed religion. He then goes on to state that animism uses innate representation modules that are deeply involved in how we understand our ideas of self and others, concluding with an idea that there is such as thing as a “natural history intelligence,” that uses an innate capacity 'for representing animal species to form metaphoric personal and social identities based in animals', (p. 210). But now we get to the nub of what I was interested in. After arguing that our bodies provide a neurological basis for human experience and knowing, he cites Newton 1996 and Friedrich 1991 in developing an idea that metaphors and analogic thinking, such as soul flight involve body image, therefore our symbol systems are derived from neurognostic models for organising both internal and external experiences (Citing Laughlin 1997). Sociocultural influences are still powerful shapers but he argues, 'universal body-based representational capacities combine memory, perception, affect, and cognition in an image-based symbolic information system'. (Winkelman 2004 p. 200)

Winkelman's paper made me think again about how my interests were perhaps more joined up that I had previously believed. I had been thinking of some sort of visual poetry, that could be developed that might link up my interests in animism and interoceptual representation. In particular sometimes shamans, such as those who operated within indigenous cultures of North America, used buffalo robes as part of their transformational rituals. Clothing yourself in the skin of another, being an excellent way to channel the other creature's spirit into yourself.

Shaman's buffalo robe

A body suit/ drawing made to explore the idea of an interoceptual self-portrait

In the image above, when it is activated by my presence, my head is positioned to peer through from the other side of the drawing, replacing the existing cardboard surrogate head, (top right). I stand where the two shoes are. Once I am in place, I deliver a monologue about the relationship between my emotional state and how I think about my body. Within the body suit/drawing are inserts and they are my responses to Camillo Golgi's drawings. I have no access to microscopes or other similar technology, so have to work with visual analogies instead. If you wet an area of paper with clear water and then dip an ink loaded brush into it to draw, you will immediately see a fine network of watery threads spread out from your drawn lines. These have become for myself part of my drawing's nervous system, visually operating like organs and as a conjoined nervous system at the same time. 

An 'organ' detail from the drawing above

I'm working with two other artists on this aspect of my research and they will draw from the situation I set up in my studio, which will be made up of three or four situations similar to the one above. They will respond to what I have been doing, just as I will respond to what they have done, by making drawings. The drawings will operate as a form of communication between artists who are operating for at least a little while as shamans, whereby we see what can be passed on and what can be reinvented, in relation to the specific issues on the ground where each artist lives.

As Manvir Singh states in his book, 'Shamanism, The timeless religion', "We are all endowed with the same cognitive architecture,", (2025, p. 12), his argument being that shamanic practices reflect the way we are wired to think and that they reoccur in different guises over and over again throughout human history. The other day I was making coiled snail type creatures, based on an object I saw in a museum in Malta. They are designed to operate as votives for gardeners suffering an influx of slugs. We all need to believe that there is some way of making our wishes come true, one of these being that if only the slugs would go away, my garden would prosper. I tap into that wish and as I do I would like to think that I hold onto an invisible link that goes back thousands of years to those first artists who made images to intercede between the known and the unknown, a history that includes Camillo Golgi, as much as it does the "Sorcerer" from the cave of Les Trois-Frères.

Slug votive

References

Singh, M., (2018) Why is there shamanism? Developing the cultural evolutionary theory and addressing alternative accounts. Behavioural and Brain Sciences. 2018;41:e92. doi:10.1017/S0140525X17002230

Singh, M. (2025) Shamanism: The Timeless Religion London: Alan Lane

Winkelman, M., (2004) “Shamanism as the Original Neurotheology”, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 39(1), 193–217. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9744.2004.00566.x

See also:

The macro and the micro (Includes a link to the video 'Powers of ten')

Drawing feet

Drawing together science and myth

Paper and skin

What can art do?

Pilates and Interoception

The inner body as a psychic form

I have for the past few months been undertaking pilates exercises. These have helped me to get more in touch with my body and to teach myself about myself. Each week as I go through a set of controlled exercise routines, I am gradually, very slowly, increasing my ability to control my body. In Pilates, students, like myself, are taught to employ the repetition of specific movement skills, and gradually through repetition, hopefully the brain will also rewire itself, as a more body aware organ. This hopefully will develop my neuromuscular synapses, and lead to a heightened body awareness and therefore more precise body/joint/muscle control, something that I am testing out by playing more and more table tennis.

One example is the fact I often experience lower back pain. I have realised that I have trouble sensing the position of my pelvis in its body space and find it hard to differentiate the movement of my pelvis from my spine or distinguish the movement of my hip joint from my spine. I am slowly becoming aware that I can more precisely activate my core and I am sensing the fact that gradually I can take control of an inner set of relationships, that previously I wasn't even aware of.

My trainer/teacher gets me to make certain movements over and over again, their repetition has helped me to internalise certain movement skills, an ability that I am beginning to see as being essential for my lower back health. I see this development as fostering improved communication between my brain and my body, which should also eventually result in more resilient muscles and an increased capacity to sustain effort over an extended period; again I am trying to test these things out by playing table tennis. For instance how quickly I react to changes in incoming stimulus or how long I can sustain a certain level of bodily concentration.

All of which I am of course then trying to bring into my visualisation of interoception research. I am trying to approach the issue from several angles at once, putting myself and my feeling tone, at the centre of the process. I cant really ask others to believe in what I'm doing, if I am not prepared to undertake an investment in the full possibilities that begin to open up, as I continue to explore the relationship between my inner body and my outer psyche in relation to the way that my outer body hosts my inner psyche. The folding that I feel takes place, seems rather like a Klein Bottle, my insides becoming my outsides, my facial signalling reflecting my stomach feelings and my mind reflecting my body. 

Studies for body mind awareness

The animation I'm working on tries to deal with these issues and at times it represents feelings trapped inside the body, at other times the body becomes a landscape and then we slip between the body and its interior organs and the feeling tones or sensations that make up the emotive landscape that emerges from the physical release of hormones into the bloodstream. 

The images above eventually become embedded into ideas for a body moving within a body. The 'trunk' being a totally separate organ, seen as an idea rather than as some sort of anatomically accurate image. 

Four versions of a trunk, ready to be animated

Body parts to be attached to a trunk

As I begin to put the animation together, the process will like all my other drawing activities, eventually begin to tell me what it is becoming about. This finding clarity in the muddle of doing, is I'm afraid my most valued methodology, but it is not one that sits very well within the established research list of approaches to attaining new knowledge.

However here is a first indication of what the interior somatic feelings are looking like.

The growing awareness of a pain emerging

In the image above, I'm trying to fuse a shape of a pain with an emotive reading of a response to it. The landscape itself is a fusion of two sets of drawings, one of local woods and another of mountains of slag drawn from memory. It is movement that tells us something is alive and active, a throbbing pain, being as alive as a flying bird, all inhabiting the biological ecosphere. 

The animated gif image below is an indication of how the trunk and body parts will come together. I was initially going to hand make all the parts of the animation and had already made a few cutout puppets, jointed with paper fasteners, but Doctor Simpo, an old friend and animator as well as comic maker and many other things, suggested that he could digitally animate the figure for me. This is his test, to see how the figure sits against the background. 

As the figure moves through the body/landscape it talks to itself, using a language that has been constructed from sounds made as people respond to different feelings, see Sound sample

The object in the frame that looks a bit like a helmet with two horns, is what I termed a psychic infuser, it is where life energies can be piped into the ground from living creatures, in this case birds attempt to breath life into the landscape. You can get a better idea of how that works from the image below, which is a colour test, to see how orange would sit against the blues. I'm yet to animate the birds properly, as they need to be redrawn. 

As I return to pilates, I will continue to use the experience to visualise a somatic awareness of the body in motion, alongside trying to represent the feeling tone that I have as I emotionally think about my ageing abilities to move. Therefore the visualisation of emotional feelings has to be coupled with 'invented' body forms, something that is also being developed by another related project that has emerged from the meetings I occasionally have with artists that worked with myself on 'The Body I am in' online project. I am in the middle of a new project directed by myself, but with growing interventions and ideas from the other participants, whereby three of us are working to develop body costumes to help externalise internal feelings but there is so much going on there that it will need a post to itself to communicate what is happening. Hopefully, this work will begin to fuse with all my other projects, such as the work at Pinderfields Hospital, and I will begin to see what it is I'm actually doing. 

References:

K. Caldwell, M. Adams, R. Quin, M. Harrison, J. Greeson. 2013. Pilates, mindfulness and somatic education, J. Dance Somat. Pract. 5 (2):141.

See also:

Fine art animation

Drawing and mindfulness

Drawing and healing

Visualising energy flow

The embodied diagrams of Nicholas Gansterer

Drawing correspondence: The Body I am in

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 how we 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 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, however when needing to show the work out in the streets, the simple expedient of the images being taken out of his book and then 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 to the strip, that had not been 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