Shadow drawing

When we were children we all at one time or another tried out shadow drawing. I've reflected on several issues associated with this activity a few times already, but perhaps not quite got down to the essence as to why this way of drawing is so magical.

How to create shadow creatures

There is a wonderful moment when you put your hands together and begin making shapes in front of a direct light source, a moment when the shadow formed begins to look like the creature you had in your head. Hands become a bird flying or a dog's head or a rabbit, but at the same time, the shadow belongs to you. It is an extension of yourself that stretches out into the world, the shadow is both of you and something that you are trying to represent.
Some time ago I wrote and illustrated a short story, whereby a creature tried to cut away its shadow. It is a common story often about someone who tries to escape their dark side, or their subconscious selves, usually with disastrous consequences. Hans Christian Andersen's "The Shadow." and 'The Fisherman and His Soul' by Oscar Wilde are typical examples.

Reattaching a Shadow, Peter Pan, Disney Studios, 1953

I first came across the idea as a boy on going to see Peter Pan; Disney's animated film enchanted me and after rewatching after many years, it still does.

The shadow has always fascinated me as someone who draws, because it is mythically part of drawing's history, as well as giving us physical information, such as where light is coming from, shadows can be used to construct a psychological context. Whenever we see shadows we “read” them and their very ambiguity can add drama or existential weight to the situation.

Rembrandt: Self portrait

By casting most of his face in shadow, Rembrandt suggests that he possesses a deeply complex personality, one that is hard to read, but powerful in its very ambiguity.

William Collins "Rustic Civility"

William Collins' painting "Rustic Civility", portrays the landowner only by the shadow he casts, suggesting that land ownership, casts a shadow over all who live on lands that are owned by others.

The cast shadows of tall buildings

When walking in the street we are very aware of the shadows cast by tall buildings, and feel cold as the sun is blocked from our view. If something is large enough to cast its shadow over us we can feel dominated or dwarfed by the presence of something so much bigger than ourselves. Conversely Lin Yutang stated, "When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set"; an aphorism that seems very apt at the moment. In fact the dictionary definition of to cast a shadow over something is "to spoil a good situation with something unpleasant".

I pointed out earlier that shadows are interwoven with the mythic history of drawing itself. Image making according to Pliny, began with tracing an outline around a man’s shadow. This act was to lead eventually to the art of painting. He goes on to then describe how three dimensional modelling began and he states that modelling portraits from clay was first invented by Butades, a potter. Pliny states that Butades invented this new art so that his daughter could remember the face of her lover, who was about to set off on a long journey. He drew in outline on the wall next to him the shadow of his daughter's lover. Then he carefully pressed clay around the interior of this outline and made it into a relief.  The emotive nature of the situation is embedded in that first shadow drawing, the painful moment of a lover’s departure is located in an image that sits between love and loss. Eros and Thanatos, the life and death instincts, attached to the shadow from its very inception as an aid to drawing.   

Victor Stoichita in 'A Short History of the Shadow', points out the symbolic connection between “shadow, soul and a person’s double.” and goes on to state that ”this would indicate that the result of the collaboration between the potter and his daughter was the symbolic creation of a ‘living’ double, a surrogate figure difficult to understand without visualising the ritual actions we exert over it.” (The portrait was eventually taken to a temple and put on display there.)

Joseph-Benoît Suvée would make a painting of Pliny's thoughts about the invention of painting, this time though it is Butades' daughter tracing around the shadow of her loved one.

Joseph-Benoît Suvée, Butades or the Origin of Painting, 1791.

What this tracing around shadows is doing though is to create surrogates of real things and this creates a particular situation, whereby copies of reality start to become more substantial than reality itself. Butades' daughter's lover may be lost at sea, but his portrait could be seen for many years afterwards hanging in the temple. This situation is further complicated when we look at Plato's shadow metaphor. In his metaphor of the cave, he points out that we never actually see reality, only shadows of it. We are therefore forgetful of what reality is, and can confuse the real with the virtual, and in doing so we lead shadow lives of illusion. 

The image of how to create shadow creatures that I used to open this post, reminded me of how ancient and deep rooted is our relationship with other animals. Shamanic traditions include the harnessing of animal spirits as guides or messengers, and the shadow forms of animals, cast by humans are easily made by the light of a fire at night in a cave. Moving human shadows when seen alongside and cast over the top of some of the earliest painted images of animals, must have seemed as if they were interacting with those images, as well it seeming that forms were morphing from human to animal. I can still remember when I was a small child my grandfather making shadow creatures, and how magical the transformation of hands into animals seemed. I suspect there were artist shadow makers in neolithic times, who were very adept at casting the shadow forms of various animals and humans in iconic poses, onto the walls of caves. If only I could have been a fly on the wall and could watch, as they acted out ancient mythic scenarios in their shadow play.

As I weave these various threads together, it becomes clear that shadows are deeply significant and in their very insubstantiality in comparison to the things that they are cast from, they become like ghosts or spirits. Perhaps they gave to human beings their first way of visualising such things, after all, the dead can still cast a shadow and as the earth moves around the sun, that shadow will continue to move, even though the body will lie still. 

Sometimes shadows don't look like what casts them. The drawing above being a playful account of what was at one time a grudge match. 

Sometimes an image is itself meant to exist as a  shadow or ghost, the one below of my father mowing, was made in response to him dying of a stroke as he cut the lawn. He has always been able to cast a shadow in the form of a presence often felt in times of stress or difficulty, his critical gaze still falling on me as a long dark shadow, even as I type these words. 

Ghost mower

Shadows and related phenomena remind us of the uncanny and a world of 'the other', but being so 'everyday', they also remind us of the fact that these things are always with us. 

Reference:

Victor Stoichita (1997) A Short History of the Shadow London: Reaktion Books

See also:

Arvak  A short story

Shadows and the magic of transformation

Articulated collage and shadow play

Tone and emotional value

The vignette

Images as ghosts

The Join

I occasionally focus my attention on basic formal or material attributes that can become part and parcel of the physical structure of a drawing or any other artwork. Partly to emphasise the materiality of art and how its media specificity leads to material thinking and partly to show how any physical property can lead to a material metaphor. 

In our visual language, "joins" can refer to the way elements like lines, shapes, colours or textures are connected and interact to create meaning, but they can also be actual 'joins', lines along which one thing is joined to another. For instance the line of a weld, the line of a stitch or a hinge. These connections are both visual relationships between things that are brought together and symbolic relationships, representing ideas that emerge from the way we can think about how things can be connected with each other. 

Sometimes we use a specific material's property to join things together, such as the various glues and tapes that are available and there is a huge industry out there devoted exclusively to pursuing research in this area and at other times we try to join things without this third party and investigate the inherent properties of the materials we wish to join together to see what possibilities emerge. There is both a structural and philosophical difference between glueing two pieces of wood together and cutting and shaping two pieces of wood, so that they can be joined without any additional fixing. 

Japanese wood joinery

A combination of craftsmanship and a deep understanding of the material used leads to a particular mindset and philosophy that places great value on both awareness and respect for a material. There arises a calmness from the contemplation of a 'dance' of joining, that you can get as you follow in your mind the intricacies of Japanese wood joints. 

Japanese culture has a long history of philosophically considering the join. For instance the concept of Kintsugi, "joining with gold", that involves repairing broken ceramics with lacquer and highlighting the joins made with gold, a concept that validates and honours the idea of repair, as something that adds value. This is very different to the concept of built in obsolescence, that leads to a throwing away and replacement with new, of things that are regarded as broken. 

Joining two different materials together can be done in different ways and the appearance after joining can be very different. 

Adhesive Bonding uses a substance that undergoes a chemical or physical reaction to form intermolecular bonds between itself and the surfaces being joined. You need to ensure that the two surfaces meet each other firmly along a clean overlapping area and you may need to allow time for the chemical reaction to take place. In drawing the main use of adhesive bonding is in assembling collages, but as has been highlighted in past blog posts, various tapes, such as duct tape and masking tape, can be used to both make joins and draw out forms at the same time. Glues also have different properties, 'Mod Podge' for instance is often used by artists because of its different possible surface 'finishes'. If you want to look at an artist that uses adhesives creatively, Mark Bradford is an excellent person to follow, his collages join together all sorts of papers and found surfaces and he uses industrial materials similar to silicone-based sealants, which give flexibility to his surfaces as well as a type of painterly presence. The joining together of various elements taken from his environment has ensured that his work is socially grounded, even though at first sight the work may look as if it is an abstract image. 

Mark Bradford: The devil is beating his wife: Collage

Mechanical fastening can be an area that leads to all sorts of visual invention. For instance clamping methods can be used to join any two paper surfaces, and to do this you might end up drilling holes or creating bent wire or using rivets, staples or paper clips. The nature of mechanical fastening means that the materials often need a considerable overlap in order to be joined, and this overlap can be a visually exciting edge. 

A visual field of a particular quality can be evolved using any mechanical fastening

Stitched joins rolled up in ink and printed off as monoprints

Once a joint has been made using mechanical means it will be much more physically visual, therefore its visual properties can be further investigated, as in the case above, where stitched together papers were then used to make monoprinted surfaces. 

The joint made by a spiralling wire that forms the spine of a sketchbook

The most common physical and visual paper joint we see everyday in the studio is the spiral binding of sketchbooks. It feels like a backbone to me and when I'm making drawings of how back pain might feel, I will often show someone the sketchbook spine, to see if they too feel this way. 

Various paper fasteners

Every one of these fasteners if used as a form of repeated unit to make a joint, will produce a very particular visual line. A simple change in pin type for instance, such as a plastic headed as opposed to a steel headed one, changes the visual rhythm.

The line of pins develops a particular visual quality as fabric and thin paper are joined

We use the joins in clothing to tell interesting stories about the garments we wear and to highlight parts of the body that the clothes relate to. For instance, as a material nears an edge, when there is the need to 'finish' off or end a section of fabric, we often see a change in direction of the material's granular sub-structure. For instance a shirt cuff. 

Shirt cuff

In order to both stop the material fraying and to imply 'this visual movement stops here', the cuff is made with a change in the direction of the fabric, placing the stripes in this case at right angles to each other. Visually we feel there is a rightness, the direction of our gaze doesn't slip off the end of the sleeve and the hand is visually put on a plinth, or presented by the cuff. One piece of fabric is joined to another and this fact is highlighted by the change of stripe direction. The most startling use of this idea being of course the ruff, a formal element that presents the head and creates a visual full stop to the garments below it. 

Van Dyke: Man wearing a wheel ruff

Another way that joins are highlighted in garment manufacture, is by seam placement. By strategically placing seams, both structural form and aesthetic function are controlled by fashion designers. Buttons are another way of joining two surfaces together, and visually they slow the read down, providing a series of linked full stops.

Cloth edges, stitched and with buttons

When we see these joins in our clothing, we recognise their importance, the edging being vital to our perceptual understanding of the situation. Not long ago there was a fashion for having open seams that ran around the edges of knitted garments, therefore highlighting rather then hiding the structural form of the clothes. This felt as if the wearer was trying to say something about truthfulness and that they were not trying to hide anything. 

This visual recognition also operates when we look at a sheet of paper. The deckle signifies that there is an edge to the material and it also operates as a reminder of the paper's manufacturing process. 

Deckle edge

However we rarely develop the possibilities that the joint offers us, both physically and metaphorically. The term "line of join" might also be used in a more figurative sense, perhaps referring to a line of demarcation, a dividing line, or a point where two things come together. On a map the line along which two countries touch is usually seen as a dividing line or line of demarcation, but is it too much of a conceptual leap to think of that line as the place where people join together?

When I used to teach on the Foundation course at Leeds, one exercise we used to do was to divide a sheet of A1 paper into four equal parts and then to make one image that was made of four different visual languages, that butted against each other at the lines of division. For instance the first section might be drawn using a pointillist technique, the second expressive charcoal, the third flat colour and the fourth watercolour washes. The final images if done well, seemed to slip in and out of different time zones, the overall image gave them coherence, but the visual fractures that happened as languages changed, caused some sort of temporal confusion.  

Joining different visual languages

The bringing together of different visual languages to create an image that they can all be part of, can also be used to suggest that there might be something that underlies our differences and that beneath our first perception, something more fundamental is in place.  

One way this sort of join has been used to stimulate the imagination is in exquisite corpse drawings. 

Man Ray, André Breton, Yves Tanguy and Max Morise: Exquisite corpse

It's great to see several different minds united in one image, the joins linking the ideas together, as well as the line of join making sure each personality has its own space within which to operate. The formal change in direction we see when a cuff is made for a shirt, is now a conceptual change in direction as one artist's viewpoint butts up against another's. 

But these joins are also folds. 

A fold can be seen as a type of breaking into two parts, what was formally one pure, unblemished surface, such as when you fold a sheet of paper in half. But like the join, it too has many physical properties and metaphorical associations. The line of the join and the line of the fold are closely linked, but the one implies two different things being linked and the other implies one continuous surface being divided into two contiguous surfaces, so I will reserve thoughts about the fold for another post. 

The join and the fold are closely related to the split and the tear, issues I have dealt with in the past and that are integral threads to an unfolding of my thoughts around these things, so do if interested follow the links at the end of this post.

See also:

The split

The tear

Tapes

Edges

Paper

Knots

Stitched, dashed or dotted lines

Mark Bradford