Writing my last post on qualia and visualising consciousness reminded me that I had already looked at some of these issues before. The previous time I was thinking about drawing consciousness I finished my post with a reflection on the landscape drawings I had been making in West Wittering. In particular I was thinking about how landscape drawing could inform and build my personal visual dictionary, from which I could draw imagery when I was looking for forms and shapes that I could relate to interoceptual experiences. I have recently returned from another visit to the same coast and whilst I was there I decided to revisit the same locations I drew from last time, to see if I could find in my approach to the drawings better intimations of walking through a cosmic body, whereby the forms I encountered, suggested that I was passing through a huge entity, in a similar same way to a blood platelet passing through a human body.
I had in my earlier post on drawing consciousness reflected upon the idea that I was also when drawing somatic feelings, at the same time illustrating something about how consciousness itself might be visualised. My consciousness being part of what Jacob von Uexküll called the unwelten or phenomenal world that is specific to my human nature. My ability to sense my own embodiment, is something I automatically transfer into the way I see landscape as I draw, which is itself an activity unique to my particular human shaped organisational structure. My conscious awareness of self, being a forming principle based on an organisational structure, that itself shapes imagination, perception and interoception.
I'll use some sketchbook drawings to try to explain.
I took with me two sketchbooks that I had decided to use for landscape drawing and a third to use when making visual notes visiting cultural sites of interest, such as Chichester cathedral. The sketchbook drawings I'm using to illustrate my point about drawing consciousness are all taken from an A4 size sketchbook that uses Indian rag made watercolour paper. As usual I'm using a dip in pen to draw with, supplemented by diluted inks and in this case the occasional use of liquid graphite.
The first location I sought out was one where on my previous visit I had drawn from a beach littered with the broken concrete remains of what were I think sea defences. This time I took with me coloured inks, making the drawings directly in red ink and then using dilutions of the ink to reinforce a visual connection to my background awareness of human anatomy, such as ribs emerging from a broken body. I had just before leaving for the coast had to deinstall my work that was on exhibition at Salt's Mill. 'The Cosmic Body' was partly made in response to the Zen Buddhist Japanese idea of Kusôzu, in particular the 5th stage of decay, which was often illustrated using an exposed rotting ribcage. The cosmic body suggested that our idea of the universe itself can only in reality be one that is based on our embodied consciousness and that although science states that it can think outside of this box, the fact that consciousness is embodied, I would argue means we can never escape the fact that all the visualisations we make, have to in one way or another reflect that phenomenal world that is specific to my human nature.
As I drew a tree, its roots being exposed by erosion, I was reminded of a body being operated upon, an image in my mind of exposed veins and arteries, causing me to use red ink to visually pull the tree and its roots out of the landscape and to insert it mentally into the landscape/body I was looking for.
During the time I was in west Wittering I filled the sketchbook with coastline images, all of which were in one way or another, attempts to find a syntheses between what I was observing in the external world and what my internal world was telling me . Hopefully the ideas that they conjured up in my mind as I drew them are communicable and that as a reader you can see how when I'm drawing from perception, I'm at the same time drawing from imagination and that observational and imaginative approaches to drawing are fused.
In my previous post on drawing consciousness I pointed out that like myself, Regis and Brigitte Dutheil agree that the mind creates the sensations we become aware of. In this post hopefully I have been able to give a flavour of how I think this works from an artist's point of view. In doing so I also believe that these drawings operate as images of consciousness and that if this is the case, Altdolfer's drawing of a tree would also have to be read as an image of his consciousness too. It is not like any spruce tree I have ever encountered, but it is like other drawings by Altdolfer I have seen. The sensibility that comes through a handmade image, being like a glimpse into another human's consciousness.
See also:
Qualia and visualising consciousness
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