Figure-Ground Relationships

Figure-ground relationships are usually thought of as gestalt principles and one cannot be perceived except in relation to the other. When I used to teach on the visual communications stream of the foundation course, an exploration of figure-ground relationships was one of the basic exercises we set for students and designers in particular use an awareness of these issues as an essential tool. Simon C. Page's posters for the Batman comic series 'Criminal Underworld', being an excellent contemporary example. 

Simon C Page

If the figure ground relationship is one where equal weight is given to either reading, the mind constantly switches between one and the other, thus activating a static image. A trick often used by poster designers or by Cubist artists, as below.

Georges Braque: Woman with two faces

Figure–ground thinking is central to the psychology of perception and is vital to our ability to recognise objects through vision. In Gestalt psychology it is known as a process that helps us to identify a figure and pick it out from the background; an activity that is harder than you might think. The images above rely on an alternation between two mutually exclusive perceptual states, an awareness of which is also referred to as bistable perception. Finding images that sit on this edge can be a very important issue for an artist, especially if what you are trying to do is to keep an image 'alive'. The flicker between one possibility and another, in effect gives life to the image as a whole.
Salvador Dali related this to what he called the paranoiac-critical method. This concept was one derived from Andre Breton's idea that in Surrealism objects could be thought of not as a fixed external things but also as extensions of our subjective selves. When creating an image that illustrates this idea however, an artist needs to use a process that can result in a double or ambiguous image, one that can be read as one thing or another. As an object or as an extension of our inner psyche.

Dali: Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach

Dali's 'Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach', is an example of his paranoiac-critical method, a process that at its core led to visual ambiguity. The image oscillates between a human face and a fruit dish.

Abstract artists can also use this ambiguity. Victor Vasarely in particular was very fond of these figure / ground illusions.

Keple Gestalt: Victor Vasarely

We are in effect playing with 'border regions' which in visual perception are the transition points between objects and the background in an image. Our ability to identify these borders and assign them to the correct object is a fundamental part of vision, it enables us to 'see' what is out there. This process is also called border ownership, and it's essential for object recognition and understanding the visual scene.

Alaska Geographic logo

Figure-ground illusions, as in the Raven-Bear image above, illustrate how border regions become grouped together with the object that is perceived, even as the figure and ground reverse. This gestalt totality results in heightened neuronal activity as these borders are perceived in conjunction with the overall image that is also being perceived. This requires a rapid global analysis of the entire scene involving the coupling of masses of neurons, which are collectively seeking out clues for both plasticity and meaning. (What it is and what it represents). Thousands of synapses and neurons are simultaneously contributing to the complex cognitive operations required by our minds to try and solve these types of puzzles, and we intuitively feel this in our bodies, as far more energy is involved in dealing with ambiguity than certainty.

In my work looking at how to visualise interoceptual experiences, I'm very aware that these experiences are often ambiguous and therefore I have been looking at this area of gestalt psychology as a possible solution to some of the issues I have been facing, especially as to how to maintain the feeling tone that comes from a real life experience in a static image.

A face in the clothes

I think this can be something found out in the world as well as in a drawn image. The 'discovery' of a face within a pile of clothes in an old photograph of mine, shows that Andre Breton's idea that objects could be thought of as extensions of our subjective selves, still has traction. In drawn images about embodied feelings, a certain ambiguity as to figure/ground relationships, can again help heighten visual tension and thus help carry a more accurate sense of a feeling tone. For instance when I was thinking about breathing and how closely our lungs relate to a tree's dendritic structure, it was an obvious move to link the two images and to try and make an image that sat between both.

Lung / tree

This works both ways and when drawing a landscape you can suggest it is alive and breathing by the way you place and shape trees.

Tree lungs within a landscape (detail)

Entrusted with carnival business: Pen and ink wash: 112 x 50 in

In my drawing, 'Entrusted with carnival business', I wanted to show that a local park was in effect the 'lungs' of the area. In the 'Mythic landscape' drawing, there was an attempt to fuse together the concept of our emergence from a female principle, that was both a body and a landscape. 

Mythic landscape: Charcoal on paper: 16 x 23 in

Embodied landscape: Pen and ink, watercolour and ceramic: 72 x 60 in

The embodied landscape drawing above was an attempt to fuse landscape, body and memory together. The landscape that flows from the embodied hills being one reconstructed from memory, as was the ceramic octopus, which was a reconstruction of a child's toy, something that was important to myself when I lived in that landscape when I was growing up. Memories inhabit the body, just places are engraved into old maps and that feeling of inhabiting a body, never leaves us until of course we die.

The flow between an external view of a body and how we see a landscape is something I have tried to depict several times. Some embodied feelings are not so straight forward, but their images can be designed to still use a certain amount of 'bistable perception', just enough to make the observer have to use a little more energy to try to 'see' what is there and as they do perhaps to 'inhabit' the image on their own terms.

Embodied feeling of a failing knee: Felt tip, watercolour and ink: 11 x 16 in

The image of a knee above was made after talking to an old school friend, who like myself is now retired and his knees were going. I made several images of our conversations and he has since had his knees replaced, but the whole experience in effect gave him a mountain to climb. For a while each knee became for him the centre of his perceptual world, the pain blotting out the rest of the landscape. 

A drawing from a series of images about tinnitus 

When I was working with people who had tinnitus, I began making images that were an attempt to visualise an invisible or non-existent force invading the inside of the head, such as the one above. Gradually the drawings of heads became more like landscapes, but not the ones typically produced by European artists, more in my mind like those made by the original inhabitants of Australia.

A working image exploring how to depict an individual experience of tinnitus

Bandak Nym: 1959/60

The 'figure/ground' images made by Aboriginal Australians of "The Dreaming" evolved out of an animist creation narrative and can be understood as belonging to a "timeless time" of formative creation. They are not fixed images, more like maps used to work out where you are both physically and psychically. Their work effortlessly fuses different viewpoints together and I owe a deep debt to a culture I have never witnessed but whose continuing existence reminds me that there have been and always will be many alternative ways of depicting our various realities.

Perhaps the most constant figure-ground or dual image in my work over this time has been that of the body / landscape. We sometimes think of our bodies as small things that inhabit an ever expanding landscape but when we begin to have to focus on our insides, such as during a time of illness, our bodies become the totality of the world we live in. There is of course a flow between the two views, at one moment I stumble and a pain in my foot becomes the centre of my attention and a few moments later, a rumbling sound in the distance takes up all of my perceptual energy, as I try to work out if a storm is coming my way.

Stomach awareness

In the image above I was trying to construct a representation of the feelings that emerge from my stomach. From hunger to nagging indigestion, via rumblings of nervous responses to facing difficult issues, my stomach seems to digest emotional feelings as much as food. It is a complex thing and I never see it, I only feel it, unless of course I have a nasty accident.

Storm clouds with lightening

It is no accident that we think of the adjective 'rumbling' to describe both a stomach or a storm.
I have returned to how to depict this, as well as finding images for my chest and breathing issues many times and if the images are to operate as I want them to, they need to sit on a fence between figure and ground, if not they become too static and cannot breathe or as in the case of the stomach, be able to communicate the movement of peristaltic waves. In Chinese medicine a stomach ache might be described as a malignant wind. 'Feng', the Chinese word for 'wind', has a wider meaning, as an invisible power that works in a way similar to how a howling wind bends a tree. It can 'blow' diseases through the body that result in aches, sickness, tremors, headaches, dizziness or fever and it can operate both internally and externally. An internal imbalance of energy or an external confusion created by a too complex environment may receive similar treatments, in both cases treatments would look to ways to induce calm.

A flow of embodied energies

As always a balance is required, total stillness may be due to death and the flicking/ticking of awareness is a good sign of life. However too sedentary or too active lives become stressful; so take a deep breath and whilst you engage with what's going on, watch how the world flips from one reading to another.

Reference:

Fields, R.D., Araque, A., Johansen-Berg, H., Lim, S.S., Lynch, G., Nave, K.A., Nedergaard, M., Perez, R., Sejnowski, T. and Wake, H., (2014) Glial biology in learning and cognition. The neuroscientist, 20(5), pp.426-431.

See also:

Illusion

Drawings as aesthetic transducers 

What is embodiment?

Seeing patterns in random events

Abstraction Mathematics and metaphor 

Drawing observational oscillations

The spiral

The edges of drawings and things

I gave a talk recently to the Drawing Research Network, it was their 2025 conference entitled: 'Drawing Negation: Emergence' and was part of an online symposium. 

This is how my talk was introduced in the blurb that advertised what was going to be delivered:

Garry Barker’s presentation, 'The Emergence of Distinction in the Visualisation of Interoception: Drawing as a Boundary-Making Act', will explore the parallels between the inception of drawing as a distinction between one thing and something else, the evolution of human territoriality, and the conceptualisation of the universe’s origin. It argues that during workshops designed to help participants visualise interoceptual experiences; that it became important to develop an understanding of drawing as a primary act of distinction. Defining a somatic feeling is linked to the introduction of fundamental mathematical logic and biological processes observed in nature. By examining the philosophical underpinnings of Spencer-Brown’s 'Laws of Form' alongside the evolutionary context of boundary-making in animals, and the visualisation of embodied thinking through drawing, this presentation seeks to articulate how drawing reflects an intrinsic human impulse to mark territory and create meaning from the void of our own bodies.

The presentation posits the significant parallels between the moment a drawing begins, the territorial nature of human and animal existence, and our understanding of the inception of the universe itself and that the mark making that lies at the centre of the act of drawing, is in its most elemental form, a distinction-making process.

Using images made in response to the visualisation of interoceptual experiences, alongside images of mathematical set theory and animal territorial marking, the presentation will unfold relationships that are designed to illustrate how an evolution of signalling, from unicellular organisms to human art forms, reflects an intrinsic animal as well as material need to mark distinctions as we attempt to articulate our existence within the universe.

Reading the introduction again after a few weeks makes me cringe, but the core of what I was going to talk about is there. I was trying to get at some sort of ontological core, an attempt to look at what underlies certain types of abstract thinking and to suggest that deep down underneath their conception lies some form of reality that stems from how things are. In particular I was thinking about the idea of edges between things and boundaries.

A long time ago I put up a blog post about edges, which was where at the time my thinking was and as I've moved on somewhat since then, thought it time to revisit a pretty fundamental question, where are the edges of a drawing? A question that is inseparable from another one; where are the edges of anything?

This is not as simple a question as it might seem and in my presentation I explored the idea of a drawing's edges being about boundaries and I further argued that boundaries were themselves concepts that had emerged from the evolution of all animal species. So what did I mean?

Diagram of an amoeba

In my drawing of an amoeba above I have used a dashed line to define its edges, rather than a continuous one. This is to suggest that an amoeba's boundaries are permeable. If not the amoeba would not be able to catch food and eat it, it would also not be able to remove waste. On the other hand if it had no boundaries it would simply dissolve out into the water it lives within. We are as a biological entity, very similar to the amoeba and we also need to bring certain things into our bodies, such as air and nutrients as well as have ways to remove waste materials. Our bodies are constantly being interpenetrated by sweat, urine, liquids, food, faeces, snot, air, wax and mucus, there being a constant going into and coming out of the world into which we are embedded. 

I thought this diagram of the body was interesting, as it transforms it into a flat rectangle. It is now in essence no different to a sheet of paper. All drawings of the body flatten it out, but they often include visual clues that remind us that the body is in reality a three dimensional object. Greenberg reminded us that when engaged in making art on a flat surface, any form of illusion designed to make us think that what we are looking at is 'real', is in effect a lie. I suspect therefore that he would have far preferred the drawing of the body above to the one below.

Max Brodel: The throat

I have written about Max Brodel's work in an earlier post and I commented upon his attempts to give heightened realism to his images by developing unique methods of textural manipulation, so that his surfaces resembled the 'wetness' of our insides. These images in effect 'suck us into' the paper on which they are made. We are pulled through the paper's boundary by an act of illusion. 

However information still needs to flow in and out of a drawing and as its edges are where it meets the rest of the world, we can in our minds, begin to see a close analogy with the amoeba drawing above, as well as with the flattened out image of the body's various systems whereby it interacts with the exterior world. 

Every drawing sits within the world

As it is looked at a drawing is constantly in some sort of exchange with the perceiver and the surrounding world. There will also, as in any communication, be a lot of wastage, whether we like it or not. What interests me in this instance, is the fact that what is percolating in and out of the drawing is often unknown, but you sense it is something. The drawing is in effect changing the world, just as the drawing's situation in the world changes it. 

The space between the edge of a drawing and the world

Deridda has written extensively about the space between the edge of a drawing and the surrounding 'real' world and he uses the term ‘the parergon’ to describe it. He understands this space as one that is always coming “against or beside, the work that has been done", he states that "it touches and cooperates within the operation, from a certain outside, but neither simply outside nor simply inside”. He uses, after looking at drapery and colonnades, an example of the frame to explain what he means. (Derrida, p. 24, 1979) The space indicated by a frame being the boundary between the way we think about art and the way we act within the world. In my 'frame' drawing above, the space/frame includes traces of the marks I used to indicate various passages between a drawing and its environment, the space/frame being activated by the exchanges. 

Edges are strange things. As I look around me I see a table top, it has edges, the sort that are defined by an abrupt change in direction. My eyes sweep horizontality across the desk surface,  and then as I come to its edges, each one stops with a dramatic vertical drop. This experience is a common one associated with furniture. On the table top is a laptop computer. It too is seen to lie in a horizontal plane and has a vertical drop at the edges of its now closed screen, but the  drop is no more than a centimetre, therefore I see the laptop as belonging in some way to the table, it sits within a shallow space that appears to unify several other items that are also lying on the table. A book, some sheets of paper, an old I-pod. They are all rectangular and have edges. Their horizontality is defined by the table top, if the table top had been raised on one side to form a steep angle, all of these objects would also have had to follow suit, until they began to slide down the table top and fell onto the floor. They are also all perceptually permeable. Each one acting in a slightly different manner as it interacts with the wider world. 

For instance the book is something that as an object can be opened and closed. It is clearly entitled 'Picasso's Animals'. As I open it I'm faced with a text about Picasso's relationship with goats. For his 75th birthday he wanted a goat and although one did not arrive on his actual birthday, two did eventually materialise. Why do I remember this, perhaps because it is my 75th birthday this week and I have had great difficulty thinking about what people could get me. A goat was not on my birthday list and if I had put one on it I doubt if anyone would have responded. Once closed the book presents me with an image of a Picasso drawing of an owl, its eyes made from a photographic collage of cut out human eyes,  eyes that I suspect came from a cut up photograph of himself. The book is an object with very clear boundaries or edges, but it is leaking into my mind, because my perceptual apparatus embraces it within a visual and tactile framework, that is wired into all my brain's existing preconceptions. 

The lap top computer is now open, it has to be open so that I can type the words I'm typing. I had to break or cross a boundary to get in. I needed to put in a password on opening the computer by raising its lid, which itself contains its screen. It's edges or boundaries appear to be very different to the book. It is linked to invisible things such as the Internet and an electricity supply. I can push a memory stick into one of its ports and pull information out of it and interact with it myself directly by pushing down on the various keys in front of me. Like the book I can read text as it appears on the screen, as I do from an open page, but I can also create text, as I do now. I am sucked into the interface by a variety of engaging interactive components and it feels even more porous than the book. It not only seems to leak into my mind, it seems to be feeling out other minds too, this blog page, will as soon as it is published be available to all sorts of people, many of whom I have never met. 

There is a drawing on the desk, it is drawn on an open right side notebook page and sits next to couple of written notes that were made on the left hand page. The writing states:

He will live on in memories.

Order sealing wax. 

To send off a skimming stone for Oscar. 

Ken tells me Oscar is dead.
He does not publicly mourn his son.

The writing reminds me of something I need to do. A private ritual that will mean nothing to anyone else but myself. The words on that page, leaving the table and yet not leaving the table. They can be read by others but without an understanding of the full context. It's getting dark and I'm going to stop typing for a while, I shall return tomorrow morning and when I do, as I walk into the room I will again see these items lying on a table top, initially inert, reserved within their respective boundaries, their edges though begin fraying, as soon as I enter the room.

The edges of these things are their surfaces, but most surfaces when you get very close to them become full of holes. In particular paper is extremely perforated. 

Microscopic view of a 'flat' paper surface

In order to contain an image, we often put a frame around it. The frame reinforces our awareness of the edge in two directions. A frame puts glass or transparent perspex material over the top surface of a drawing and a wooden surround around its four edges. The surface acts as a type of boundary membrane, but so do the edges, which can also be seen as a type of boundary. In fact if we hold up the drawing within a frame such as those devised by Lina Bo Bardi, we can see clearly that the back of a drawing is also permeable to our gaze. 

Lina Bo Bardi: Glass easels

As I have already pointed out, Derrida used the word 'parergon' to define a sort of "supplement" to the main thing. Think in this case of a drawing being the main thing and its frame a secondary object. However Derrida being Derrida, decides that this relationship between the core and the periphery can be reversed. The supplement, the outside or secondary object, can be seen to be the centrepiece. Without a frame, the thing framed "cannot distinguish itself from itself". In my mind Derrida's frame is a sort of psychic space around an object that allows it to be itself and yet also interact with the rest of the world. This is the amoeba solution. Its boundaries need to be permeable. If not the object or drawing or thing, would not be able to nourish or maintain itself and if it had no boundaries it would simply dissolve into the surrounding environment. This is I realise another animist interpretation, but as a materialist, everything has I believe at some point to be able to merge and interconnect with everything else. 
Derrida as a writer often thinks of things as bookish realities, at one point describing the parergon as a book's liminal text. A liminal space is one such as a doorstep, a place between things, a space you need to pass through in order to get from one space to another. It can be thought of as a mediator, something that helps us to become engaged with the main event. In Derrida's mind perhaps a title, a foreword, a preface or even an index or commentary. In this case the help may become a far more potent item than the original text, by being more succinct and therefore more understandable, the supplement now becoming the driver. Lina Bo Bardi's glass easels are sometimes more visually powerful than the drawings or paintings they are meant to display, by framing the artworks in a new way, we are encouraged to approach them differently, we may for instance spend as much time exploring the back of an image as its front.

 

Thinking about the edge of things, eventually opens out an issue about 'thingness'. The idea of a thing is that it is separate from other things. But as I have pointed out, all things are in constant interconnection. Communication between things suggests that the edges of things are always frayed and that things bleed into one another. If we get close enough to things we can see how porous they really are, all living things requiring points for the surrounding world's entry and exit and all inorganic matter needing to engage in the quantum flux of spacetime, which enfolds everything in its various energy fields. The edge is therefore a boundary that is in reality simply an idea, a concept that allows us to decide where one thing begins and ends, rather than it being any sort of fixed reality. 

We should never forget that when animals set out to define their territory, that boundary within which they live most of their lives, many of them do so by using their body's waste products, either defalcating or urinating to mark out the perimeters. The micro project of an amoeba, becoming an evolutionary reinvention on a macro scale. Once a territory is defined an animal can begin to think about doing other things, as they are no longer having to constantly think about how to defend borders, their olfactory signs doing that for them. Perhaps these signs can be thought of as first drawings, being both markers and definitions of physical space, that are also intimations of a creature's need for a mental space within which to do something more than just survive. 

Rhino marking territory

Reference:

Derrida, J. & Owens, C. (1979)The Parergon October, Vol. 9 (Summer, 1979), pp. 3-41 (39 pages) https://doi.org/10.2307/778319

A recording of the Drawing Research online symposium, where you can listen to the talks given, including my own.

See also:

Edges

More on Lina Bo Bardi

Trapping and Framing

Stitched dashed or dotted lines

Paper, mobile phones and fingertips

Interoceptual portraits

I have been taking the work on interoception into another area, that of portraiture. I have for many years been fascinated by Oscar Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' a late nineteenth century Gothic novel, whereby the deeds perpetrated by an evil man, are reflected in the changes made to the features of a hidden portrait, rather than to the face of the man who perpetrated the deeds. At that time there was much interest in physiognomy, the art of judging character from facial characteristics and in response to this, Wilde developed an idea based on a sort of reverse engineering, whereby you can measure the depth of depravity that someone is sinking into by watching their face transform over the years. If only this were true. I can still remember the first time I saw the Ivan Albright painting he made for the film 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'. In the 1945 Albert Lewin directed film, the first part had included two colour inserts of a painting made of the youthful handsome Dorian Gray (in reality painted by Henrique Medina) and then later in the film you had two frightening technicolour reveals of Albright's degenerate image of what in reality Gray had become.  Albright's painting would haunt me from then on. 

Dorian Gray by Henrique Medina 1944

Ivan Albright Picture of Dorian Gray: 1944

I thought I saw glimpses of Albright's insight into the human condition in Francis Bacon's work and I was reminded of this when an artist I had been working with in conjunction with an Italian artist to develop ideas for interoceptual portraits, sent me a Simon Shama quote; ‘What Bacon liked about George Dyer was not the assembly of features… what he liked was the inside of him and the way that pressed against the outside, the whole slithery jumble of a person’.

Francis Bacon: Study for a portrait of George Dyer

The phrase, "The whole slithery jumble of a person". struck home, and when it came to my own recent self-portrait, I found myself dealing with disintegrating forms alongside a colour struggle using complementary opposites, both ideas being used to build a psychological idea of an inner duality.

Interoceptual Self portrait

The two artists I have been working with have just sent me some objects through the post, which was a way of getting some sort of physical contact into a situation whereby we have been trying to make images of each other via computer screens. There is something much more authentic about touch and even though we are all three separated by many miles, the few objects that I can hold in the hand and pick up to look at, close those geographical distances right down to the surface of my fingers. Our portraits of each other have been developing over the years. But this time we sent objects and images to act as some sort of catalyst or stimulus to the making. As always these things are as much self-portraits as portraits of others, but the process of an image's arrival is always intriguing. In the case of the image I made responding to the objects in one parcel, I first of all glued down a shirt pattern that was enclosed and then I responded to the same artist's mono-print of a skull. As I was working between several things in the studio, I on purpose didn't think deeply about what I was making, I just kept doing stuff. As Johns put it, "do something and then do something else", or something like that. I.e. keep responding and making things happen and only later go back and see if anything works or not. 

Portrait of myself made whilst thinking of making a portrait of another English artist

Portrait of myself made whilst thinking of making a portrait of an Italian artist 

There is as you can hopefully see in the image above, a strange form emerging from the head of the figure. It is like a shell and has a red rose like form sitting over what would in a more conventional portrait be the brow. It is the product of one of our exchanges, but as always there is very little logic in my image development process. One of the things I was sent from Italy was a small nest like object, it was made of fabric, wrapped in rusty wire and other metal pieces and in its centre was a plaster form, its shape like a pebble brain. My artist corespondent had made a metaphor for her brain. I had sent to her a pair of ceramic legs that I had modelled on an idea of the hut of the Baba Yaga, which is always in illustrated books depicted as a hut carried on giant chicken legs. Without the legs the hut would just be a hut, but with them it became something fabulous. I had sent these legs to both my artist collaborators because I wanted them to think about using the legs to make something of their own fabulous, in the old sense of the word, as something magical, mythical or relating to a fable. When I looked at the nest I realised I needed to put it on similar legs, as I did it became alive and it took over my image making process. It had invoked some form of sympathetic magic.

Portraits of an artist's brain as a mythical creature

Part of my research into the raising of awareness of interoceptual feelings has been to look at the work of illustrators who have been working to visualise its importance. A really good example was the illustrative work of Abby VanMuijen and after looking it, I decided that she had already done some excellent work that focused on the core issues involved and decided therefore that I didn't need to retread the same path, but would continue to push for some sort of visual synthesis between my own more idiosyncratic language and the diagrams of emotional range and pain awareness that I had also been looking at. I was particularly interested in the fact that she kept the same image as an underpinning form and changed the colour to fit the emotional movement.

Abby VanMuijen

I therefore decided to try a similar approach; initially taking my interoceptual self portrait and changing the colour palette to see if I could demonstrate an emotional shift, but combining emotions to see if it was possible to communicate that ever morphing sense of life's instability and constant change.

Surprise and disapproval 

Anger and remorse

Acceptance and sadness

Interoceptual self portraits with colour changes suggesting mood swings

The initial image has a much more nuanced colour range, colours push against each other, my experience being that our emotional range shifts and moves in a complex manner. If like Abby VanMuijen I push the colour range into the primaries, emotion changes but it is simplified, therefore I have decided to look at complex mixes. 

Robert Plutchik, the colour wheel of emotions

I'm gradually bringing my ideas together but as always I'm not quite sure what I'm doing, mainly feeling for something rather that following a logical path. I have looked at Robert Plutchik's work for a while now and although I can see all sorts of problems with it, it does open a door for me, so why not I thought step through it? 

See also:

Body auras

Measuring emotions and colour

Is drawing a language?

To Touch is to believe

Portrait as witness and control

What is a portrait?

The Lamed Vavniks

Drawing out from within

Desire lines

Drawings are made both consciously and unconsciously, and not always with our hands or by humans. Some drawings are traces of repeated activity and desire paths fall into this category. 

A desire path

Richard Long's walked lines are another type of desire path, but this time with an aesthetic intent. However these lines are not just things that humans make.  A game path is a naturally occurring pathway made by animals. 

A game path

A human/animal desire path heading towards water

Desire lines are paths that speak of wanting to get places or do things and the more we realise animals like ourselves are emotional beings that also have desires, perhaps we can develop an understanding of a reality that links together the lives of animals and humans. It’s been suggested that fifteen journeys are all that’s required to designate a fresh desire path, but I would suggest all that is really needed is one animal to go off in one new direction. Once that has happened, others will follow. However the faint trace of another life moving ahead before us, perhaps offers grace rather than instruction; in the sense that grace is a sort of undeserved favour, a path resulting from another's adventurous spirit, being in effect a gift.

There is a certain timeline to the evolution of the road system. Roads have evolved from animal tracks; first the animals wear down the vegetation, then humans follow these tracks on foot. In another era humans will ride these paths on horse-back before eventually widening them as track ways for horse-drawn carriages and then eventually in times much closer to now, they will have become metalled roads for cars. Eventually what were desire lines become fixed by an ordnance survey as roads on a map.

I've recently returned from West Wittering and we foolishly decided to let the sat nav direct us back to Leeds and we had a very strange journey, it was almost as if the sat nav was arbitrarily deciding which roads to take. It reminded me of being a boy and staring at maps and wondering where those roads might take me and what sorts of experiences they might lead to. The idea that following a road can lead to self-discovery or mystical transformation is a common theme in literature and philosophy. It suggests that the journey, both physical and metaphorical, can be a powerful catalyst for personal growth and spiritual awakening, in particular, the concept of the "road less traveled," means that venturing off the beaten path can lead to unique insights and experiences. Following a road may lead us to discover a lost part of ourselves or help us to undergo a mystical transformation. Each desire line when begun, is indeed a newly beaten path, taking its maker into spaces as yet untrodden.

The road systems of England

In our present time, desire paths are made when we step off Google map and let our intuition decide our fate. They seek out connections between where we are and where we wish to be. Instead of being worn into shape by the pressure of passing feet, they are perhaps unique connections being made between information sets, or possibilities being seen for the first time; they’re indications that there is another way. A desire path is also a trace, often left behind because of someone following an impulse; or a desire to find a new territory. 

Animal paths

If we reverse engineer a road, we might at some point come back to its past existence as an animal track. Most animals are territorial. They walk between places to feed, to drink, to rest and to find others. The landscape itself will direct which route to take, as it provides trees and rocks to move around, gentler and steeper slopes, trees as rain cover or grasses to eat on the way. In effect the landscape wraps itself round the animal. The desire lines animals follow are also in effect, like the lines of an animal 'Wyrd', whereby the invisible lines of each animal's psyche are wrapped around the world as they pass through it and as they do the animal's destiny is woven. The word wyrd comes from the Proto-Germanic word 'wurđiz', a noun derived from the verb werþanan, meaning "to become". As we pass through life we become who we are, this is our fate. This Anglo-Saxon concept, still seems to myself to make sense, like all animals, our life lines are inextricably entangled into the world we inhabit. 

Desire is what shapes us; as we are shaped we begin to define ourselves and to do this we use tools, one of which is the mirror. The mirror allows us to see ourselves from the outside, in effect we become part of the landscape we inhabit. Like all the landscapes we traverse, we can change them by stepping off the desire paths we have chosen and starting a new one. One desire line can be our hair parting and by simply changing the 'normal' line of parting taken by our hair, we can in effect change our personality. 

Hair parting lines

There is a widespread cultural belief concerning how hair partings change a person’s looks. The general consensus seems to be that parting on one’s left makes a person look competent and masculine, whereas parting on the right makes a person look warm and feminine. In the Christopher Reeves Superman films when he was acting the Clark Kent character, his hair was parted on the right, but when he was Superman, his hair was parted on the left. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to research this and then to persuade the make-up department that this was an essential part of the character transformation.  

Christopher Reeves

For most people, the way you part your hair is instinctive. But there are times in your life when you feel the need to change, just as when you decide to step off the pavement and head out over rough ground to see if you can get to somewhere else. When you do that, eventually the new direction is worn into your path, you in effect own it, it is a sort of 'signature' path.

Desire lines can of course also be found in the markings you make in your own artwork, some drawings reveal traces of repeated activity, certain forms recurring over and over again. 

Theresa Murdza

The wondering wobbly circles that pass through this drawing by Theresa Murdza, are her desire lines. Just as desire paths are ones we take as we walk towards something, these lines are ones made as she draws towards something. Once decided upon and enacted we tend to repeat our journeys, which is why artists tend to repeat the types of marks they make.

Brenda Holzke

As we repeat a mark quality, it becomes a sort of artist's signature. I often draw using pen and ink, the thickening and thinning and hand speed associated with the application of these marks forming my own work's 'desire lines'.

A page from one of my sketchbooks

Paul Klee

Page from Klee's Pedagogical Notebook

As Klee takes his lines for a walk, he is in effect developing 'desire lines'. 

There is a certain timeline to the evolution of types of drawing within the art canon. Approaches to drawing have evolved from one artist to another; first of all one artist will wear down the thick vegetation that surrounds the prevailing approaches to drawing, then other humans will follow these tracks. As more and more artists ride these paths they will eventually widen them so that they become roadways. Just as in the paths we follow out in the wider world; following these roads may lead us to discover a lost part of ourselves or even help us to undergo a mystical transformation. A line can take many paths, some short and some long, some straight and some twisted and as metaphors for life, lines are asked to act out a huge multitude of narratives. Each line has though to be finally cut, or as Milton puts it, "Comes the blind Fury with th'abhorred shears, And slits the thin-spun life". Each line scissored by the Fate Atropos, when its story is complete and its owner has fulfilled their destiny.

See also:

Tim Ingold's 'Lines'

Lines in the road

The weaving of grids

Drawings as entanglements of life

Stitched, dashed or dotted lines