Seeing as drawing: Drawing as seeing

The fusion of hand, face and puppet: A materialist thought

The image above is from a sketchbook, one of many I use to record ideas as they emerge from my head as I draw. I am though also aware as an image emerges, that I remember how other things look as I struggle with what I am trying to visually invent. I have 'seen' things in the past, similar to what I think I'm now in effect, drawing out of the paper before me. For instance as I drew the small Sooty figures that move around the hem or base of the human headed puppet above, I was aware of seeing similar shapes in the past; perhaps not an actual border of small Sooty puppets, but things not too dissimilar to the one coming into being. Tapping into visual memories helped my drawing mind make decisions about how these forms could convincingly be arranged. 

Seeing, or the act of visual perceiving, can be thought of as the product of "intermediate level representations in the visual system" or what has been called by David Marr, (1982), "the 2 1/2-D sketch" He argued that we cant see the totality of the visual information surrounding us, and that instead we construct an idea of the three dimensionality of our surrounds in our mind. The first stage of this representation is interestingly called by Marr 'the raw primal sketch'. Edges, tonal values etc. i.e. things similar to those a drawer is centred on when making a representation of the world, are orientated upon a visual map that reflects the orientation and disposition of surfaces in the world, in relation to the observer's viewpoint. The 'sketch' is though, a 'neural rendering' rather than a pen and ink drawing of what we see. I.e. the 2 1/2 D mind sketch is a 'representation' of how things look. As Alva Noë puts it, (2023, p.35) "It is not a representation of things themselves, or of how things, in any perception-independent way, actually are. It is a mere picture." But when ever has a picture ever been 'mere'? Several writers on vision (Prinz, Riley, Noë, Jackendorf) have highlighted the fact that when looked at this way, how we see the world is very similar to how we construct a drawing of the world. The main difference being that a drawing is where perceived information is processed, coupled with raw materials and then perceived again and therefore must always be a second order body of information. You could easily argue that how a drawing works as an operational model, is virtually exactly the same as the internal model that we use to 'see' the world. The drawing in our mind, like any observational drawing made from physical drawing materials, is an image that is made of selected elements taken from whatever is out there and will have more or less information within it depending on amount of time available to see what's there; lighting conditions, previous understanding of the type of situation etc. etc. Except of course the mind drawing has no actual existence, it is a cognitive mapping, therefore an active complex of neural networks in flow and never a static object that can be pointed to. However the close similarity between how we read a drawing and how visual thinking itself operates, means that a physical drawing can be regarded as a sort of analogy that stands for what is actually going on in the mind. 

The aspect that then becomes even more interesting, (well it does for myself), is then to follow what happens as the activities of drawing and painting expand their use value and move from documentation stemming from observation, on to ideas based on the observations made, and then even further to ideas based on possibilities that stem as much from the material implications of drawing itself, as from the images made possible out of recombinations of memories of previously seen, drawn or painted experiences. I.e. the processes of imagination. If the making of drawings and paintings can be thought of as the materialisation of an extended mind, then each approach to problem solving in image making, could also be regarded as an analogy that could stand for different ways of thinking. In visual languages the move from observation to imagination, is rather akin in verbal languages to a move from a description of events, to the creation of a work of fiction. The recomposing of live experience as imaginative futures, is actually at the core of the way we read every complex of incoming perceptions as a possibility. This means that as we react to experiences, we make images of positive pathways that can be followed for day to day living. Fight or flight being just two very basic directional responses to the possibility any one set of perceptions offers. 

My recent work has been an attempt to represent an older more animist way of thinking, using a avatar based on visual memories of a Sooty puppet that I used to have when I was a child in the 1950s. The drawings, paintings and ceramic sculptures that I have made, respond to the memory of an object and how it operated for myself as a child, as a 'transitional object', or buffer between myself and reality. This idea relates to a materialisation of what I now, looking back through an animist lens, see as a fetish. However it is a concept that has been emerging for a while. I have been trying to visualise a more animist engagement with the world around me for some time. For instance, I have been seeking to make connections with plant life. I spent many hours drawing, trying to form a connection with the vegetation that surrounded me and I still try to do this. My recent training as a permaculture designer being just another attempt to find a way to foster that connection. So let's look at some flower images.

I am trying to build an argument that there is a seamless movement between drawing as perceptual description, to drawing as fictional invention. I believe that it begins as soon as we see something, because we are already inventing as we see. If I take some drawings and compare them it is perhaps easier to understand what I'm getting at. 

Dandelion studies

The drawing above is from an old sketchbook and it documents a time when I was interested in what a dandelion looks like. On the left a seed head and next to it two studies of dandelion flower heads. At first glance they look as if they are accurate records or documentary drawings of things looked at closely, but in fact all three images are fictions based on perceptions. My eyesight isn't as good as it used to be, therefore each image has to be an impression, or a simplification. The drawings are in pen and ink, so they are very much to do with pen and ink possibilities; for instance the line flows as only a line drawn in ink can flow. My focus was on the flower-heads, so nothing else is recorded and therefore the degree of selection and editing is enormous. Above all I was looking at these things with an inner eye, one that was looking for idea potential in the forms of nature. However the drawing is based on experience. I did look at the dandelions in my garden. I picked them and held them up to look at them. There was an exchange of some sort made, between myself and these dandelions and the exchange changed me, by adding to thousands of neural pathway movements, in such a way that the experience was made available for recall.

Detail of flower sculpture made for an installation

I had made a series of sculptures for various exhibitions based on flowers. These sculptures were 'invented' out of clay. However their invention relied a lot on my previous observational drawings of plants. 

The three drawings immediately below are from pages in a sketchbook where I'm playing with ideas that relate to flower heads. The one with a rabbit form beginning to emerge from a flower was drawn as an idea, just as much as the ones further below.

The flower hosting an animal

Thinking of a vessel / closed flower head

Study for a ceramic flower form

The transition from observation to invention is seamless, there being as much invention in an observational drawing of a flower, as there are visual memories of observations made of flowers, and other things, embedded into the invention needed for the making of constructed fictions. 

Drawn from life

An idea emerges of a bird's head from a flower head

Flower bird clay study

One of the several flower hybrids that were installed in Harlow Carr Gardens

Once again I'm reminded of 'disegno', a term involving both the ability to make a drawing and the intellectual capacity to invent a design or visualise an idea. Some of the skills needed in order to draw are developed by constant drawing from observation, and then the skills that have been acquired are used to invent and to visualise possibilities. By practicing these skills, these in turn become more refined and focused on the realisation and visualisation of invented form.

A sharp eyed hunter is 'sharp eyed' because he or she is always looking and noticing things that help in the understanding of possible future scenarios. This is perhaps a form of drawing without needing to draw. 

 

Drawing can be seen as a model for the act of looking itself, therefore it can also be thought of as an analogy for looking. This implies that aesthetics ought to be regarded as being at the forefront of philosophical thinking. How a drawing looks being a model for how a thought is seen. 

References 

Jackendorf, R. (1987) Consciousness and the Computational Mind Cambridge: MIT Press

Marr, D. (1982) Vision San Francisco: W. H. Freeman

Noë, A. (2023) The Entanglement: How art and philosophy make us what we are Oxford: Princeton

Prinz, J. (2012) The Conscious Brain: How attention engenders consciousness Oxford: OUP

Riley, H., (2021). A contemporary pedagogy of drawing. Journal of Visual Art Practice, 20(4), pp.323-349.

See also:

From perception to concept: Why draw

Drawings as aesthetic transducers 

Visualising energy flow

Drawing and philosophy 

Drawing at art school a symposium 

More on perception and research

Drawings as aesthetic transducers

Energy field as battery: Final stage

My own artwork sometimes has direct academic spin offs. My musings in relation to what I'm trying to communicate through my drawings, help me to sort my head out in relation to what I think I might be doing. I recently had a paper rejected that I had submitted to a drawing journal about the idea of drawings as types of battery or as I put it aesthetic transducers. I can see why it was rejected, but as an example of how I think as an artist, rather than as an academic, it is useful, if only to myself. Anyway here it is:

Abstract

 

Drawings as aesthetic transducers

 

All drawings are engraved with life and movement is a sign of life. If existence is regarded as an interconnected totality then there is no clear divide between things such as drawings, people, minerals, plant life, animal lives, chemical exchanges, weather patterns, gravity, sunlight, and the use of a particular muscle to hold a pen in order to make a mark. These things are all events within a constant flow of movements that are interconnected with each other. Central to how these events fit together are energy exchanges, such as electro-magnetic to chemical energy or chemical to mechanical energy. This paper argues that drawings can be regarded as sites of energy exchange, and that movement in relation to drawing can be understood both as a physical record and as a deep metaphor, by thinking of drawings as aesthetic transducers. Drawings it is argued can convert different forms of energy flow into compressed energy fields that can be stored in a similar way to a battery. The movement and distribution of these energies, it is further argued is continued as drawings are looked at; their stored energies released within the visible light spectrum of electro-magnetic radiation fields, is converted into the electrochemical activity that flows through human minds. Reflecting on the process of walking through the world and drawing it, it is argued that an objective drawing concerned with visual perception can embrace both phenomenological and symbolical understandings, and the images produced can be seen to operate both as transducers and as charged batteries.

 

Drawings as aesthetic transducers

 

Drawing communicates as a simultaneity; everything, the materials, the image and the way it is drawn, all these things can be seen and perceived at once, a wholeness which is in itself a deep metaphor for existence. Because of this, when making an observational drawing of the perceived world around us, drawing can be a wonderful means of capturing a flow of ideas and percepts within a material framework; one that externalises thought and coheres it within the frame of a small sheet of paper. In this paper two small A3 size drawings will be put forward as examples for the way that drawing can both capture movement and be itself a metaphor for movement as the essence of life, experience and existence.

 

A fundamental connection between human beings and drawings is that both pass on previous experiences. Cells know how to put a body together and to be able to do this, they have to have some form of memory of how they have to shape their reality; as they divide in the way they do, experience is passed on. Jablonka and Lamb (1998, p. 160) explain in detail how memory systems enable somatic cells to transmit their phenotypes to their descendants. The existence of these systems mean that memory begins for human beings in their bodies, or more precisely that their bodies are the product of memories. Could it be that humans like drawings are an idea that can be passed on? If so, this is a concept about how formal principles are translated and read and if that is right, we are involved with ‘aesthetics’; an aesthetics concerned with inbuilt necessity, patterns that are found in the structure of the basic elements that make up our world.  This requires a way of thinking about aesthetics that explores the capacity for movement or possible change in relation to art forms, rather than looking for principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty. The resultant aesthetic would be one of connection rather than the appreciation of an isolated object; the beauty of any situation being concerned with its processes of attraction for other forces and the 'rightness' of its relationships. Therefore it could be argued that it is in the joints between things, and in an awareness of how connections are made that the values of this aesthetic domain lie. 

This situation or situatedness (a theoretical position that posits that the mind is ontologically and functionally intertwined with the body, environmental, social, and cultural factors), also means that ideas themselves have to be aligned with material forces not just by being sensitive to the possibilities that any material offers, but in a sense that ideas are ‘driven’ by their material nature and their use value is dependent upon how they can reveal a possibility or understanding of a relationship within any identified complex of interrelatedness. If our bodies are formed of inherited memories, the products of our bodies, if we take on the implications of embodied thinking, therefore take on similar characteristics, i.e. drawings are in many ways like ourselves. Drawings entangled as they are in their making with our bodies, bear a one to one relationship with our hands, our eyes and our minds, and life itself, therefore movement is inscribed by one into the other.

 

Everything is changing constantly, movement is an essential aspect of being, it is a fundamental quality shared by all living organisms and if we regard the universe as a complex matrix of energy flows, then movement is found everywhere and within everything. It is only the limited nature of our human perception that stops us appreciating this fact, but at both sub-atomic and at universal scales, movement manifested as flows of energy underpins everything. However for energy to manifest itself at a human level, it needs to be converted into forms that we can perceive and interact with. For instance the radiant energy that comes from the sun is converted by plants into chemical energy by photosynthesis, this chemical energy is stored in plants and released into our bodies on eating, which is in turn converted via our muscles into mechanical energy. (Kiang, Siefert and Blankenship, 2007, p. 224). This movement of mainly invisible energy is both a deep symbol for an interconnected flowing existence and is a reality that impacts on any attempt of a drawer to make visible invisible forces.

 

Drawings are records of intertwined physical and mental entanglements with the world. They capture traces of our body’s movements; and are like ourselves, embodied entities, entities that can also be regarded as externalised thoughts. As you look at the drawings discussed in this paper you can mentally envisage the dip-in pen that was held between fingers and then dipped into a changing series of pigments suspended in liquids. You can re-trace the time of each drawing's making, by reflecting on the spaces between marks, how they differ due to their speed of application and number in relation to the surface coverage. A drawing is a physical, material idea and as such is a reminder of our own and the world's material agency. But to become what they are, they have to be filtered out of the complex matrix of the world by certain sensors and these sensors are by their very nature also transducers or energy converters.

 

Drawing as an energy converter

 

A sensor is a type of transducer (Trietley, 2019), typically an electrical current can be converted into mechanical energy that can be read as a moving arrow on a mechanical gauge. We can think of a drawing in the same way. The visual experience of a drawing is received in the form of light energy, which is itself a kind of kinetic energy (Petersen, 2014) that makes light visible to human eyes. Light itself is a form of electromagnetic radiation emitted by hot objects like the sun or a light bulb. Visual experience is converted via our bodies into electro-chemical data, which can be stored and retrieved and made sense of within a series of mechanisms that have evolved over millions of years as survival mechanisms. One of which is what we now call ‘imagination’, or the ability to hold in our minds a concept that allows us to predict possibilities and these mental possibilities are used by us to make decisions and actions that usually result in electro-chemical energy being converted into mechanical energy. (Chi and Snyder, 2011) However human beings are by nature collective creatures and this mental screen is only available to internal scrutiny. If a collective decision is to be made something needs to be done to externalise information. In the same way that information about an electric current is made visible by an arrow moving across a dial, this invisible information can be visualised as a drawing.

The diagram below illustrates how a drawing sits between the field of observation and the perceiver. As the experience of looking is captured, the drawing in effect becomes a battery, holding ‘image energy’ within itself, so that it can be released as visible energy via an observer’s eyes.

Figure 1: A drawing made from observation seen as a battery.

 

In order to mark the surface that sits between the field of observation and the observer, the mechanical energy of arm movements, finger pressure and wrist rotation create physical traces that in turn form chemical bonds with the paper. These traces also create a framework for mental images to form out of the mass of marks they leave, marks that as the eyes move back from the picture surface, cohere to realise to an observer’s brain imaginative concepts. The resultant image operates both as a sensor; recording the various arm and hand movements made and as a transducer, translating various energies into drawn marks on paper, that are in image form compacted into a very thin paper battery.

There are however several other transpositions that are going on at the same time, each one requiring input and output energies in order to be realised.

 

Gabor Maté (2009) pointed out that a deep understanding of a complex situation is impossible from any one perspective and that complexity needs to be viewed simultaneously from many different viewpoints. He also reminds us that whilst examining a situation from one angle we need to keep the others in mind. As the creator of the drawing, I am a biological entity that is inseparable from it. In biology cilia are membrane-bound organelles found on most types of cell, an individual cilium is shaped as a threadlike hair that extends from the much larger cell body. (Gray, 1928) A typical example being a sperm, the tail of which is formed by a cilium. In evolutionary terms cilia are fundamental in the development of movement. Ciliary movement is though restricted by a need to be surrounded by water when functioning, however over time as animals emerged from the seas and evolved into land based creatures cilia were able to adjust and adopt various new functions, such as to help enable stomach digestion or as photoreceptors. Photoreceptor cilia have a structure that allows them to change rapidly in response to perceived differences in light, (May-Simera et al., 2017) differences that indicate for our brains, movement.  The sensitivity of hair like cilia, being vital to our ability to process perceptual change, movement in this case being inextricable from the physiological complexity of our ability to look. The wave like shape of a cilium becoming entangled in the symbol building imagination as awareness grows of the evolutionary biology of our visual receptors. A mark made with this awareness in mind, can be thought of as sperm like, swimming in a sea of paper, but at the same time be understood as a reminder of an integral part of the apparatus of vision. I am both the animal I presently am and the host of older forms that over time have positioned themselves within myself. Just as I am composed of over fifty percent bacteria, I am also composed of my own evolutionary history, the evidence of which points to constant on-going change. Energy signals crisscross my body; light becoming chemical and electrical energy; mechanical energy now emerging in response to perceived changes in light. Deep history is entangled in this process. As I respond to light’s changes with mechanical energy expended via my muscles in order to draw, I am also aware of my aging bones. Bones are made in a very similar fashion to the way that shells are extruded, both needing a liquid environment within which to grow. Blood relies on iron as a carrier of oxygen around the body, which is why our blood is red, an octopus relies on the copper-rich protein called hemocyanin to do the same thing, which is why an octopus's blood is blue. We are part of an ever changing dance of materials that are constantly connecting with organic and inorganic forms and as a drawing is made it both continues this material dance and as a transducer, converts it into an imaginative record, so that others can read what has happened, both physically and mentally.

 

The tensions within visual language that release energy

 

The psychological need I have to capture the images I am making is another aspect of the entanglement that I am trying to unpick. The image in my mind is a multi-dimensional concept formed by cognitive and affective evaluations, (San Martín and del Bosque, 2008) and as I draw the image evolves. For the moment, the small wave like marks I make, are read as ripple ridges within vibrating skeins of interpenetrating records of experiences and then I refocus as the drawing begins to exert these emerging visual tensions on my decision making mechanisms.

Alongside my nervous system, sits my endocrine system, (Marieb and Hoehn, 2007) using neurotransmitters as chemical signals, tensions set off in the brain by an off centre visual mark, release hormones that speed up the drawing hand, but lessen its control. Tension can be experienced both emotionally and physically as blocked energy, but it can also be produced as Arnheim (2004) suggests, by our awareness of the flip between figure and ground that is at the core of a drawing’s ability to recreate movement that is both dynamic and still. A drawing of a Necker cube can be used to demonstrate how an either/or situation works. The drawing is a static image, our eyes constantly trying to decide whether or not any particular cube face lies in front or behind. The flip between one decision and another gives life to the drawing, because the answer is never settled. This is another type of energy that can be stored within a drawing’s metaphorical battery. Its energy being released and transmitted via our live perceptual engagement, into both intellectual and phenomenological energy flows. The Necker cube is though a simplification and perception in the real world involves a much greater degree of complexity.

 

Gestalt psychologists state that we see a series of dashes as a continuous line because of the close proximity of each element alongside the consistency and similarity of forms. (Kiryati, Henricsson and Rosenthaler,1992) We have an innate tendency to perceive a line as continuing in its established direction and that this happens prior to our conscious awareness at a time in early vision known as pre-attentive processing. When compared to a continuous line broken lines are read as less forceful, less sure of themselves, and this is a unique quality, related to boundary perception or how we mentally put lines around things. According to (Hoffman & Singh, 1997), the clarity and weight of a boundary line around an object helps to determine and fix its importance within the visual field. A dashed line therefore reduces a boundary’s strength and in doing so un-fixes the objects within the field of vision, so that they can visually vibrate within the totality of the event, in effect becoming verbs rather than nouns. 

Figure 2: A Necker cube with clear boundary lines alongside an image of dashed lines representing a much more complex event

 

Earlier on in this article it was argued that our bodies are the result of formal principles that are passed on by cells that transmit their phenotypes to their descendant, and that aesthetics can be explored from the perspective of how formal properties reveal an inbuilt necessity for movement and the looking for patterns associated with the need for constant change.

Arnheim argues that the absence of solid shapes does not mean that a drawing has no form or pattern, it has ‘perceptual forces’; every one having a physiological counterpart in the nervous system (Arnheim, 2004, p. 17). The idea of energy fields were perhaps in his mind when he stated that Physiological Field Processes occur as interactions between the active perception of parts of things and the totality of the field of percepts. These were he argued, the Pseudo-Thermodynamics of Mind, visual tension effecting action. The further a mark was off centre the ‘lever-principle’ would increase the weight of its visual effect. In this way a drawing works as a transducer, energy being released via the effects of visual tensions. The idea behind the thermodynamics of mind was based on Arnheim’s reading of the second law of dynamics, which asserted that in any isolated system, each successive state represented an irreversible decrease of energy. The Gestalt Law of Visual Perception, was then according to Arnheim (2004) any stimulus pattern that when viewed exhibited a structure that was as simple as the given conditions permitted. This simplicity, I would argue is seen in every drawing done from observation, the selection process reflecting both the predilections of the drawer and the energy losses that occur as visual information is received and processed and finally converted into the mechanical energy needed to make the drawing. Arnheim however also realised that there was a counter principle at work, and that in the observation of visual perception we become aware of an interaction between an active counter-principle, something he called the “energetic life force” and a tendency towards balance. This energetic life force is I would argue an animist idea, one that allows us to see potential affect coming from both animate and inanimate objects, a force that also supports the idea that static objects are in reality fictions. Henri Bergson has written extensively about what he termed the 'élan vital’, (Bergson, 2019) a similar concept to that referred to as a "vital force" by the pre-Christian Stoic philosopher Posidonius, (Durham, 2007) who stated that the energy emanated by the sun spread out into all living creatures. More recent scientific explanations that point to the sun's radiant energy being converted into chemical energy by photosynthesis confirming a hypothesis made over 2,000 years ago. The philosopher Deleuze used Bergson's idea to describe an internal force, or substance in which the distinction between organic and inorganic matter disappears. (Ansell-Pearson, 2012, p.21) This removal of the difference between inorganic and organic life being for myself a necessary one in relation to this developing argument, as it supports a decision to use an idea of animism as a way of developing a more holistic understanding of the world and specifically in this case it helps us to think about how energy can flow between organic and inorganic entities, between humans and the objects they produce, in this case a drawing. 

 

Drawing from observation

 

When drawing from life you are in effect visualising energy flow. Every mark you make is a captured moment of energy, the action of looking being a transfer of energy from the world via the eyes into the brain. A growing awareness that there is constant energy transfer within yourself, between yourself and the world, and between the complex of animals, vegetables and minerals that make up any surrounding environment, is central to an awareness of what is entangled into the making of a drawing from observation. Arnheim (2004, p.2) stated that the visual pattern of a field of forces, could be visualised using what he described as ‘ridges’ from which ‘the level of energy slopes off in both directions’; these ridges being the centres of attraction and repulsive forces. The short wavy lines that make up the majority of marks in these drawings, can also be seen in this way, operating to establish the ‘restlessness’ that Arnheim describes belonging to all perceived objects, the resulting ‘tension’ emerging as a psychological ‘force’.’ (Ibid, p.2)

Figure 3 Observational drawing: Brush, Pen and ink on paper 2021

 

The drawing above was made from a situation encountered on a walk. It is very easy to spot someone walking who is not very well because their gait will give them away. All life has a rhythm, but sometimes it's blocked or the rhythm breaks down. When you are healthy, focused and on top of things, visual scanning is much more insightful and observant than when you are not very well. When drawing, you can also have an insight or intuitive sense of the wellbeing or not of the environment you are observing, drawing in this case being a sort of conceptual two way health check. The drawing above was made on a good day, it was early morning and I had had a good night’s rest and was feeling fine.

The drawing ‘figure 3’, was made from an area once built upon but now left for nature to reclaim. Walls jut out of the ground, broken by trees that have pushed their way out into the spaces left by ruins of buildings also ravaged by the weather and ceaseless erosion by organic life. The drawing, using pen and ink alongside diluted ink and brush was made on A4 watercolour paper.

Various rhythms of compressed energy emerge from the situation.  Bricks have a regular rhythm that sits alongside the movement of breeze blown grasses, fragmented staccato divisions between broken stones, and the growth patterns of trees that surround the wall and which are gradually dissolving the wall’s rhythm back into older rhythms of nature. The trees push vertically up, powerful forces that surge out of the ground towards the sun, the walls in contrast now broken like dead bodies. As I draw it, a slab of concrete feels to me as if it could have come from a cemetery, it now becoming a tombstone for a dead building. 

It is in marks suggesting wave-forms that rhythm emerges onto the page; seen up close as small ink curves, but from a distance coalescing into a recognisable things. These marks are indicators of surface texture, of a blade of grass waving in a slight breeze and of light as it moves from brightness into shadow. They are also vibrational traces of hand movements. I stand to make the drawing, so movement begins in my feet, rises up my legs, is carried up my back, down my arms and into my fingers. I am ageing just as the building that once stood here has aged. At some point, like the broken wall, I will join it in dissolving back into the world I emerged from. All of these things are centred on energy transfer, whether it is the transformation of the movements of my body, via the marks made by the pen, the transformation of optic impressions into their drawn records, or the growing intellectual awareness of a landscape that is in constant change.

 

On the same day another drawing was made from observation. 

Figure 4 Observational drawing: Brush, Pen and ink on paper 2021

 

The drawing ‘figure 4’ is also about energy transfer but with a slightly different emphasis in relation to time. As I broke through some undergrowth, I looked down and lying on the ground was a bright red plastic tyrannosaurus. It was pristine, its plastic surface unsullied by dirt and grime. I gradually became aware that the tail was missing and that it was in fact broken and therefore probably discarded by its owner, who must have taken it into the woods and performed a ritual ending to its short toy life. As I drew it, I tried to reconcile its form with the surrounding vegetation, pushing its edges against the more energetic marks used to suggest the surrounding flora. I was imagining at the time, it sinking gradually into the ground, becoming a discovery for future archaeologists. The drawing began to look as if the dinosaur had been defeated by something even bigger; it was a former giant, now made small; the fast drawn marks made to suggest the movement of surrounding grasses, also imaginative indicators of giant ferns seen from far above; time and scale collapsing in the mind's eye. This image of a toy, something glanced at in a brief moment, also being a window into deep time. The red plastic once a form of vegetation, then over eons of time became a carbon fossil fuel and as an organic polymer, morphed into a form alongside cups and saucers, other toys, medical equipment and myriads of other plastic goods.

The drawing arena is small, not more than a couple of feet to scan, I don't stay long, don't attempt to describe the light change, don't dwell on textural differences, I simply make marks and find energy rhythms. The dinosaur's stomach ripples like waves, curves of energy that play off against marks made to represent plastic muscles on plastic legs, that like its arms stick out helplessly, air running to the rhythms of surrounding wind blown grasses. 

 

Figure 5 Tracing the process of looking

 

These approaches to drawing described above have evolved from processes of observational drawing that initially used the visual checks and balances of a William Coldstream inspired grid of looking to assess where things were in relation to each other. Then for many years I used the 'giron and fesspoint' observation of perception drawing method as an attempt to capture the flicker and movement of looking. (The 'giron and fesspoint' drawing methodology was used for many years at what was the Leeds College of Art and the name was an invention of one of the staff I taught alongside, Patrick Oliver) These are the methodological implications of the drawings of Cézanne, indicators of an uncertain certainty when attempting to record observations of events that are never fixed. There are of course other drawing traditions that are of great use in the depiction of ideas and the clarification of form, but I see these as being centred on image development rather than the recording of perceptions. But related to all forms of drawing, is that aspect of energy transformation whereby mental energy is transformed into symbolic visual energy, an energy that leaks in and out of the pictorial dynamism emerging from the growing visual tension of a drawing’s making. This energetic life force, an animist idea, allows the drawer to visualise affect coming from both animate and inanimate objects, it carries within itself an awareness that static objects are in reality fictions. In poetic terms this could be articulated as being a visual equivalent to William Blake’s ‘personified energy’ (Mee, 2005)

 

Both of these observational drawings can be regarded as examples of energy transducers as well as being particular types of batteries. Made by a human being immersed within the energy flows of existence, they hopefully, on being looked at by others, communicate the experience of being aware in a particular way. On been looked at, visual energy is released from the drawings’ surfaces, electrochemical energy is stimulated by the incoming visual rays, and stored in the brain of the observer in a form that can be released as mechanical energy. Many of us in the drawing profession, having stared long at drawings we are trying to think about, begin to ape the movements we uncover with our looking, fingers and arms beginning to follow the perceived movements of the artist that made the image in front of us; thus beginning the process of releasing energy from the drawing. These physical movements gradually releasing other layers of awareness, those of history, of physics and of other disciplines of thought that we may have encountered as we attempt to develop an understanding of the world around us. As we do this, the drawing in front of us fuses together its existence as a phenomenological experience with its use value as a symbolic object, the balance between these two creating yet another movement of forces, as the mind flickers from one form of understanding to another and as it does the flow of electrochemical charges across cell membranes generate electrical currents within the body, these in turn also create heat energy which is itself related to the vibration of molecules in a substance. And so it goes, energy gradually through our lifetime, eroding away, and that second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy, ensuring that at some point in time, we will like our drawings become for a brief moment static entities before we dissolve back into the flux from which we came.

 

Drawing was for John Berger about mortality (2005) and our attempts to reconcile an awareness of this with the fact that we have to live our lives with an awareness of death. In order to further explain this, he then gives an excellent interpretation of ‘mannerism’ in drawing, which he says is about inventing ‘urgency’ instead of submitting to the urgency of what is. Each drawing he suggests is a site of departure, for me this suggests that good drawings are a beginning as well as an end, a dip into the energy flow of life, rather than a frame around which to depict it; a battery to help us recharge our energies. The final image re-introduces colour into the situation. Colour can be both an emotional trigger and a phenomenological  optical experience. In this case the original optical excitement of the looking is re-created by exploring the slight separation of each eye in relation to the wider scans, whilst trying to hold onto the image of the child's dinosaur as seen in the first drawing. The bright green containing a blueish / purple cast drifting through the centre of the image, is an attempt to re-create the feeling of seeing the more static dinosaur image within the ever moving fronds of grasses and leaves. This is an intuitive response, that draws on tacit knowledge built up over many years of trying to re-create time bound experiences within static, time frozen images.  

Figure 6: Image as battery: colour field conjunction

References

 

Ansell-Pearson, K. (2012) Germinal Life London: Routledge

 

Arnheim, R. (2004)  Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye London: University of California Press

 

Berger, J., 2007 Drawn to that moment. In: Berger on drawing. London: Occasional Press

 

Bergson, H. (2019) Creative Evolution London: Grey Rabbit Publishing

 

Chi, R.P. and Snyder, A.W., 2011. Facilitate insight by non-invasive brain stimulation. PloS one, 6(2), p.e16655.

 

Durham, Ian T. (2007) Posidonius In Tremble, Virginia; Williams, Thomas; Bracher, Katherine; Jarrell, Richard; Marché, Jordan D.; Ragep, F. Jamil (eds.). Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 927.

 

Gray, J. (1928) Ciliary Movement Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Hoffman, D. D. & Singh, M. (1997). Salience of visual parts. Cognition, 63, 29-78.

 

Jablonka, E. and Lamb, M.J., 1998. Epigenetic inheritance in evolution. Journal of evolutionary biology, 11(2), pp.159-183.

 

Kiang, N.Y., Siefert, J. and Blankenship, R.E., 2007. Spectral signatures of photosynthesis. I. Review of Earth organisms. Astrobiology, 7(1), pp.222-251.

 

Kiryati, N., Henricsson, O. and Rosenthaler, L., 1992. On the perception of dotted lines. Inst. Commun. Technol., Image Sci. Laboratory, Tech. Rep. BIWI-TR-137.

 

Marieb, E.N. and Hoehn, K. (2007) The endocrine system. Human Anatomy & Physiology, pp.603-643.

Mate, G (2009) In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts Toronto: Vintage

May-Simera, H., Nagel-Wolfrum, K. and Wolfrum, U., 2017. Cilia-The sensory antennae in the eye. Progress in retinal and eye research, 60, pp.144-180.

 

Mee, J. (2005) Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period Oxford: OUP

 

Messenger, J. (2001). Cephalopod chromatophores: Neurobiology and natural history. Biological Reviews, 76(4), 473-528.

 

Petersen, K., 2014. Understanding Kinetic Energy. Cavendish Square Publishing, LLC.

 

San Martín, H. and del Bosque, I. A. R. (2008) Exploring the cognitive–affective nature of destination image and the role of psychological factors in its formation. Tourism Management, Volume 29, Issue 2, Pages 263-277,

 

Singh, M., & Hoffman, D. D. (2001) Part-based representations of visual shape and implications for visual cognition. In T. F. Shipley & P. J. Kellman (Eds.), From fragments to objects: Segmentation and grouping in vision (pp. 401–459). Elsevier Science

 

Trietley, H. I. (2019) Transducers in Mechanical and Electronic Design

London:  Routledge

 

Zhang, Y.J. ed., 2006. Semantic-based visual information retrieval. Hershey

: IGI Global.

See also:

Drawing observational oscillations

Visualising energy flow

Visualising energy flow (part two)

The iconography of the invisible

Freud and drawing invisible forces

Geometrical psychology 

Why interoception

Alina Popa: Disease as an aesthetic Project