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

On AI and Disegno

My interest in drawing as 'disegno' is key to my thoughts regarding certain underpinning theoretical aspects of art practice. 

During the Renaissance central to the idea of drawing as 'disegno' was the use of drawings as the basic building blocks out of which a finished concept would emerge. On the other hand 'Colorito' was the direct application of colour (paint), to a support, (canvas or a plastered wall). This distinction has a philosophical dimension, one that provides us with a way to look at recent artificial intelligence (AI) applications as a contemporary form of 'disegno'. 

An artist who saw themselves as conceptually using drawing as disegno (e.g. Michelangelo) would expect fellow artists to have had a long training in drawing from life and from sources such as classical sculpture, together with an understanding of other forms of drawing such as geometry, compositional structuring, the development of complex figure poses and the use of mathematical proportion. Alongside these practical skills most importantly the artist would have the ability to draw from the imagination; these skills supported an artist's ability to build, construct and paint whatever ideas drawing had allowed the artist to visualise. Disegno both facilitated invention, and the capacity for visualising a concept, such as a building, a painting or a sculpture. It is the imaginative and intellectual core of the process, which elevated 'disegno' and those who practiced it, onto a par with other intellectually demanding areas of human endeavour. This was why artists were able to argue that there was a distinction between a craftsman and an artist and therefore demand more money for their work. This was a division of labour that could be understood by those in power who also no longer had to work with their hands to make a living. I personally think that because this argument was one focused on appealing to those in power who no longer had to get their hands dirty, that the distinction was taken too far and that the more art moved away from its craft base, the more it became estranged from those people who understood ideas via making or using their hands to think with. The more art became an intellectual pursuit, the more it forgot its earlier 'animist' relationship with materials, an understanding centred around the fact that materials had a life of their own. The spirit that used to be sensed in things as they were made was almost lost, but perhaps not forever and recent thinking in particular as laid out in the work of Tim Ingold, has pointed to a re-animating of the ‘western’ tradition of thought. I suppose what I'm circling around is the separation of making real things from the preparing for making them. I'm interested in how drawing allows the imagination to leap forward, and to envisage a possibility but drawing doesn't do the work for you, you will still have to carve that sculpture or get that building built. However entangled up with the material possibilities that confront us, is an ability to visualise possibilities and drawing is entwined within that envisioning process. 

I spent some time this afternoon talking to someone who had for years made a living by recycling old materials and re-making it into bags, cases and other useable objects. She had always done this, ever since she was a girl, growing up in post-war Britain during a time of rationing and a scarcity of materials, when it was normal to make do and mend. Her bags are beautifully sewn and lovingly constructed. I spoke to her about an idea I had for a bag of my own and she understood immediately what I needed, my old bag was falling apart and she could help not just revitalise it but rethink it. OK you might think but isn't this craft and not art? Perhaps there is an infinitesimal line between the two, but her remade bags are also ideas and she had very clear convictions about sustainability and the need for recycling, so it could also be argued that these objects did reflect an ideas base and that they contained within them a very clear point of view. The craftsperson is thankfully still with us and is still envisioning ideas as well as making them. 

Hanna Washburn: 'Imagining the Future' 2018.

Hanna Washburn: I'll Believe in Anything, 2018

Hanna Washburn's sculptural practice stems from a personal engagement with her own old clothing, these hand crafted pieces are about recycling. Many would argue that this is clearly art and not craft because there is invention and thought put into the work. But what if the forms of sculpture she uses are just that, forms, just like the templates a bag maker uses? 

Matteo Rattini: This sculpture doesn't exist: 2021

I was reminded of these distinctions when looking at the recent work of the artist Matteo Rattini, who has trained a neural network to create images of contemporary sculptures based on Instagram's algorithm suggestions. Basically he fed into a computer hundreds of images of modern sculpture and asked it to come up with a range of ideas based on the information it had received. These ideas were realised as 3D images using a CAD package and exhibited on screen as virtual sculptures. 

These are drawings, very convincing drawings yes, but they are still drawings. Once again I would argue 'disegno' or the use of drawings as the basic building blocks out of which a finished concept can emerge, is being used. Just as in the same way that Michelangelo would show his 'finished' drawings to prospective funders, in order to raise funds to get sculptural ideas commissioned, Matteo Rattini could use these images to persuade someone to fund their realisation by 3D printing. 

Thoughts about how a drawing allows the imagination to leap forward and how it can envisage a possibility are conflicted and yet stimulated by Rattini's work because his images look as if they have been already built and then photographed. But they have not, the visualisation process still doesn't do the work for you, someone will still have to carve that sculpture or get it made in some way. However that 'get it made in some way' has changed and these could be 3D printed. The virtual models are produced in such as way that every facet is recorded as a set of coordinates and these coordinates can be used to drive a 3D printer. If it is sent to be printed, the hand skills normally associated with crafting a work of art are redundant, replaced by a machine, at the moment still serviced by a technician but a machine nevertheless. But does this matter? Isn't the idea more important? 

I'm sort of mixing up two things here, the need to validate art as an intellectual activity, one that is about ideas and their realisation and the need to recognise the importance of material thinking. I'm hoping that materials might have embedded within them something that links to very old animist ideas, ideas centred on the vitalist nature of materials. Remember that Michelangelo saw his ideas in the marble and carved until he set them free. 

But we can also see the potential of 3D images within 2D drawings, some drawings are though harder to use to visualise 3D figures than others. 

Template for a teddy bear

The Leeds Arts University has a fashion course and I was always impressed with the pattern cutting technicians and their ability to 'see' three dimensional forms in the shapes of the flat patterns they were working on. 

The centuries-old art forms of origami (folding paper) and kirigami (cutting and folding paper) offer elegant solutions to this 2D to 3D problem, involving only folding and cutting to transform flat papers into complex geometries, but the more humble art of making flat templates for soft toys is also part of this tradition.

All of these issues become conflicted however as they enter the world of data manipulation. For instance the company Lalaland uses AI to create synthetic humans for fashion eCommerce brands, this is used to increase diversity in retail. Lalaland’s platform generates human like models of different ethnicities, ages, and sizes, customised according to customers’ body shapes, such as hourglass, apple, triangle, pear, or rectangle. A highly efficient automated workflow combines on-mannequin product shots with AI-generated model imagery to produce realistic model images, created in a fraction of the time required by traditional model photography. I.e. there is no need for an actual human model any more. In my earlier blog post on surfaces and body perception I looked at the process of measuring the body and creating a flat structure that could then be converted into a digital 'human', but now things have moved on; or have they? If you read the last post, you will be very aware of the issues I have with measurement and the collection of data. 

A flat map of a body created in Maya

Measurement in the case of the Lalaland images needs to be converted from flat data to 3D realisations. The skills a soft toy designer would need in order to think about how to realise a teddy bear, have been stretched to include the possibility of mapping any 3D form and 'people' data is fed into a computer, which can now make a very convincing 'human' used to model clothes for retail outlets.  

AI research has been defined as the field of study of intelligent agents or any system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximise its chance of achieving its goals. In Lalaland's case AI-generated model imagery is used to produce realistic images of people. The perceived environment would have been restricted to images of people of all sorts of sizes and shapes, until enough data had been fed into the system for the production of a 'world view' determined by that data. Once the world view was in place, actions taken by the AI system that maximised its goals would be ones that produced answers that gave human body shape to its perceived needs. 

Lalaland site where you can customise body shape, ethnicity, hairstyle, identity, pose etc.

The visualisation tools offered by Lalaland and other sites using AI would seem to me as being little different from those tools used in the Renaissance. Back then artists were using the new tool of perspective to visualise a building or a painting. However alongside the visualisation skills, most importantly, the artist would need the ability to draw from the imagination; as well as have an ability to build, construct or paint whatever ideas the process of drawing had allowed the artist to visualise. Disegno both facilitated invention, and the capacity for visualising a concept, such as a building, a painting or a sculpture. So does AI also allow for the development of a concept and invention? 

If by new concepts we simply mean looking at the existing world in a different way, then AI processes could be a very interesting way of developing ideas.  

Memo Akten

Memo Akten is looking at how to visualise one of the fundamental problems we have as human beings. The problem of point of view. When we develop our world view we develop it from perceptions of the environment we inhabit. Let's say I was a lighthouse keeper, then my experience would be centred on the sea and breaking waves and rocks. Akten's video of his AI computer simulation as it processes data makes us very aware of what happens when data is coming in from only one narrow source. On the right side of the screen we have images made by a computer program that has been 'fed' with thousands of images of the sky, sea and breaking waves. This is the world that the program has 'learnt'. It expects therefore for everything to conform to the behaviour of rocks and sea and sky. It looks for waves splashing when they meet obstacles like rocks, it expects the swell and movement of water to be contrasted with the hard immovability of rocks. It expects the moving areas to reflect light, (the sea and sky) much more readily than the fixed points, (the dark rocks). Edges between moving surfaces and static ones are seen to be where waves break up and produce foam and splashes. The rhythm of sea movement is recorded over and over again, so that the software understands the nature of these rhythms and how they work. However when this 'point of view' is fed rather different information, such as in this case a hand moving a yellow cloth, the AI system can only read the new information in relation to the world view it has established. Therefore it translates the hand and cloth image into one of the sea's waves breaking over rocks. On the one hand you could say that this is a very imaginative interpretation of a hand and cloth on the other hand you might argue that this is simply a mistaken interpretation. It does however ask us big questions as to how our own interpretations of the world work. Are my own inventions or 'new' images simply results of my narrow experience of the world misreading new information? Are for instance the images I have been making recently in relation to 'interoception' simply a result of my own limited processing of experience and would I therefore see things very differently if I had a more 'scientific' understanding of the subject matter? The image below is from a series of images made recently in response to having Covid-19 and associated problems with breathlessness. 

A barrier to breathing suddenly released as a cough

See also

Creating a digital human body from surface measurements  

Artificial intelligence: Learning to see

Some problems with communication Why point of view matters

Drawing as process

Painting as disegno

Computer generated art

AI and drawing

Natasha Kidd: Painting as Disegno

Natasha Kidd: Overflow

Natasha Kidd makes automated paintings, systems or machines.  Her mechanisms fill paintings from the inside and in making visible the process, action and event of painting itself, I would argue she returns painting back towards a need for grounding itself in disegno. I'll try and explain. Disegno is a Renaissance term describing both the ability to make a drawing and the intellectual capacity to invent a design. It was seen as something all artists, (painters, sculptors or architects) had to do in order to 'design' or visualise their ideas. Disegno was the underpinning framework that a painting was built on. If you wanted therefore to reveal or make visible the processes from out of which a painting emerged, you would show the pentimenti (underlying drawings), cartoons, and the studies, which would again all be drawings. 

It is interesting to compare Kidd's work therefore with more traditional approaches to making visible the process, action and event of painting itself. 

Robert Polhill Bevan: The Feathered Hat: Study for a portrait of the artist's wife 

The black chalk drawing above has been squared and numbered for transfer, by leaving this process visible, Bevan in effect is also making visible one of the processes of painting. 

Natasha Kidd: Flow and return

The underlying grid that so many painters used to transfer their drawn image onto paper, echoes the grid of pipes Kidd produces in order to 'feed' her canvases with paint. 

Jenny Saville: Study from Pentimenti 

Jenny Saville’s Study from Pentimenti is an image that demonstrates how making visible the process still can be achieved in more traditional ways. This time it is the pentimento or adjusted underlying drawing that is revealed by Saville as part of the disegno process. 

Titian: Bacchus and Ariadne 

Beneath the figure on the left in Titian's 'Bacchus and Ariadne' there still exists an adjusted drawing or Pentimento. This normally invisible process can be revealed by x-ray photography and once extracted or separated from the original image, becomes something new again. 

Another meaning emerges if we go back to the original Italian understanding of 'pentimento' which is repentance. This suggests that changing one's mind can also be a type of repentance or regret. 

Jasper Johns: Regrets

The adjusted drawing is also the place where imagery arrives or emerges from the process of making a drawing. In Johns' image 'Regrets', the dark vest like shape and skull image that sits above it, emerged when Johns began drawing from an old torn photograph of Lucien Freud that was found on the floor of Frances Bacon's studio after he had died. The torn out section of the photograph, the missing element, became a positive when the image was mirrored and redrawn, and for Johns the pentimento is now the final image.  This too could be compared with another of Kidd's images. 

Natasha Kidd: Painting that is machine dipped

The paint ripples and lines demarcating levels of dip in Kidd's work, could be compared with Johns' ink washes made within the boundaries of a traced series of shapes taken from the original photograph. The painting as it rises and falls into the vat of paint, creates negative spaces around itself, the rectangular form of the dipping tank, echoing the shape of the canvas. Both Kidd's and Johns' work being self reflective and concerned with the processes of making art itself, in Johns case he recognises other artists and their mythologies as being part of the process, just as much as the physical action of putting paint onto canvas. 

See also:

Drawing machines at the Venice Biennale 

Drawing devices

Drawing from old masters

Process and its documentation

Drawing in colour 2

Raphael

During the Renaissance the word ‘disegno’ was used as a term to cover both drawing and design. In Florence ‘disegno’ was seen as essential to the beginning of any artistic activity, be this sculpture, painting or architecture. Therefore it could be argued that painting in Florence was essentially coloured in drawing and the main technical process for Florentine painters was fresco painting, which needed a cartoon to be drawn out first, so that a drawing could be transferred to the wet plaster. However in Venice there was a different story emerging. ‘Colorito’ a term that meant both colour and its application was seen as fundamental to giving the ‘look of life’ to painted images. Venice was surrounded by water, therefore it could get damp and dampness was the enemy of fresco painting. Because Venice was a maritime power, it had large supplies of huge canvases that were used for sails and these were ideal for making surfaces to paint on, therefore a very different way of painting evolved. Venetian processes of the layering and blending of colours involved not only new ways of painting but different brushes and the evolution of painting on canvas led to another way of thinking about colour and image. Instead of colour being seen as what you filled in between the lines, it became a structural principle in its own right. Instead of beginning with drawing, Venetian painters often worked out compositions directly on the canvas, using coloured brushstrokes rather than line to define form.

Drawing and colour have therefore a long and interesting association. Can you draw with paint? If so is this drawing or painting? Are all paintings that are planned out as drawings in advance, really coloured drawings?

It is interesting to compare a drawing by Titian the great Venetian colourist with a Florentine master of the same time.

Titian is used to finding the form directly, using the activity of painting to discover the figure. Therefore his drawings are not plans for paintings but exercises in discovery, the drawing below shows him thinking about dark/light balance, as in a ying-yang symbol. He is finding through the markmaking, you get the feel of this being a drawing by someone who thinks through a brush.

Titian

In contrast Raphael makes drawings that can be traced and copied onto cartoons and then transferred. His images are clean cut, sharply defined and exist as plans for paintings. You can see the relationship between Florentine drawings and paintings by comparing the drawing below with the detail of a painting at the top of this post.

Raphael

David Rayson’s work is centred on what he has called The Everyday Fantastic, or “a soap opera with no text”. He uses basic computer drawing programs and cheap felt tips to draw those bits of the city that no one loves. Underpasses, bits of scrubland, the backs of housing estates, are all drawn or printed in such a way that the medium and the subject conjoin to give form to an idea of an awkward beauty, something on the edge of ugliness, something a long way from Raphael's ideal of the perfect human body and Classical composition. Rayson however still has to consider the relationship between drawing and colour.

David Rayson

Colour and drawing combine in Rayson’s work to give the effect of raw urban experience. There are no soft niceties in this colour palette, the marks are akin to scribble, or colour is simply just filled into areas, but this is an attempt to get at the essence of what the images are about, and felt tips and cheap computer drawing programs are perhaps today's canvas and oil paint. The low toned yellows and vibrant violets in the underpass image suggest that Rayson is very aware of colour theory, and his images therefore hide their sophistication, like an Elizabethan Playwright writing for Eastenders. 
Anna Bulkina in contrast uses colour in a very private intuitive manner. Her use of mono-print techniques means that at times her stained drawn images can blend gently into images that are very painterly. She is similar in some ways to Ken Kiff, but her colour sense being Ukranian is more Eastern European, you at times get intimations of Chagall. I don't think she is as consistent as Kiff but she is well worth looking at if you are thinking of working in a very private idiom, especially when telling stories about the potential of the domestic to become strange and fantastic. 

Anna Bulkina

Someone working more in the tradition of Titian, is an artist like Betsy Dadd. She makes animations and uses a lot of mono-printing techniques, but essentially it could be argued that she is someone that loves drawing in paint.

Betsy Dadd

Betsy Dadd draws directly on glass plates and takes impressions from these in order to achieve the sense of a 'frozen' gesture. She would probably have looked at Degas mono-prints beforehand, Degas being a wonderful bridge between painting and drawing, his pastels (see earlier blog post) holding a delicate line between the two disciplines. If you look closely at the mono print of the figure standing in a swimming pool above, you can get an idea of how the mono printing technique helps her to control the image. The rectangle of the bath itself would have been created by brushing paint directly onto a glass plate. The sharp edges would be created by using a paper stencil to ensure a crisp edge and then the red ladder would have been applied later. Dadd's images evoke the melancholy of the city, they suggest the loneliness that can become the lot of many people drawn into a city of thousands, who by virtue of the harsh environment of late Capitalism, are forced to exist alongside the many but outside of the comfort and protection of family and friendship groups.

Degas

It's interesting to compare Dadd's technique with Degas'. He is wiping away the ink to get a sharp edge to the figure, and his brush marks are clearly revealed by the way the paper picks up the ink. Even an artist of Degas' stature has to scratch into the plate to dig out the form, look at how he has tried to clarify the arm by scratching a line around it, and he has had a very difficult time finding the right marks for the hand and comb. The image is being discovered in its making and that is what makes it so fresh and much more akin to Titian's drawing than Raphael's. Dadd's figures are much less substantial, they act as symbols of isolation, rather than flesh and blood people. Each time a technique is used it is rediscovered anew, each artist having to find a language to express what it is to be alive in their particular time and in their particular place.

Rose Wylie

The artist Rose Wylie is someone who draws in paint. She belongs to the tradition that includes David Bomburg and Roy Oxlade, (see earlier posts) but has gradually developed a way of working that is perhaps closer to Philip Guston. It's wonderful to see her work now acknowledged. See 

I started this post with an image from Raphael and now end it with one from Rose Wylie, and you may therefore think that the history of art has taken a steady downwards slide ever since the Renaissance. However I beg to differ. Rose Wylie is as highly trained an artist as Raphael was, she is a graduate of the Royal Collage of Art and in her 'naive' images there is much sophistication. The Pre-Raphaelites were called that because they wanted to return to a more spiritual and direct way of painting and saw the work of Raphael as being a dividing line between the pure, direct expression of Medieval art and the overly sophisticated and controlled manner of the High Renaissance. Artists have always sought to bridge the gap between the experience of life and the artistic lens through which life can be looked at. Rose Wylie like many other artists is seeking to find that 'spirit in the mass', that moment of realisation, that time of duende or an authenticity that helps us touch the reality of being alive, and in doing that she has my full respect.  

See also
 Drawing in colour part one
Drawing in colour part three
Drawing in colour part four

Painting by numbers and colour solids 

Colour and control

Roy Oxlade and Rose Wylie

Process and its documentation

Dóra Maurer: Seven Foldings 1975 Drypoint 

My last post about paper reminded me of how important process and its documentation are as ways of developing practice. 

When writing the previous post about Sipho Mabona's origami folding, I was reminded of Dóra Maurer's 'Seven Foldings', a print that became, as she stated, "the object of actions in continuous change". 

Maurer began this series of works by dropping acid onto an etching plate and documenting the process with a series of photographs. She called these performances ‘vehement actions' and began to use systematic photographic documentation of what happened. 'Seven foldings' was an attempt to record the process of change that a plate could go through in a more ‘geometric way'. She cut into the plate, folded it and took ‘phase-prints' of each of the stages. The work becomes a record or documentation of the process and as such its meaning becomes less about issues such as composition or media specificity and more about how as a document it can reveal the processes that lay behind its making. 

Maurer then began to use 16mm film to document her work, for instance the film ‘Timing', shows a canvas being folded. 

Folding was something that fascinated several artists during the late 60s and early 70s, because it was an activity that both revealed the physical structure of what was being folded, and was an activity that could be easily recorded and presented. For instance in relation to her project, 'Drawing Which Makes Itself', Dorothea Rockburne stated, “I came to realise that a piece of paper is a metaphysical object. You write on it, you draw on it, you fold it.” She was interested in paper not just as the ground for a drawing but as an active material, its inherent qualities determining the form of the artwork. The folds when exhibited in series reveal the process of exploration, this type of presentation being very important when process becomes dominant. Work that presents process as an essential aspect of its reason d'etre, has to often be presented very systematically, so that an audience can follow the moves that were made. 

Dorothea Rockburne, Untitled from Locus, 1972

Without the example of artists such as Maurer and Rockburne, Sipho Mabona's practice, (see last post) that relies heavily on its documentation, would not have been possible. 

However, I suspect this older generation of artists associated with process would have criticised Mabona's practice as being not rigorous enough. The fact that he decided to make an elephant, they would have argued, took the audience's attention away from the process of folding itself. 

I think this debate is important because it highlights the post-modern divide. Modernism tended to valorise media specificity and abstraction was a way of getting audiences to focus on the process of making art, such as the quality of the paint marks or surface. The introduction of imagery was often thought of as bringing in a narrative that came from outside art. Artist were advised to stay away from illustrating stories. But theories have moved on and in a post-post-modern world of practice, we are now in a situation where all earlier approaches to and theories about art making are available as on-line resources. However with so much choice, it becomes much harder to make decisions, my advice is therefore to focus on researching whatever it is that is interesting to you and as the research develops hopefully it will reveal an approach and imagery that is unique to your personal vision; not by you trying to make work that is 'different or stylish' but by the force of the inner logic of your process, by the depth of your research and the sharpness of your perception. Whatever you do, you will eventually have to present it to an audience. 

Presentation is very important when systematic processes becomes dominant. Work that presents a timed process has to be presented very systematically, so that an audience can follow the moves that were made. 

Eleanor Antin, 'CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture' 1972

A typical example is Eleanor Antin's 'Carving', every day she reduced her food intake and then each morning, she was photographed naked in the same four stances. She was effectively 'carving' her own body into shape.

The grid of looking, which historically is located within the domain of drawing or geometry can also work as a grid of classification, its structure allowing the observer to clearly examine visual difference. This is a structure borrowed from science; for instance the image below allows various gradients to be compared. 

Slopegraphs for comparing gradients

Eadweard Muybridge

The gridded systematic approach used by scientists and analytic researchers such as Muybridge allows us to easily see the results of an investigation and this was to have a powerful influence on art. It is of course important to remind ourselves that drawing as a means to explain things is an essential tool for all disciplines. During the Renaissance when the disciplines of art and science were not so rigidly separated it was easier to see the grid as part of the process of looking and systematically checking relationships.

Durer: gridded perspective device

As a tool for measurement a grid could be both laid over a plot of land or established as a screen through which to look at the world. 

In the late twentieth century Rosalind Krauss wrote an important theoretical text on the relationship between the grid and modern art. The grid as a formal device to use when stabilising visual relationships was during the last century embedded as a central component of design thinking. In the last fifty years, any artist with even a small amount of training in graphics or visual design would therefore have been introduced to the importance of the modular grid as an organising structure. 

In the 13th century, the architect Villard de Honnecourt produced a diagram used for producing page layouts with margins of fixed ratios.

Use of fixed ratios to stabilise layout in design

Although gridded page layout had been used since the invention of printing, the profession of graphic designer did not get established until the early 20th century, but with the rise of industrialisation, print in particular became vital to the dissemination of information and although fixed ratios were still useful, geometry and in particular the grid, were organising systems that could be used much more flexibly. There was a move away from centered text to “asymmetric” design as in a newspaper page, and designers began to use a Modular grid, which was an especially flexible model for text and image arrangement.

Compare the modular grid above with typical gridded modular presentations used by artists who use systematic processes. 

Bernd & Hilla Becher

Andy Warhol

herman de vries

Sol Lewitt

The compositional logic of the grid as a template for aesthetic investigation was central to the development of the work of several artists interested in process. The serialised exploration of formal variation, was guided and limited by the geometric configuration of the grid and was an aspect of fine art I clearly remember being promoted from my time at college in the late 60s and early 70s. Perhaps the most sensitive of the artists working in this way was Agnus Martin. She often held a delicate balance between following the logic of the grid and allowing her own aesthetic sensibility to determine the final result. 

Agnus Martin

In the mid twentieth century the design grid was incorporated into the grid of the computer screen and early users of the computer to create art relied on this to generate their work. Frederick Hammersley was one of the first artists to use computer coding to generate imagery and the way numbers are used to identify the points on a screen relies on Cartesian coordinates which are themselves essential to the development of analytic geometry. 

Frederick Hammersley

Looking at the grid in relation to 'documentation', it also becomes clear how what was initially used as a device to stabilise design, is now becoming a format to emphasise rigor and authenticity. Tehching Hsieh's 'Doing Time' which was the Taiwan pavilion's presentation at this year's Venice Biennale, relied heavily on systematic documentation.

Tehching Hsieh's 'Doing Time'

The geometric grid that was used for the serialised exploration of formal variation is in this case being used to establish the authenticity of the action. Once more I'm reminded of how important 'disegno' is as a principle and or method that underlies fine art practice. Disegno constitutes the intellectual component of the visual arts, which in the Renaissance justified their elevation from craft to fine art. The use of a grid in this case is not simply about the clear visualisation of the process, it also asks questions about the human capacity to systematically organise the world. From the way we are clocked in, given a number and registered from the moment we are born, to the way that the collection of statistics becomes the driving force behind government decision making. Disegno, 'drawing' in this case being the way that an underlying concept shapes the final presentation. 

Geometry itself began as a way of developing a particular understanding of the world, when it was first used there would have been no separation between what we now call art and science, it was simply a useful way of drawing. Documentation has long been an essential tool for the understanding of scientific investigation and has now become central to contemporary art practice. Perhaps we are at last beginning to respond to C. P. Snow's problem of two cultures. He argued that "the intellectual life of the whole of western society" was split into two cultures; the sciences and the humanities, and that this was a major hindrance to solving the world's problems.

Social media relies on documented imagery to function, many artists have extended their practices into filmmaking via the process of documenting their actions and processes. Technological advances now mean that we all have a mobile device in our pockets that we can use to make films that are of better quality than those made with movie cameras used to be. I began this post reflecting on the film that was done to document Sipho Mabona's origami folding. Why not consider making a series of short videos about your own practice? Which aspects would you focus on? Would these videos focus on the sound of your drawing's making? On the way marks change a surface? or on the more performative aspects of your work? Perhaps a video could be made of the processes 'off camera'. Is there a filmic story in the history of the elements that you are working with? I have posted several times about the stories that come with various papers or substances such as charcoal or graphite, is there a way of making these histories into videos? 

See also some other related posts on the grid and disegno:

The weaving of grids

The grid as a trap

Mathematical shapes

From perception to concept: why draw?

Sarah Sze (a further reflection on the concept of drawing as disegno)

Notations: Contemporary drawing as idea and process