Drawing and Philosophy: Part one

Keith Arnatt: eating his own words 1971

A long time ago in a tutorial when I was studying for my DipAD in Newport, Keith Arnatt asked us a question. Were the artworks we were producing 'a priori' or 'a posteriori' statements? He had already sort of taken me under his wing and had decided that as a lad from the Black Country, with an accompanying Dudley accent, I needed educating and although I had a pretty good grasp of art history I didn't have any real understanding of contemporary art and associated philosophical theory and it was this that interested him at the time. So he made me read. British analytic philosophy, A. J. Ayer, early Wittgenstein, Russell etc. was linked to having to read Kant. Richard Wollheim's 'Art and its Objects' was critiqued via Strawson and W. V. O. Quine, John Austin was used as an example of how language games could be used and late Wittgenstein as to its use value. Chomsky was at the time seen more as a language theorist and we debated such issues as 'can there be a private language?' via the writings of Rush Rhees. Semiotics was brought in via the Whorf Sapir hypothesis that language determines thought. It was a hard learning curve and one you only had to take on if you wanted to attend his tutorials, as he would put it, don't bother to come if you haven't prepared yourself. This early exposure was in fact really useful, it was rare when undertaking a DipAD to have to read so extensively into philosophy and because the then complementary studies department ran a series of other programs alongside the traditional art history lectures, such as the history of philosophy, classical music history and interpretation as well as understanding Egyptian poetry, as a young artist I began to get a grip on the fact that conceptual art was a fascinating and rewarding area to be involved in because it could embrace all forms of knowledge, not just art.
I have been through many different periods of both practical work and theoretical frameworks since then and see the business of art making in a very different way to the one that Keith was trying to expose me to at the time. However that initial exposure means that occasionally I do still turn my mind to the relationship between making art and philosophy and in particular the way that drawing can be understood from different philosophical standpoints.
So bare with me as I ramble around what is for me an issue I have had to in many ways argue internally against, because I'm not sure that making art is anything to do with establishing meaning.
So back to Keith Arnatt's original question. I would if in his tutorial now suggest that this was a question about knowledge. Does art give you 'a priori' or 'a posteriori' knowledge? For instance, if all art was determined by what Dickie would call the 'institutional theory of art', art would be a sort of game or set of rules and behaviours set out by the collective understanding of all those that were involved in this sub-group preoccupation. Then, if this was the case, the art produced would be known prior to experience, because it was the result of the rules set out beforehand, i. e. a priori. But if these works of art were to be regarded as particular types of responses to experience, or perceptions, then these works of art would have to be known empirically, i. e. a posteriori. This distinction could if you wanted it to, be used to divide artists into two categories, those that explore and test out the boundaries and possibilities of art and those that use art to reflect upon issues that they have come across in their various experiences of living in the world. Of course, being an artist also means that your experiences are often those that belong to the art world, (art education, other art, the gallery system, art magazines, books on art etc etc) and this world overlaps with and is part of reality or whatever else you might want to call the world of our collective experiences.
If you look at different critical stances you can again divide them in a similar way, for instance Greenberg's insistence on formalist, media specific thinking in relation to art, suggests that what he sees as art is a gradual re-testing or re-thinking of the elements that comprise of a work of art, art's abstracted elements can be formally investigated and no outside of art elements are needed for this investigation. However Rosenberg who invented the term, 'action painting' begins a process that allows us to see making art as a performance, and as we begin to take on board the implications of this, we begin to be able to define art as being 'experiential'. A 'happening' (a type of early performance art event) was by its very nature embedded in the world.
So what about drawing? If I follow the rules of perspective or technical drawing systems I ought to be able to produce a drawing by following the rules, 'a priori'. But if I was making a drawing from direct observation it would require me to have direct experience and to rely on my sense impressions to give me new knowledge, 'a posteriori'. I can already hear the arguments, such as, "What if I'm making a technical drawing of an object that I have to take measurements from?" or, "What if I'm working from observation, such as in the life room, but applying to my observations classical ways of rendering forms as taught by the academy?" I would say these are what Kant calls 'synthetic a priori' forms of knowledge, a sort of state in between. I would also point to the fact that I have often made technical drawings of forms that were not based on anything I have seen, but which were products of my exploring of possibilities of formal invention brought forth by following the rules of a particular perspective or isometric projection.
It is Cézanne's doubt that perhaps opens this area out for artists. Cézanne asks questions such as what is it to see anything? His drawings are not about capturing the solidity of things, but are more about recording the process of looking. Earlier art set out the rules for how the world should be depicted, but Cézanne moves our attention away from learning how to depict, towards something else, more akin to 'being aware of and questioning the processes of experiencing'.
This is an image from a how to draw an apple tutorial. The tutorial has some good tips. It suggests making marks that feel for the changes in surface direction, it asks you to consider the shadow as much as the apple and asks you to think about how the apple is lit and how you might indicate the space that the apple sits in.

From a 'How to' drawing book

Below is an apple as drawn by Cézanne At first sight in comparison to the drawing above it looks unfinished. There is an uncertainty about where the edge of the apple is, it seems to waver uncertainly and have no real solidity. You can see why so many people when looking at Cézanne's images derided them as being clumsy and unfinished.

Cézanne

You could argue that we get the art that we deserve, or another way of putting it is we get the art that epitomises the problems that face the society that we find ourselves in. In the case of Cézanne he sits very neatly alongside the rise of Existentialism as a philosophy of choice for the 20th century. This is a philosophy of doubt, one that tries to accept the bleak reality of a Godless universe. Plato's ideal forms seem a long way from here, a theory of forms that suggested that ideas of things in some way were the true reality. For instance the mathematical perfection of a triangle in Plato's ideal view, in some way lies behind all triangular forms, there being some sort of ideal of triangularity. This is rather like the position of the academy in relation to art. The academy's standardisation of how art was taught and its determining of classifications that not only told us what art was, but also which aspects of it were the most important, such as History painting being of most value, was a set of ideals that lay behind the everyday reality of an artist's job. The 'grand style' of 'high art' being the ideal, the perfection that lay behind art's reality.
But what this meant was artists working to set patterns and those patterns very quickly began to get more and more out of step with what was happening in society. However, there are several art schools that still follow certain aspects of the old academy training. Those of you reading this blog who are attending a British art school might not be aware that there are still art school traditions in existence that follow many of the rules of academic training. There are two main sorts, those that base their teaching on construction and those that use observational or 'realist' techniques. Here are some art schools with an emphasis on realism...

Angel academy of art (Florence)
Florence academy (Florence)
Charles Cecil (Florence)
Academy of realist art (Toronto)

and some art schools with an emphasis on construction...

Ashland academy of art (Ashland, USA)
Repin institute (St. Petersburg)
The drawing academy (Viborg, Denmark)
National Art school (Bulgaria)

These small art academies are very different to the British art school tradition which is founded on a position of the radical questioning of everything and which accepts Modernism as an essential even though now 'past' tradition. The Bauhaus and its forerunners such as the British arts and craft movement, are still important, but waining influences on British art and design education systems and a continuing link between the old concept of academic art training and what is provided today has gone. What has replaced the older tradition is one that is based on communication theories. Basically, if as human beings we use something, we will be capable of also using it for communication. The art school then becomes a sort of laboratory whereby things are played with in order to see what can be communicated with them. There is less of a divide between visual art, sound, smell, taste or touch in what people experiment with, many students working with immersive environments that can include all the senses. I think we have returned to a much older tradition, one whereby humans simply used what was available to communicate, and from what we know of communication from 30,000 years ago, sound, vision, touch, smell and taste were seen as a totality when our ancestors were creating cave visions. Eat the drugs, see the visions on the cave walls and dance to the sounds of drumming. However within that totality, there would have always been some people that just loved drumming and were better at it than others, and some that could make images much more convincingly than others.
Thinking about convincing images, it is interesting to see how many of the institutions offering constructional or observational training still call themselves 'academies' and of course Arnatt's question would still apply to their different training programs. Do they provide a model to work from or do they guide you towards being able to 'realise' your visual perceptions?
The schools that emphasise realism often use the Charles Bargue Drawing Course, which was devised in the 19th century and which guides students on how to copy from plaster casts, how to study and work from great master drawings and which finally gives instruction on how to draw from the life model. These three areas of study are usually blended in with other methods taken directly from French Academy teaching materials. There is an emphasis on training how to see. (Note not questioning it, but giving ways to shape what you see, for instance you are taught that by copying shadows you can arrive at a much more satisfactory observation of a figure, than by filling in outlines.) These courses emphasise technical mastery of traditional art materials and aim for success in 'realism', i.e. skin tone should be accurate, proportion correct etc. Most of the drawing is taught sight size, i.e. one to one size correspondence which leads to accuracy in measurement.
The schools that emphasise constructional methods use more sculptural drawing techniques. There is an emphasis on three dimensional awareness and how to use this to construct figure drawings. For instance tonal analysis using cross hatch techniques, planar construction or the simplification of continuously moving organic forms, so that they can be rendered more clearly within various perspectives. This system often works in layers. For instance in the first stage you make perspective boxes of say the pelvic girdle and trunk of the body, then on top of that you place drawings of bone structure and musculature, and then on top of that the formal distribution of human body shapes as understood from models.
Lots of guides exist which you can use if you want to take on board these systems.


Artists that use these techniques still have a role to play within our society. For instance because these techniques in many ways stand for 'tradition' and 'classical ideals' they are perfect for portraits of important people. These are not the skills of doubt or Existentialism, they are about certainty, mastery and ideal form. I have met artists trained in this way and all of the ones I have come across were from rich backgrounds, whereby they had the means to study in places like Florence for several years in order to acquire the skills and a ready made market for their work because their contacts could both afford and wanted to have on their walls art of this sort. (I am an unreconstructed socialist and therefore I will read these things as part of an ongoing class divide, I'm sure many people would have a counter argument) In some ways I envy the certainty and confidence these skill sets give and I realise that some students that arrive on the courses I teach on, find the constant questioning difficult and would much prefer a course that concentrated on the acquisition of a particular set of traditional skills. It may be that our society will at some time return to these 'traditional' values, but the only models we have for when this has happened are when the state has wished to exercise total control, such as under Nazi rule in Germany or the Stalinist regime in Russia. I personally would rather live with doubt and constant questioning than be part of a fascist regime. However I do realise there is a problem in relation to what is seen or understood as art. If a large number of people don't understand what something is, it may be that that something isn't functioning as well as it should do. For instance the Turner Prize rarely showcases any artists that make paintings, but the majority of people outside of the art establishment think of painting as what art is. The paradox here being that the majority of people don't look at paintings and use moving image media such as film, video and TV broadcast to get information and entertainment, which is exactly what todays media artists are using, all four of this year's shortlisted Turner prize artists being video makers. Steve McQueen as an artist has used video for a long time and his '12 Years a slave' cinematic production saw him cross over from a fine art audience to a cinema audience. But what is happening here? He makes art videos about his experiences of life and films that go on general release in cinemas. Both formats express ideas and communicate complex emotional engagements with life. Cinema audiences are not worried that his work can also be seen as art, but some art audiences question that his work might not be art. A writer such as Michelle Marder Kamhi in 'Who Says That’s Art? A Commonsense View of the Visual Arts', questions the whole edifice of contemporary art and suggests that it is only in traditional formats that we will find an art that communicates to 'ordinary people'. Craft and skill are allied closely to an emotional engagement in Kamhi's writings, but it is presumed that the necessary crafts are older ones such as those associated with painting, not those associated with the making of films. TV programs that follow artists with traditional skills are for myself interesting, in that they provide a new way of thinking about painting, one totally immersed in lens based media. These programs provide a storyline, often based on individual's back stories, a time based opening out of the process of making, (not unlike the British Bake Off), and of course there are winners and losers. Of the millions that watch these shows, how many people actually then go and buy paintings is questionable, but what these programs do is reinforce in the mind of the general public an idea of what art is. But if we think about certain theoretical stances, such as 'the medium is the message' a Marshall Mcluhan concept, he would argue that because the information is carried by broadcast media, what has happened here is that people are getting hooked on a TV program and that the paintings are incidental, they might as well be cakes or pots or any other products that require a set of skills to make them, it is the structure and nature of the broadcast medium that is controlling what is communicated.
People love to watch other people who have skills. There is something heartwarming and central to the human condition of being able to use hand/eye/brain coordination to make things, whether these be paintings, cakes, pots, sand castles or ice sculptures. I am really happy to watch those sandcastle makers that arrive when the tide is out on the shores of the Thames in London, they can quickly make sculptures that are good representations and people cast money into their buckets in payment for being entertained. I used to watch my grandfather French polish furniture, the process of stripping the wood down, preparing the surface and gradually layering the stains and polishes as he worked his rags into and across the woodgrain was a fascinating one and just as entertaining was the man next door who used to take his motorbike apart, repair it very carefully and rebuild it or my grandmother showing me how to bake a cake. I think what we have here is a reminder of 'embodied' thinking and that what certain types of paintings represent are repositories of old hand skills. There is something about developing a craft skill that is completely fulfilling and perhaps this is central to our conceptual view of how we need to operate as human beings. Collingwood when laying out his aesthetic theories thinks long and hard about crafts, and realised that for many people art and craft are inseparable, so he looks at how craft or technique needs to be used to bring about certain psychological states in an audience, however he finally decides that this is to restrict art to 'mere means'. In a time of post-Duchamp we are very aware that craft doesn't have to be involved in the making of an art statement, but and I think this is a big but, the celebration of hand/eye/brain coordination and the products this produces could be a very important thing to do if we are to help people attain a state of well being.
In the middle of this is a problem with breaking things down into different areas of thinking. The old art/science, art/craft divides are based on a sort of atomisation of thinking, ways of thinking whereby things have their proper place. Lots of academics spend many hours teasing out differences between things in order to determine their location within certain frameworks of thinking, music fans spend hours arguing that Classical music is much better than the Beatles and too many articles are written about whether or not painting is dead. In our real world everything is connected and we use all the things we come across in lots of different ways, to communicate what we think. I might drive a certain make of car to communicate status, hold my cigarette in a certain way to show I'm an intellectual, wear trainers to tell my friends I'm not longer in their gang, write sentences to declare war, make a film to tell a loss, sing a song to explain how England has changed. In moments of importance, such as births and deaths, we still need rituals and if you think about the complexity of these you get an idea of how art works. At a funeral place is significant, we chose one with heightened meaning, churches, particular spots in the landscape, the sea. We dress in a particular way, polished black shoes, no trainers. We sing, we use certain songs to explain our loss, we even sit in certain cars that communicate to everyone as they pass down the road what is happening. We read poetry, we arrange flowers, we carve monuments or small marble plaques, we leave toys or other objects as reminders of someone's age. The complexity of these things is what is important, even down to the tone of voice we use on these occasions; all things have the possibility of being used to communicate. It is therefore, I believe, forms of philosophy that acknowledge the interconnected of everything, that are the most useful.

It is interesting how quickly a reflection on art and philosophy can lead to political positioning and how quickly an implied role for art can be questioned. There are several earlier posts whereby I have tried to explore the role of drawing as a type of questioning of the process of looking and to save time I'll just put in some links.

The Hard Won Image
Andrew Lister drawings
Reflections on Andrew Marr's book on drawing
From perception to concept
That uncertain certainty
A few thoughts on the art science divide

Part two will look at the rise of phenomenology as the go to area of philosophy when it comes to theorising about drawing and my own personal interest in object orientated ontology.

Drawing and philosophy part two

Some thoughts on object orientated ontology

Drawing as a model for life experience

So can drawing to be separated out from life, and if so what is the use in thinking of it as a separate thing, especially if life itself can be experienced as a type of drawing? It could be argued that drawing be regarded as a model of reality or arena whereby the material thinking that arises from real world interactions is echoed or re-enacted within a tightly controlled situation. The lessons learnt in responding to traces of events in the real world are in these cases transposed into the controlled arena of the drawing. All those experiences of real-life events that I have referred to over the last few posts; the reading of tracks in the snow, the following of marks that indicate a path, one material leaving marks on another etc., help build up a vocabulary of material awareness, one that can be applied in a variety of circumstances. In a traditional drawing a very limited set of material interactions are used as a trigger or an initiator for thinking, but even these restricted materials (charcoal, ink, pencil, chalks etc. what we tend to call art materials) can when looked at closely and the narratives we see unpicked, help us to think about how both the making and the way the materials help shape the making, come together to make meaning. Look at these previous posts about traditional approaches to drawing; Watteau and Hakuin Ekaku although from very different cultures, both use their materials to respond to things happening in their world. Real life experiences and drawing can in many ways mirror each other, drawing being a model to help us understand something about life, life itself being the resource from which all drawings take their bearings. Of course a drawing can't really escape from or be separate from the world itself, but it can be regarded as a temporary holding space and testbed of experience, a space for material thinking to take place, one that gives us more time to reflect on the issues raised. I have in a past post pointed to Derrida's concept of the parergon to help think about the space between an artwork and the real world. However since reading Donna Haraway's 'Staying with the trouble' I would suggest that it might be more important to think about how a physical preoccupation like drawing, (both its objectness and the processes surrounding its making or origin) is entangled with and into the rest of nature.

False nose: pencil and wax crayon

The drawing above of a false nose was done while I was waiting for someone. I was in a house in Glasgow and for some reason the person who owned the house had this false nose lying on a table near to where I was sitting. I began to doodle something on a piece of yellowish paper, a something you can just about see as a ghost of its former self. Once I had realised I could develop the drawing further, I removed the initial drawing with a white oil pastel. As I realised I had more time than I thought I had, I changed focus, this time trying much harder to establish a more convincing shape for the false nose. I began to realise the drawing could be read in two ways, with the bottom of the nose either open and facing out into the space, or lying flat on the table surface. This flicking between states is fascinating, because it keeps visual possibilities open and alive to constant reinterpretation. I'm always aware of Cezanne when doing drawings like this. He was a master of the small difference in viewpoint. As I drew I was moving my head, so that curves to the left of the image are made from one viewpoint and curves slightly to the right are drawn from another. As a small drawing like this gradually emerges one of the issues is how much do you adjust different aspects of the drawing to allow them to fit together as a whole. This I believe can only be done by instinct. There will be an overall feeling tone that arises, one that makes the difference between the drawing being alive or dead. It is in relation to this feeling tone that the most convincing adjustments are made, not the measuring of relationships. However, is there enough information to make the drawing convincing? Does it tell enough of a story of its making? Is there enough in this drawing to suggest a layered read or double life? Is it experiential as well as metaphorical? In small drawings like this, I can see all sorts of possibilities; a scrap of visual information can provide a thoughtful few moments that at some future time might become a much more worked through idea. I would hope that in changing focus as the drawing was emerging, this has helped to get across an idea of compacted time, of a series of decisions made and captured in such a way that they all continue to operate on the mind of the observer, thus keeping the initial experiences alive. A dialogue with an inanimate object being hopefully as rich as a dialogue with another human being. A stand alone drawing done in the security of someone's kitchen is though very different to a series of drawings done in the open air. 
Below are some sketchbook drawings done down in West Wittering of a wheat field. I've drawn this field several times and each time something new occurs to me.

Sketchbook pages

The top drawing is made on a single A5 sketchbook page. It is again made in pencil, and white oil pastel is used in conjunction with the pencil as both an eraser and as a method of giving an extra dimension to both the textural and the tonal range I can make when working in pencil. The paper is creamy white, and is smooth and about 100 gsm in weight. The two drawings below, done on the same day, are made in a small A6 sketchbook, the paper is watercolour weight and the images take advantage of the landscape format that is on offer if you work right across both pages. This time pen, brush and ink is the medium. The metaphors available when drawing a field are very different to those that come to mind when drawing a false nose. A field of wheat is in constant movement, it is more like trying to draw the surface of the sea than an object. Therefore rhythm becomes more important. The pencil drawing felt too stiff, so I moved on to pen and ink because each stroke is much easier to read as an energy container. Close up and more distant views again change the nature of the marks made, the furthest away forms being made simply with a brush and dilute ink. The wind blows as I draw, my feet push into the earth, there is the sound of the outdoors and an awareness of small creatures moving through the landscape and I am like all these things, tied into the world in my own networks of connection, our occurring together in this field at this particular point in time being the result of far too many small and large happenstances for me to articulate, but we are all arriving at the same time, myself, the landscape and the drawing. 

It's interesting to compare a drawing of wheat done from a much more scientific point of view, such as the image below.

I'm very aware that my drawings tell the viewer very little about the actual nature of each individual seed head. My eyesight isn't as good as it was, but more importantly I was trying to capture an essence of the experience, something that could replicate the feeling of a dynamic rather than a snapshot of time. The drawing of wheat above is focused on very specific scientific information, the seeds and their various shapes are picked out and arranged next to their respective cereal grasses. In particular they are made to produce information that will be scientifically useful for another human being. My sketchbook drawings it could be argued are far less useful, however they do point to a certain type of relationship a particular human being had at a particular moment in time with a field of wheat and in that very fact, perhaps this is their use value. I was prepared to stop and have some sort of conversation with the field, the drawing being perhaps like some sort of animist language, the spirit of the field now reflected in the spirit of the marks made. 

There is a fundamental limitation to the drawings I have been showing as examples of how I have tried to build images of experiences. In particular small drawings can only hold certain sorts of information about time and space. Experiences are durational, often built in relation to overlapping time periods and in relation to very different perceptual viewpoints. My experience of anything will also include memories of previous experiences that help me understand the experience I am having, these memories and new perceptions become locked together to make complex amalgams and the sketchbook drawings shown so far are isolated examples of observational experiences. However they can inform the process and the best of them can hopefully stand scrutiny as examples of drawing as observational thinking. These sketchbook drawings operating like vignettes within a short one act play.

Allegorical map of Chapeltown

The drawing above is a drawing that is more like a novel. I attempted to combine various physical awarenesses of spatial movement with symbols and observations that all at one time or another had a role to play in the understanding of the story/s that weave through an area that I know well. This is a link to another map type drawing one I produced after several conversations with people who had arrived in Leeds after some horrid experiences getting there and who were now living in high rise flats. Brexit, Trump's wall, a fear of the future and of the past, what it was like to arrive on the South Coast of England, stranded fish and several other stories were all entwined in this drawing, one that was struggling to cope with so many issues, but which was at least as far as I was concerned about stuff. 

The map is a sort of dreamtime structure, but unlike the real dreamtime, it isn't tied into the culture of the everyday, it sits outside the experiences that contributed to its making and this I would argue is a problem, a problem not just for these two particular drawings, but for the vast majority of Western art as it is produced today.

So how can this dichotomy be resolved? Artists such as Joseph Beuys realised that if their art was to really connect with people it had to work on many levels at once. Drawing, materials thinking, performance, poetry, sound, text, installation, etc., each element supporting other elements and adding to the potential for meaning construction with as wide a range of communication channels as possible. In the far distant past cave painting would have been set into a series of rituals that would have included the intonations of spells, the singing of hymn type chantings, symbolic dancing and stories told, and Beuys was very aware of this. So what am I proposing? First of all and most importantly, I think that drawing is still a very powerful tool and one that allows human beings to have a dialogue with other things that are not other humans. To draw a false plastic nose left on a table is to take it seriously. We humans have spent too many years not taking anything else seriously except ourselves. So if drawing things can help attune us to other things that must be good. Secondly drawing uses materials to make meaning, in doing this the actual activity of making drawings binds us as humans with other materials, this entanglement creates a language, a language which is a symbiosis between human and non-human materials. Again I think this is important, because it reminds us that we can't do things on our own. However we live in a society that is not used to reading drawings, so other communication channels need to be used to help both make others aware of the potential of drawing and more importantly to raise awareness of what is now often called OOO or object orientated ontology. A way of thinking that reminds us of the primacy of things and that tries to rebalance our human tendency to see everything as either an extension of ourselves or as something we can control. Drawing needs to be embedded into the fabric of society and seen as part of a much wider idea, an idea of a society that recognises how the entanglement of everything together means that we have to act respectfully and thoughtfully in relation to animals, objects, processes and other people. 

Some links to other posts that touch upon some of the issues opened out:

Drawing as mapping, a post that asks questions as to the sorts of languages you might use when responding to various real life stimuli. 

The frame, a post that opens out the dialogue surrounding how to frame an image. At the end of this post is a link to the Parergon by Deridda. 

Celia Paul and Cezanne 

The world is drawing itself

I would like to explore a situation where the world is constantly drawing itself. To look at the world as if nature is making its own traces and human beings are seen as just elements within a vast range of other mark makers, both organic and inorganic.

A river system revealed as a drawing

Nelson Minar created software whereby when used we could see how river networks operated across vast territories, therefore we could reset our thinking in relation to familiar maps of the world. His coding was still available when I was writing this post; see and it came with a warning that as coding it was already becoming out of date. What I thought was important about these drawings was the symbiotic link between various human and natural phenomena. The land itself is shaping its own traces; as rain falls water flow responds to the terrain it finds and as it does so it finds its way down towards sea level. This finding a way cuts through a vast range of geological differences, but eventually the dendritic shapes of rivers and streams and rivulets and river basins become clear and tell their own story. The thinking of someone like Minar will begin with an awareness of his own body. The fact that our human bodies include similar dendritic systems; arteries, veins and nervous systems that are often in illustrations similarly colour coded, is I'm sure an important element here. The coding done by Minar is also something that is 'rooted' in a topographical awareness of surfaces and boundaries. Mathematics, coding, human biology, embodied thinking, geology, weather systems, physics and chemistry all becoming enmeshed in drawing.
Publicly available data is also an important element, free information being essential to a non-capitalist economy of thinking. Thinking without resorting to thinking about how individual gains can be made is becoming more and more important to my own idea of why I am engaged in this project of thinking through drawing. Find the open source information for North American river systems here. 

The rivers of the American Southern States visualised using Nelson Minar's code.

A snail trail is something we have all seen. Snails produce a type of mucus, 'snail slime', that is used to help them crawl along. It is partly like a glue and partly like a lubricant, thus helping a snail to climb up surfaces as well as along floors. This silvery track is a sign used by humans to check whether or not their environment is sealed off from the outside world or not and by other animals as a sign that food is present.

Snail trail

Years ago I read a short story about a mathematician, a Buddhist monk and a Christian priest in conversation. The monk believed in reincarnation and the idea of karma, the priest also had an insight into these issues and often quoted from the bible to explain his truths to the other two. In this case he quoted Galatians 6:7;  "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap”. Neither was able to convince the other of the 'rightness' of their religion and the mathematician was also not convinced by either of the religious scholars and stated that  "where there is life there is a pattern, and where there is a pattern there is mathematics", a famous quote taken from the mathematical scholar John Barrow.  There was no conclusion to their conversation which was years later being reflected upon by the Christian priest, who was sitting on a bench reminiscing on the fact that the other two people in the conversation were now dead. As the priest related this remembered incident he began watching a snail moving across the floor just on front of his feet and leaving a trail of slime. The snail seemed to be moving in a purposeful manner and the priest decided to keep a close eye on what it was doing. Gradually the snail traced out the mathematical symbol pi. Well I think that was the story, I read it a long time ago, and it stayed with me. 

Pi snail trail

This drawing in a story weaves together several things, mathematics, religion, nature, belief and the fact that a drawing done by a non human actant is central to the narrative. 

Coyote Buttes slopes: Arizona and Utah border 

Differential erosion creates beautiful landscapes, which reveal variabilities in rock hardness as wind and water act together to shape the face of the planet. New drawings are made as lines of difference emerge, rocks laid down in seas millions of years ago now exposed as contour bands drawn across the undulating earth. This is little different to artists cutting into surfaces to reveal different colours and textures, Penny Evans' ceramics being typical examples of sgraffito, the scraping and digging away of surfaces in order to find new colours and forms beneath.  

Penny Evans: Sgraffito used on ceramics

We use the same processes when drawing as nature does. This is not really a process of mimicry, I would suggest it is simply how things go. We are all physical things and part of nature, so perhaps it is no surprise that wind and rock operate in a very similar way to people and clay. 

I have looked at shadows as a way of thinking about drawing in earlier posts, but what if we look at the world itself as a drawer of shadow shapes? As the Earth revolves around the sun and spins on its axis, a constantly changing series of shadow landscapes are made. 

Everything that projects above the ground has the potential to project a shadow on cloudless days, and these projections are in constant movement, a movement that informs us about the changing relative positions of Earth and Sun. We have of course used this fact to develop our idea of time and sundials are just one of the many ways that human beings have harnessed shadows. In plants certain proteins can detect changes in light, so when the plant experiences a time of being in shadow, it holds back the photosynthesis process so that the plant doesn't waste energy trying to make use of the sun's energy when it is not  available. This protein is so sophisticated that it allows the plant to make decisions about very subtle differences, such as whether there is a passing shadow, such as a cloud obscuring the sun, a chance flicker of light or the light fading because it is the end of the day. It could be argued that plants understand and use shadow much better than we do. 

A very basic sundial

Shadows have helped us to have ideas. From Plato's idea of the prisoners in the cave* to in the case above, an advertising company developing an idea about protection and the unborn baby, as part of a campaign to get us to adopt. Once again we can see human beings and natural forces combining to do something as well as natural elements getting on well enough without us and operating to produce effects as part of what goes on. It doesn't actually matter if we are around and about to record these effects or not. So in this case the famous question, "If a tree falls in a forest and if there is no one about to hear it, does it make a noise?", sort of changes its meaning and becomes more like an analogy of mankind's hubris. 

*Plato asks us to imagine prisoners chained in a cave, they are unable to turn their heads, and all they can see is therefore the cave wall. Behind them is a fire and between it and the prisoners is a low wall along which move puppeteers that manipulate puppets and objects in order to develop particular stories about the world. The prisoners are totally unaware of the puppeteers and what is going on behind them, all they can see are the shadows cast on the wall in front of them. This situation is he explains what we actually experience in comparison to pure reality or the ideal forms that underpin all experience. So when we look at the shadow of the woman holding a child, if we could not see the woman, but only the shadow we would think she was pregnant, a type of mistaken deduction that Plato suggests we constantly make. 

See also:

Drawing as entanglements of life
Drawing as the trace of a touch
Patternings, ties, entanglements and knots
Drawing as a model for life experience
Drawing to an end

Drawing as the trace of a touch

The Mohs hardness test in operation

Perhaps all a drawing really consists of are the traces left after one thing has touched another. I like this definition as it suggests a situation whereby a basic contact between things is the most important issue. The image above is of someone conducting a Mohs hardness test, if you check out how to do the test this is what it states; "...place the unknown specimen on a table top and firmly hold it in place with one hand. Then place a point of the reference specimen against a flat, unmarked surface of the unknown specimen. Press the reference specimen firmly against the unknown, and deliberately drag it across the flat surface while pressing firmly."  If the reference specimen leaves a mark the unknown specimen is harder than the reference specimen. The drawing above tells a basic story about many of the drawings we come across, they are simply the result of a softer material coming into contact with a harder one. For instance, pencil on paper, or silverpoint on a gesso ground. We could however open out this concept and think about other types of contact, such as when we get a touch of the sun. If I leave a plank of wood out in a field, the area below it looses contact with the sun's rays and when I move the plank what is left is a drawing. A cat scratches a tree to make sure its claws don't grow too long, in doing so, it leaves a drawing. A dog runs through a muddy patch and its paw prints leave a long drawing. I take a bite out of an apple and leave a drawing of my teeth behind. Waves beat relentlessly upon the coast and draw it into new shapes, wind touches soft rock and shapes it into standing forms. These traces are not permanent, they are part of a continuous series of events, they can be seen as indications of what has happened. We can read or imagine events from traces and work out what might have happened to cause them. In this way time runs forwards and backwards, some traces are like fossils from the distant past and others are occurring now. As I type these words it is snowing outside, as the snow is falling it is gradually whiting out the landscape outside my window, working like an eraser, it is leaving the sharp dark lines of leafless trees, as dividing lines cutting through an image that gets softer and softer as more and more snow falls and covers the world beneath it. Soon the rains will come and wash the snow away, each change in conditions leaves its own traces and I read them, but in their own ways the rest of the world is reading them. The frozen ground and the creatures within it, the trees taking the strain of collected snow on their branches, slate roofs feeling the sliding of snow weight as it tests the strength of old wooden gutters, car tyres as they spin too fast and look for traction. There is constant change going on, as one surface meets another a dialogue of exchange takes place. One surface is softer or more pliant than another; the snow takes the shape of the postman's boot as he walks to the door to deliver today's letters. I notice as he goes back along the same path he came, that he puts his feet back into the impressions he left on his way here. What does this tell us about him? It is a story not unlike the channeling of water as the snow begins to melt, a channeling that often goes the same way, but not always. During the year workmen have dug up the pavement and replaced the old stone slabs, I noticed that water doesn't pool there anymore, the worn indentations of sandstone have disappeared, the tiny pools of water that would collect and freeze will no longer be there to slide under my shoes this year, but will this new surface be even more slippery? Its  smooth covering of snow suggests that this might be the case. I will find out as soon as I walk out and tread my way through the snow, my own traces will also tell a story for others as I make my way, the long slip marks of feet sliding will perhaps soon be evident. All these things are observed as traces that can be seen as having a potential impact on the changing conditions that I survive within. The world is an infinite drawing that I and everything else, has learnt to read. Sometimes it is hard to see the traces because they are hidden behind a series of complex events or operations, sometimes the traces are also there for such a short period of time that they lie outside of our perceptual experience, but something will have experienced them. As the snow still falls I am typing about the experience of seeing it. Each letter as it appears on the screen is a trace of the event of my finger pressing a key. The electronic pulse that I trigger in pressing that key is invisible to me but it is real enough, real enough to make the letter appear on my computer screen, real enough for the letter at some future date to be printed in ink on paper. The coding that directs the shaping of each individual letter form and the how it is placed in line with all the other letter forms I have decided upon, is also invisible to me, but I am aware of its existence and the fact that it will be broken down into binary bits, on or off signals, that are read by the computer. As I look again at the screen I'm reminded of other elements that are also deeply involved in leaving traces, one's a lot harder to observe but which are nevertheless shaping the world I live in. For instance nitrogen trifluoride has probably been used in the construction of the liquid crystal display screen I'm looking at. As a chemical it is a very powerful greenhouse gas and when I am done with this computer I will have some sort of responsibility for the gas trapped inside it. My last post stated that I often think of the old idea of the Wyrd and the entangled thread of life; these material traces are within a wider view not separate. As I touch a thread that weaves its way through to me, a thread that I know little about but which I begin to sense is having an effect on things, I also become more and more aware of myself as simply another material conglomerate, that also touches and leaves traces.  
The snow has triggered a response in me and at the same time in other animate and inanimate things, we are all woven into a complex pattern and perhaps what is most important is that this pattern is a wonderful one. The wonder helps me to have a better acceptance of things touching and shaping and causing change and hopefully to some extent also enables me to let go and release control of things I can't really control anyway. I can't control the snow, but I can experience it. As I step outside snowflakes fall on my dark coat, I look at them and even as they wet down, I have a glimpse of their structure, my eyes are just about good enough to see the quickly disappearing crystalline shape, a structure that is the result of each snowflake taking a totally unique path down to where I am. It will have experienced changes in moisture and temperature, changes in air pressure and wind speed, all working together to make a unique hexagonal form from its molecules of water. In the grander scale of things, I am very like that snowflake, my shape formed by all the random events I have experienced, my pattern established by complex chemistry, my final form shaped by various contacts with the other things that exist within the same spacetime frame as myself. All this too is drawing. 

Earlier posts that also reflect on some of these issues:


Drawing maps (More thoughts on animal markings as boundary markers)
The imprint and the trace
How working with pencil and an eraser can be seen as an exploration of physical traces
Silverpoint drawing
Paper, mobile screens and fingertips

Touch and frottage

Drawing as entanglements of life

Drawing as a sign: Black emulsion on wall 2017

It has been observed that these posts are somewhat random in nature and that there is nothing to provide a common thread; my next few posts will therefore attempt to tie a few loose ends together, but I will as always ramble around somewhat. Perhaps first of all if you are more academically minded it is important to let you know as readers what my ‘methodology’ is. It is perhaps best summed up by the poet Yates, who stated when asked about where his poetry comes from, “It is composed out of a mouthful of air.” If there is a more theoretical base to my observations this is rooted in the old Northern European idea of the Wyrd. The Wyrd emphasises the interconnectedness of everything, a little like the spider's web analogy, whereby if you touch one part of the web, all the other strands vibrate with that touch. It is very concerned with, 'what is in the process of happening'. More recently, because I was reading Karen Barad, the concepts of 'diffraction' and 'entanglement' have become useful to me, in that they also help me to think about how all things are connected and these words give me a way into critiquing the commonly accepted idea of an individual 'seeing' the world or of having a 'point of view', as being concepts that give far too much privilege to the isolated observer. Kurt Vonnegut coined the phrase, "Lonesome no more." He suggested that this would be his running slogan if he was ever to run for president. I would vote for that, I think that loneliness is one of the worst feelings we can have and as a species we are meant to be connected to the world and each other and when we are not we feel bad. Drawing can also remind us of how we tend to prioritise the intellect over feeling and in doing so it can help relocate us back into the world by questioning this priority. Because drawing is grounded in the materials of its making, we can learn from the process of drawing itself, we can experience how materials themselves shape thoughts as well as actions and things. Therefore I believe we can use drawing to begin to feel at one with the world. We are inseparable from the world, we act in the world and in conjunction with the world, but our particular society has encouraged us to believe that we are to regard ourselves as special, somehow different and more important than other things and in thinking we are special, we also fall into a trap of treating others as if they are only important in relation to how they can help us with our own self realisation. This is of course a paradox that I can't escape, because I am part of the society I live in, I have to respond to its ideals and views of how I am supposed to operate and I have been 'trained' to see myself as an individual, in fact as someone regarded as a creator, I have been encouraged to be original, my work is valued as being 'different' or praised because it offers an alternative view on the world. Artists are often seen as outsiders and this is for many people their value to society, but I have a nagging feeling that this is all wrong and an artist should help us all see what is common, what is wonderful about simply existing as part of the awful complexity of existence. 
I have a three year old granddaughter and she loves talking to me about the drawings I make, she enters into a dialogue with them immediately and easily. This is important to me, and I would hope that what I do is accessible to a wide range of audiences, and that in trying to use a common language I do not make the work poor or weak in its form or that I over simplify the concepts and ideas I work with. 
I'm someone who draws and as my drawings evolve they have a life of their own. However that is not to say I have no intentions, simply that I don't work to a plan. Often my intent is discovered half way through the making or even after the fact. I can therefore be accused of flitting from one thought to another, rather than following a linear narrative, but I'm not trying to argue the rightness of my position, simply giving out a health warning to those who might want to measure the academic rigour of anything I have to say. At my best I am lost in what I do, when I try to think about it too much I become disassociated from both art and life and find it difficult to experience things. I sometimes try too hard to make relationships with the world and other people, and in that trying too hard I can lose touch with feelings and it is feelings that matter. 

The title of this post, 'Drawing as entanglements of life' was arrived at so that I could open out what I believe is a very difficult issue, how to continue a meaningful drawing led practice in a world dominated by photographically captured images. I understand drawing as a rich historical practice, one that includes many cultures and approaches. But I also think that the ubiquitous presence of photographic images has tended to give more weight to some ideas about drawing than others. Perhaps the most important issue here is that drawing is so often seen as being something to do with a certain sort of representation. I know it's a cliche but as with most cliches there is an element of truth in there, the phrase "it looks just like a photograph", is still used by people to praise the drawings they come across and it is a phrase that always makes me shudder, not because of its naivety but because of the power that lies behind the assertion. The person that asserts that the drawing is good because it looks like a photograph, is actually saying to me, "I know what things are meant to look like and this image is a clear demonstration of that. It reflects back to me a basic belief I have about the world and it is that it looks like what I see in photographs." When you look at the history of this idea of representation it includes within it the tradition of Renaissance perspective and the concept of a drawing being the capturing of an image on a flat plane, a plane that appears to drop down between the viewer and the scene that is being drawn, such as in the diagram below. This is of course a wonderful idea, but it is an idea that can also work like a trap. The image is captured, in the same way a photographic image is captured and in that very capture I have a problem. The problem is to do with how life is frozen, immobilised and cut out of context. It is also a way of owning things. If something can be separated out as an identifiable thing, it can be traded, just like a trapped animal can be killed and sold for its skin or its meat. This separation can also be seen as a point of view and a point of view is often what is looked for in our society. It is what I am developing as I write, my point of view being that it is very hard for me to really see what is going on, if all I can do is see the world from fixed individual positions. Everything is as far as I can see, a dynamic series of unfolding interactions. 

I love this drawing of how perspective works, it sums up for myself the issues that come with the idea of how to visualise or make representations of things. For instance, the drawing above uses an oblique projection to visualise the idea of perspective, this itself suggests to me that the maker of the image realises that perspective has its limitations, and in this case I would suggest the drawer wanted to show that the object to project was the same as the projected object, and if this drawing had been done in perspective the object to project would have had to be drawn with a different vanishing point to the projected object, therefore they would in effect not just appear to be different in size but also shape. The thin slice that has been captured (projected object) is in this case exactly the same shape as the thing in the world that has been captured (object to project), it is just smaller, however the line it is dawn with remains exactly as wide as the line that contains the object to project. I.e. it suggests that representations can have a one to one correspondence with the things they represent. I like the fact that the shape of these objects is of a sort of amoeba or potato form, one of those organic shapes that moves between one thing and another, because this does suggest that all forms are constantly in transition. The aA, bB, cC, dD, eE, fF and gG relationships are clearly indicated and geometrically linked, all of course directed and fixed in place by the eye at V, which appears to be very logical, but which is also somehow very wrong. It suggests that this capturing process is how we experience the world and that we take a straight lined geometric, God-like or hunter's position in relation to reality. What is in reality being represented is a frozen set of positions or relationships, an image that probably accurately reflected the world view as it was in 15th century Italy. 

The great chain of being

In the diagram above God sits in prime place and then as we move down the different levels we see humans being set above animals, plants and inorganic things. It is this hierarchy that the developing idea of humanism was going to replace, however what humanism seemed to aspire to was to replace God by humans, thereby simply re-drawing the diagram with mankind at the top. This type of diagram is very familiar to anyone interested in politics.

The Capitalist Pyramid

Pyramidical structures always imply something being on top, something at one point directing relationships with all the other things in the system. 
Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a similar structure and once again our best interests are found at the apex of the pyramid, there is no question as to whether or not this is a good or bad thing for the rest of the universe. 

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

By establishing these patterns it feels as if we have accepted the idea that hierarchies are always how things are meant to be. I feel as if I need to at least move the layers around or look for some less controlling formats. 

If I stand behind a window and look out at the world, I can, if I keep my head very still, trace around the objects I see with a pen that uses ink that allows me to draw on glass.  Students being introduced to drawing in the 19th century would typically have had to make drawings using equipment such as Ablett's glass plane, equipment designed to reinforce the idea of things being what they are when captured in one particular position. 

Adverts from an early 20th century book offering an introduction to perspective

The text that supports the drawing of Ablett's glass plane states this: "The teacher with the position of his eye fixed by the moveable iron ring, traces with brush and Chinese white the outline of the object, (rod, disk, cube or chair etc), which is placed on a table or the floor on the further side of the glass. The pupils, one by one, look through the ring and see for themselves that the lines traced on the Glass by the teacher, coincide with the outline of the model. The teacher then points out in what way the representation on the glass differs from the real object, and produces the outlines with ruler and brush to show the vanishing points. The pupils must afterwards make a drawing on paper from the real object, each one from a different position in the room." 
It can't be a coincidence that Duchamp's 'To be looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost and hour' was made at exactly the same time that Ablett's glass plane was available for sale. So here I am exactly 100 years later, dipping my toes into the same waters, but this is the difference between art and science, artists are forever revisiting the same issues, but scientists believe they can disprove things and then move on. 

Duchamp: 1918: 'To be looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost and hour' 

Although the teacher when using the glass plane is asked to point out the different between the set exercise and working from a 'real' object, this type of controlled looking is very like making a stuffed animal of experience. But a stuffed creature in no way gives you an idea of the vitality of an animal, of how it engages with the world around it and of how it is part of an empathetic or autopoietic relationship with the world around it. The photograph freezes time, it in effect kills life, but it has become such an ubiquitous aspect of our lives that we have not noticed that we are surrounded by its little killings. Everywhere we are faced with still, dead, immobile images of ourselves and others and yet all people seem to want is more and more of these images. I'm often asked' "Why didn't you take any photographs?" when I was at a family event or other special occasion. I'm criticised for not making some more images of frozen moments, images that somehow people have begun to think of as real or as an entry point into thinking about what's real. I don't want to be a pall bearer, I don't want to be reminded of an experience by chopping it up into thin bacon slices. A pig smells, has weight, makes constant noise and acts through time; when experiencing a pig you are forced to engage with it and it with you, but photographs of pigs are more like the packets of freeze dried bacon bought from the supermarket. When I see people taking selfies I feel it's as if they want us to have casts of their skin, death masks for everyone, slices of themselves for consumption, easy to capture and easy to consume. The photographer John Rosenthal once stated that, "It is from the deadest places inside ourselves that we take most of our photographs.” Read his original essay here. He was thinking of a different issue, but one not too far away from what I'm thinking about. It was often said that 'primitive' peoples feared having their photographs taken because it was as if their souls had been captured. Perhaps we read this in the wrong way. 'Primitive' peoples it could be argued are engaged in life as a whole and we have become more self-conscious of our lives. In this self-consciousness we need to check ourselves constantly, the mirror in the doorway being often the last thing we look at as we leave the house. The photograph becomes a check-in, a registering of a slice of reality that we would like to have exist for us. But this is no reality and it is we who are the naive 'primitives' if we think that these little captured moments can have any baring on a lived life. A lived life is inseparable from the confusing happenings of constant experience, only when we are long dead does the entanglement stop, only when the last memories of our existence are gone, only when the atoms of our physical shell have all moved on and are part of something else is our entanglement un-entangled. 

I also like to think of drawing as thin sculpture. The world of most drawings is a flat one, but within that flatness there is a lot going on. Materials are moved around, the paper itself is a complex amalgam of cellulose layers and all sorts of forces are at work between the atomic surfaces of the various elements at play. This is very unlike the flat world of geometry, not at all the sort of place where a line is simply the shortest distance between two points.

It's becoming obvious that I don't know how to be clear and simple about what I believe drawing is, but never mind perhaps that's the point. I think I also need to consider the fact that photons exist in wave form and that materials are composed of quarks, electrons, neutrons and protons and why ideas such as these, ideas virtually outside the field of visual experience, might be important to the way a drawing is made and why diffraction patterns are a more realistic concept around which to frame existence than fixed viewpoints.
Young's diffraction diagram made in 1800, is a diagram that I love and one that also has straight lines in it but these are indicated by repetitive patterns occurring between moving circles, i.e. indications of relationships rather than fixed links between points. 

Young's diffraction diagram 1800

The diagram above suggests that our experience of the world is rather like the wave patterns on a pond made when you drop two stones into it at the same time. It is more to do with ripples of interference than solid objects. It is more to do with effect than things. This idea has allowed scientists and artists to think about all sorts of models for how the universe might be. 

One definition of diffraction is the bending of light around the corners of an obstacle or aperture into the region of the obstacle's geometrical shadow. A shadow can itself be broken down into distinct parts, the umbra (which is what we would see if light only travelled in straight lines from one source), and the penumbra, areas partly lit because the light source is larger than or more than a single point source. Shadows are always interesting for a drawer because their very insubstantiality is what is used if the drawer wants to give more of a feeling of mass to the objects in a drawing. Often the parts that have been worked into in order to create the darkest elements within a drawing are where light is not found, or severely diminished. The pure untouched white of the paper surface will usually be made to stand for the highlights, for those surfaces that turn towards the light source. The way an artist develops transitions from one area of tone to another is key to the emotional register that will be developed within a drawing. See this earlier post.  It is at this juncture we see that feeling and a grasp of form are intertwined in their relationships and the edges between things are vital to an understanding of this. But above all its the possibilities raised by multiple sources of energy that interest me, getting an idea across that more than one thing is going on at once and that an edge is not quite the fixed separator between things that we tend to accept it as being. I hope that having a certain approach to drawing means that you can create metaphors for the constant ongoing intermingling of everything. 

A = Umbra B = Penumbra

Similar to diffraction patterns the diagram above illustrates the relationship between an umbra and two penumbras. The photograph below demonstrates how the play of light on any situation is normally a complex set of relationships that exhibit various aspects of shadow-play. Look around at the room you are in and you will probably be able to identify many possible sources of light, from both direct light sources such as the sun or light bulbs and reflected surfaces such as mirrors and shiny surfaces. As you move your head to explore these things you are of course, in comparison to the photograph, infinitely multiplying the possibilities of changing viewpoints. 

We tend to forget that our everyday experience of the world is shaped by diffraction. Light is scattered by interference which can be caused by tiny particles that are so small that they have a similar magnitude to the wavelength of the light passing through them. When driving in fog you have probably noticed that the car headlights seem to be spreading their shining out much further than normal. The colours we see when looking at the sky are a result of light scattering as it meets the debris in the atmosphere. Water vapour and dust provide fine particles small enough to interfere with the light, scattering the short wavelengths to produce the blue colour we think of as sky, and at other times diffraction produces those colours that disturb us because we are not used to them, particularly when there is a lot of dust about. 

Hold one hand in front of a strong single light source and slowly bring two fingers together while watching the light shining between them.  As the fingers almost touch, you can begin to see a series of dark lines parallel to the fingers. The parallel dark lines together with the bright areas between them are actually diffraction patterns. 

These are the same fingers that I use to hold my pen or pencil and as I draw my body comes into play and it quickly begins to respond to whatever materials I am drawing with. These materials on a sub-atomic level will be operating in that paradoxical world where what seems to be matter can also be seen to be an atomic dance. The way ink as a chemical liquid operates during the process of drawn marks attaching themselves to paper, or the processes involved when during a drawing one surface rubs off against another, have been chronicled in previous posts. These descriptions are there because I believe the physical nature of things, including the make up of my own body, are not thought about enough. This is part of a false divide in our society between art and science, that needs to be broken down. My fingers are far less responsive to the movements of the pen than they used to be, this is because I am getting older and I have arthritis in my fingers. All these things are in some sort of dance of relationships and it is within this dance that images emerge, they grow out of iterative doing, rather than an organised logic, they are the product of interactions rather than the products of a planned operation.
In order to articulate the above ideas I have used photographs and diagrams, the diagrams are more interesting to me because they give shape to a thought, whilst I have to anchor the meaning of the photographs by stating what they help me to think about. 
So what is it that I'm doing when I'm drawing something? 

Sweet potato: Pencil and oil pastel on paper

The drawing above was done perhaps ten years ago, it's not a particularly good one, but looking back it helps me to think about an experience. I was doing a series of drawings of fruit and vegetables at the time. My local corner shop had to cater for a variety of palates this being a multi-cultural area and so there was and still is a wide range of both exotic and local fruit and vegetables readily available to buy in a small shop on the corner of a street in West Yorkshire. A place that has a climate suitable for growing rhubarb and potatoes but definitely not sweet potatoes. I was very aware at the time I bought these vegetables that I had intentions about making images based on them, but no clear idea as to how any one image would finally look. 
As I drew the sweet potato I become more and more aware of its weight, small hatched marks were used to feel my way over the surface and an oil pastel was used to both erase areas I had over worked and to provide a more waxy surface for the graphite to bite into, this allowing me to make darker marks than the 2B pencil would normally be able to achieve. As more and more of the yellow tinged paper was covered the vein like marks that traversed the sweet potato's surface began to feel very like my own veins and as I looked at my own hands I began to feel a close affinity between the vegetable and myself. In the image of the drawing you can just about see the way the marks feel their way across the surface and in the darker more shadowed areas the marks take more than one direction as they make their way back over each other, as if it takes the eyes much longer to explore what happens in the dark. There is a tiny shadow coming from the sweet potato's tip as it touches the surface of the table. It sits alongside other marks, ones made to establish the fact that the table is there. Somehow that touching was vital to the meaning of the drawing, the 'touch' was the moment of that sweet potato coming alive, it too could touch, I could see that and needed to make a few marks that let others know I had seen it. Marks that indicate shadow are fascinating as they depict something that has no substance, but their direction can indicate what type of surface the shadow is cast upon. I like this drawing because it feels as if the sweet potato has weight. It feels as if it presses itself down onto the table surface. Whether the shape was like this or not doesn't now interest me, the original is long gone, eaten in a soup and for a while becoming part of me. The peelings from its preparation, would have gone into the compost, which would have been dug into the garden at some point. So where does the drawing begin? At the moment I bought the sweet potato from the shop? At the moment it was shipped to England from the country it was grown in? Or did the drawing begin in the moment I was drawing flowers from a garden in Dudley back in the time of my adolescence? 
Compare the drawing of the sweet potato above, to a drawing of celeriac done at another time on a different type of paper, one much more cooler in colour. 

Celeriac: pencil and oil pastel on paper

The celeriac drawing is larger, the pencil is more like a 4B therefore I could get a much wider tonal range out of it and the surface of the celeriac had more opportunities for mark invention. At some point before I had bought it, it had been brutally cut away from its roots, foliage and stems, reduced to a decapitated head. I can still remember feeling as if I was drawing a brain or a guillotined member of the aristocracy, small hairy bits of stray vegetation that attempted to visually pull away from the surface felt as if they were exposed veins or raw nerve endings. Both drawings of vegetables began as simple exercises in rendering, but as they evolved they became more about my own awareness of a relationship between myself and other things. We were momentarily touching, and I would in turn eat these things, making them part of myself. How much of an idea came from me, how much from the quality of paper and pencils and oil pastel? How much from the series of events that led to me being in that shop and deciding to buy a vegetable, how much from the shop being there at that point in time, the community being what it was and is now, I can't say? But what I can state is that the drawings above are part of an entanglement and if you look closely you can see my body making the marks that make up the images, my hand was able to grip those materials in a certain way, a way that it no longer can, my eyes saw things on that day that they will never see again, the light will never be the same and my eyes will never again have the same receptivity, and the news on the radio is different, the conversations I am having will have changed and I will have read more stories about how others think the world is. The drawings I make now are very different, but in many ways they are the same. They record connections between things, they touch on ideas that arrive through the making process, they are partly a reflection on what it is to experience the world and partly an idea that becomes materialised. However I am also making drawings in conjunction with other artists, I'm looking at how I can work collaboratively and as I do so I learn more about possibilities and more importantly I'm learning how to let go of my desire to control the drawings. Perhaps I'm learning to appreciate the fact that all drawings are part of a much wider process, one that slips in and out of our experiences of life, not as separate records or observations, but as inseparable conjunctions of materials and actions, as entanglements and not as some sort of analysis or understanding of the meaning of things. 
And yet, drawings also operate as signs, symbols and icons. Once again by defining their use they become separate from the world they operate within. The drawing can be a sign for something, both embedded within the world and yet often used as if it can in some way reflect upon the world. This aspect of drawing is another key driver behind my thinking, which is why the opening image is of a wall drawing of mine that tries to suggest drawing's dual status as a place within which certain types of questions about drawing itself can be asked, whilst at the same time trying to think about life.

But just for now I shall stop writing and leave you with another image. One that is an attempt to depict the isolated body, the raw bare existence of an island of humanity. A drawing that is much more about what existence in a body feels like, but which was drawn during the same week as the image 'drawing as a sign'. 

A part of the main: acrylic and watercolour on paper: 2017: 48 x 12 in

Some earlier posts that also touch upon these issues

Iterative drawing 

Is drawing a language?

Is drawing a language part 2

Is drawing a language part 3

Why does ink stick to paper?

Detailed information on perspective drawing