Memory Drawing and hands

An old memory drawing test exercise

Memory drawing used to be a vital part of an artist's training. The image above is of a glass slide found in a skip in Newport recently. I would have been really interested to have seen what the rest of the slides looked like, but this found image conjures up a pretty good idea of how one particular examination worked.
Many years ago I read a biographic novel about the life of the artist Gainsborough. In the novel, (whether this was based on fact I don't know) Gainsborough had set up a still life in his cellar and had put a canvas on an easel in his attic. He hated climbing stairs, so this meant that if he was to minimise his climbing time, he would have to memorise the still life really clearly when down in the cellar, so that painting time in the attic was productive. This scenario has stayed in my head, so it must have had some use as a mnemonic. When I tried to work with the same situation myself, I found it almost impossible to carry in my head the necessary detail to make a good accurate drawing in the top floor studio. The process of climbing four flights of stairs demanded a lot of physical effort and this seemed to drain away the energy needed to hold an image in the mind. Like many things, if you are to develop the muscles, (both physical and mental) you need to train regularly.

However there are many other ways of developing memory as a useful mechanism in relation to image making, most of which involve the image maker providing helpful memory frameworks for the audience. This being the case, I would like to remind everyone who is making drawings or images of any sort, that visual memory training is a discipline with a long tradition and that it is one well worth looking at if you are to become more astute when making decisions as to how your images will become memorable.

Drawing on paper from Mogao Caves

In the past our own bodies have often been used as memory machines, and they are much easier to work with than full blown memory theatres as described in Frances Yates' wonderful book, 'The Art of Memory'. A book that everyone should read, simply because it helps us to understand how our brains need structures within which to save memories and even more importantly, that memory structures need images associated with them if they are to become 'memorable'.

Guillo Camillo's Memory Theatre

Memory theatres are though huge and costly things and there are other ways to achieve similar ends, in particular our hands can be used very like mini versions of these theatres, fingers replacing the aisles that were placed between rows of information seating. The process of bringing together certain associations or particular images in order to trigger memories, quickly begins to create bizarre forms, and hands in particular seem to lend themselves to both imaginative play and to support materialised thinking in relation to numerical ideas and visual representations of structural principles. 

One of the most ambitious of hand mnemonics was presented by Girolamo Marafioti of Calabria in a 1602 treatise on the arts of memory. The system consists of a map of ninety-two manual loci; twenty-three on the front and back of each hand, each housing a different geometric symbol: a crescent moon, a chalice, a circle with horns and what looks like a lemon. To use the system, one assigns a to-be-remembered thing to each locus. One might, as Marafioti suggests, use it to remember a group of people arranged by status, age, or other characteristics. The system compresses the features of a memory palace and makes the whole edifice fit into the shape of a hand. 

From Girolamo Marafioti’s 17th-century treatise on the art of memory, De Arte Reminiscentiae, demonstrating the use of loci 

Using hands to visualise numbers of days in months

We have all played this one: 

Here's the church and there's the steeple, open the doors and there's the people

What began as a post to remind everyone of how important visual memory is, is now becoming a post about hands and how they can become the starting point for memorable image invention. So I'll save the stuff about artists' visual memory teaching for another post and look at hands and how they have been used as memory devices. Yes my mind flits around all over the place, but it's the way it operates best for me and hopefully, eventually all these diversions will make some sort of sense. 

The hands (above) of the Chinese image from the Mogao Caves were drawn over a thousand years ago and are annotated with Chinese characters on the fingertips that give a specific name to each digit; above that, on a second row we find the names of the five Buddhist elements: space, wind, fire, water and earth and a final tier, floating upwards as if on kite strings, lists the ten virtues. The drawing illustrates a mnemonic system, that helps the viewer to make connections between elements and virtues. At about the same time in England, the monk Bede came up with a treatise called 'The Reckoning of Time', in which he laid out a method for determining when Easter would fall on any given year. These two systems both deal with the issue of materialising thought. As Barbara Tyersky puts it, "When thought overwhelms the mind, the mind puts it into the world". Those of you that regularly follow this blog will be well aware of how important I believe 'materialising thought' is; without a way to externalise thought we become trapped in our own minds and making images is one of the best ways of doing this.

Bede. Diagram from 'The Reckoning of Time'

In ancient Pompeii a bronze sculpture of the Hand of Sabazius held images of protective symbols for the house owner. Sabazius, the god of vegetation and the guardian of women in labour, is often depicted in the palm of a hand, but it is the other symbols that emerge from the hand including a nursing mother, a crow, a table with offerings and a serpent, that make these hands such fascinating objects. These strange hands are memorable precisely because of the fact that they are strange, but their strangeness is one driven by a very normal desire, the need to seek divine protection. 

Hand of Sabazius

Cicero wrote about the importance of memory as an aspect of rhetoric and he introduces us to the idea of memory devices and provides a lasting image with which to remember how memory devices work. Cicero connects the training of memory with sight and like other classical rhetoricians he used the mind’s recollection of visual space to act as a guide to the memorisation of ideas. A mythic story of the invention of the art of memory by the poet Simonides, is told by Cicero and as it not just describes how the art of memory works, it is itself a memory device, I shall repeat it again. 

The poet Simonides created the art of memory when, after he was the lone survivor at a crowded banquet, he was asked to identify the bodies. During the banquet, he had been asked to step outside because he had to receive an urgent message. While taking the message, there was a rumbling sound as an earthquake shook the building, the roof then collapsed, crushing everyone inside beyond recognition. Simonides was shocked but safe. Very soon the distraught relatives of the other diners arrived at the scene and according to custom they needed to bury their dead relatives within the day, but there was a problem, the diners had been badly crushed and disfigured, so no one could tell who was who. Simonides however came to everyone's aid, he had a way of remembering the names of all the corpses by remembering who was sitting where. The shape and layout of the room and its tables and chairs were clear to him in his memory and as the people in the room were of great importance, their positions in relation to the room's layout had been sharply impressed upon his mind. 

This association with location, meant that many early memory methods involved walking around a building and things that were to be remembered were then distributed around the building in significant places and you walked through these spaces in your mind, each location triggering a memory because something was positioned that was designed to set off an association with what you were trying to memorise. The hand is like a small building and can be used in the same way. 

I have looked at hands as a way of remembering musical notation in an earlier post, but a good idea is always worth revisiting. In this hand image (below) made in response to ideas supposedly set out by the 11th-century Italian monk and music-theoretician Guido from Arezz, we can see how he uses the hand image to memorise the names of tones and their relationships by linking them to the natural divisions that we make when drawing hand images.

16th-century diagram from the manuscript of an unknown author depicting musical notes scored across a hand in the method attributed to Guido

Manuscript illustration of a 'Guidonian hand' 1274 

The solmization sequence ut-re-mi-fa-sol-la appears both on the enclosing circle and on the hand itself

In the drawing above the artist has been able to break totally away from normal conventions of spatial depiction, The near hand is big and powerful, but the far hand is gigantic, it spreads out until it is big enough to contain the idea. 

It's amazing how different hands can become. The one above also illustrating Guido's ideas could belong to an Egon Schiele of the Medieval artist world.

 

Egon Schiele

These woodcuts of chunky hands below, are totally different in sensibility. They are heavy and solid, the sort of hands that if engaged in making karate chops would do some serious damage. 

From Anianus’ Compotus cum commento (1492), an adaptation of Bede’s computus system

Van Gogh: Hands

Van Gogh's drawing of hands, is an image of hands that know how to do hard work; these are peasants hands. Whilst the hand below is meant to be much more spiritual. 

Hand-coloured woodcut: The Hand as the Mirror of Salvation

El Greco

El Greco's hand above, is a fascinating one. It is in fact quite strong, and yet at the same time it is sensitive and definitely a hand that has spiritual intent.  

From Stephan Fridolin’s 'Treasury of the true riches of salvation': 1491 

The hands above contain numbers that correspond to meditations in the book, in effect creating a table of contents. I like these hands as the little fingers have a kink in them, and so do my own fingers, a fact that makes me think that the artist, may have like myself, had arthritic fingers. However in the same book, we have a pair of more solid hands, hands with much broader fingers that can carry busts of the apostles, saints, Mary and Christ. 

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From Stephan Fridolin’s 'Treasury of the true riches of salvation': 1491 

Of course we can use our hands for many other purposes, they are as versatile as we want them to be. From the shadow puppet of childhood to the fist of adulthood, the hand morphs into what we want it to be. As in the case below where the hand becomes a 'handy' sundial.

Thoinot Arbeau 1582 volume of practical astronomy: How to convert the hands into a sundial 

For the people of Michigan, the hand becomes a map.

You are supposed to know something really well if you know it like the back of your hand. A phrase I never really understood. As a boy I had spent many hours with my gran who would often hold my hand and carefully trace out my lifeline or prod my Venus Mount, she seemed to know all there was to know about the palm of my hand, but she never spoke to me about the other side. 

Chart of the Hand from Dr Alesha Sivarth's Book of Life 1898

References:

The public domain review  A wonderful source of images

Tyersky, B. (2019) Mind in Motion: How action shapes thought London: Basic Civitas Books

See also:

Drawing Hands

Drawing maps

Connecting the singularity: Aesthetics and memory

Eric Ravilious At Dulwich

The Westbury Horse

I went to see the Eric Ravilious exhibition at Dulwich yesterday. Besides being a chance to catch up with a few Rembrandt portraits that I hadn’t seen for years, this was an opportunity to see a lot of Ravilious all in one place. It might look at first sight that this is an old fashioned, should have been forgotten, very conservative English watercolour artist. What you might ask, has his work to offer someone working today? After all he died during the Second World War, 8 years before I was born.

There is though something quietly powerful about his work. He has a very strong sense of design and organisation, this coupled with a sharp grasp of how perspective can be almost hallucinatory and a way of making marks in watercolour that shifts between the fluidity of a stain and the dynamic vibration of graduated mark making. His colour is refined and sensitive to atmospheric changes, in particular he can suffuse an image with light, which he controls with an often dry-brush technique, coupled with a scratching out process that he uses to bring back the white of the underlying paper.

He constructs his brush strokes very subtlety, combining changes in direction with graduations of colour. In particular his grasp of atmospheric perspective is coupled with a clear design sense, that allows him to use elements such as this post above, to frame his view of the Long Man of Wilmington. 

Ravilious uses perspective to create emotive spaces from interiors as well as landscapes. His use of pattern in the bedroom above creating a strong sense of claustrophobia, the sprung ironwork of the bed-heads, inhabiting the space as a substitute for the missing figures that would have inhabited this space. He is aware of the potential of pattern to be a powerful emotive force, thus being able to avoid the accusation of being a 'decorative' image maker, whilst being able to carry off the use of pattern to unify his images. This is a difficult tightrope to walk and it's his use of perspective that allows him to solve this conundrum. The interplay between structure, space and decoration is kept in balance, in this way the images stay 'alive' the eyes switching between the strong stabilising verticals, spacial mark making and rhythmic pattern. 

His grasp of underlying geometric form is perhaps at it clearest when he deals with engineering. The huge ship propeller sitting on a rail carriage in the image above is beautifully realised, the mark making following the propeller's curvature, taking the eyes into and around the space, the perspective rectangle of the carriage stabilising the torque of the propeller. At the same time the 'realism' is of course a construction, one that is so intense and stripped down that the image feels almost dreamlike. In writing this is sometimes called 'magic realism', images having an almost hallucinatory intensity. 

This exhibition was really useful for myself. Ravilious' work reminding me of how important it is to reconcile the various elements that make up a drawing. In particular I was reminded that drawing can work very powerfully on that edge between movement and vibration (gestural direction and mark making) and stillness, (structure and composition). By holding all these things within a simultaneity that our eyes 'see' all at once, drawing can be used to reflect on a deep inter-relationship between structure, pattern and process that in turn reflects a further  recognition of "autopoiesis". Autopoiesis is a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself, such as an eco-system or a human being. Any life form depends on its survival by being able to reproduce and maintain itself and this means that its physical structure must be synthesised with its 'pattern' or shape and it has to be integrated into a process that links it successfully into its environment. 

In my mind I was left thinking about how Ravilious' marks weave themselves together in a similar way to what we could call the 'web of life'. His visual patterning integrating with muscular structures, his process being one of the sympathetic and embedded observer, whose perceptions were ordered in a manner that reflected a fully empathetic human being. 

The Ravilious exhibition is open until August: see

Why do we draw?

So what do you make drawings about? In the posts I’ve put up so far I’ve tried to make you all aware of drawing as a broad church, a wide area of investigation. But that’s very similar to putting up posts that demonstrate that writing covers many styles and formats. It is very obvious and shouldn’t really need stating, but you have to start somewhere and one of the things that I was very aware of was that people had a quite narrow view of what could constitute fine art practice within the drawing strand.

I believe that we all have experiences and that what artists do is reshape those experiences and process them through a medium, such as a book or play or a drawing.  They use this process to communicate to others something that has been understood or felt about whatever the experience was. I am a strong believer that life is full of an infinite series of possibilities and that in order to make sense of these you need to focus and sift through them and only by constructing frameworks of meaning can we negotiate our way through the infinite number of possible choices that life throws our way.

My personal issues are centred on how media news affects me and how my everyday experiences of Leeds shape my day-to-day life. For instance this weekend I went foraging for mushrooms, I spent time walking through woodland corridors on the very edge of suburbia and found food to eat in the middle of January. Mushrooms and green leafed plants are thriving due to the warmer climate and as I walk and pick and draw, my mind drifts towards how I can make images of this experience and what these might mean. I get home and turn on the radio and I’m saturated with news and views surrounding the shootings in Paris. Both these experiences begin to fuse together and I’m aware that everyone else listening to the news will be forced to make decisions about how to think about fundamentalism and terrorism. I’m also still a lecturer in fine art. I spend a vast amount of my time thinking about drawing as a fine art practice and this too is part of my experience, this too will be part of what I’m trying to communicate, which is why I’m often looking at visual language and asking questions as to how and why it works as it does.

The hard thing for me as an artist is to shape and fuse together various experiences. When I was younger I used to privilege certain experiences over others, some I tended to use within my practice and others I kept separate because I felt they weren’t the stuff of artworks. As I get older I realise that all of life is open to being thought about and communicated about in an art-form of one sort or another. But some things are better communicated as a novel or a play and others as images or songs. Some things work best within a combination art form such as film or performance art. My mistake has often being to try and use one form when another one would have been better, this is why I would always recommend working in several ways at once so that even though you may be better at one form than another, you get a feeling for how the different possibilities for communication might work.

Perhaps the hardest question you can be asked is, “What is your work about?” but at some point you will need to become obsessed with something. When I was young I realised that I was obsessed with art and art and its processes became for several years the subject of my work. As I got older things changed but I would suggest that that is natural, the toys of youth are not the same as the things of old age.

So going back to my present dilemma. What do I draw, how do I make images relevant to today? My interest in plant and fungus life perhaps being something I can deal with using botanical illustrative forms, perhaps maps might help me identify where these things occur. But how to deal with the sense of impending doom I get when I turn on the news? This will take a lot more work.

I’ve mentioned before that drawing has many languages and I think that is its great richness and fascination. How these can be combined to create a unique voice or signature is something that only comes through in the making. But as you make, as you draw and work through its ranges of possibilities, perhaps it helps if you can accept the fact that it’s OK to include all and any of your experiences of life. So many students I have spoken to in the past have reserved certain areas of their lives as non-art territories and in reality it is often in those very territories that the richest materials for art making will be found.

Some of my recent walks have taken me past tower blocks, the drawings I did of them are now being processed and are going through an editing stage, whereby I assess how well or badly they communicate my feelings. I have to make work to find out what I am doing, but this isn’t enough, I also have to edit and make choices about directions to take the work into, and these responsibilities are of course common to everyone who wants to make fine art images.

The next stage will be to build these images into larger more complex visual narratives, ones that have an allegorical message that I want them to have. But that is my business and not necessarily yours, your job is to identify somewhere to start and this is often by focusing on something that you have noticed or come across already but just hadn't thought it worthwhile as an 'art' subject. My last word on this is to beware of art, looking at other artist's work has a way of taking you down certain paths that are pretty well worn, life is nearly always more interesting. 

See also:

What use is art?

Why it matters