Glass painting

There is something of the spiritual about glass and even though it is expensive for myself to get access to the specialist kiln equipment needed to fire it, I am drawn back to it like a moth to a flame. I have recently been revisiting glass painting and looking at how some of my existing drawn images could be translated and redeveloped using traditional glass painting techniques. I have in past blog posts looked at some of these in detail here and here, but there is always something new to learn and this was again the case. 

One of the areas of my work that I am always looking at improving is that of expressive mark making. Therefore one of the things I took into the workshop was an existing image where I had tried to visualise an interoceptual awareness of an acid reflux attack, an event that caused both heartburn and stomach sickness. The visualisation, made using inks and watercolour on paper, didn't work well enough, it was too confused and although an image was arriving it wasnt quite there yet, but the translation of the feeling tone, that of the burning sensation in the throat, that was coming from an acidic stomach, was I felt at least coming into view.

Acid reflux: ink and watercolour

In the original image I had tried to express the relationship between the stomach sickness and the heartburn by juxtaposing blue and orange complementaries, the orange flowing out of the blue of an imagined twisted intestine. The expressive quality of the application was an attempt to suggest the emotional nature of an event that also woke me up and had me gasping for breath.

I worked very closely from the original, as it was made on the same day as the event I was trying to communicate and I didn't want to lose that immediacy. However this time the various drawn textures had to be thought through much more in depth, each one the result of trial and error and the application of various amounts of lavender oil and pre-treatment of the glass surface. For instance oil rubbed into the glass beforehand enabled a very different texture to be achieved in comparison to the glass that had not been pre-oiled. I used brushes, a dip in pen, porcupine quills, a palette knife, fingers and crumpled paper pushed into the paint. Sometimes being very precise and at other times just letting the textures arrive as I played with possibilities. The final image was far more intense than the one I was working from and the elimination of colour allowed for a much clearer realisation, alongside the fact that I had made the image slightly narrower, that put more emphasis on the vertical travel of the sensation. 

Acid reflux: Fired painted glass

Unfortunately I managed to break the glass as soon as I got home but even that was in some way a helpful event, as it reminded me that both the initial experience and my feeling about the breakage were in some way linked. The experience I was trying to visualise was one whereby my body was feeling broken inside. I was now 'fixed' and in a position to remember the experience without any associated trauma. Perhaps a repair of the glass would echo this. 

The break

Repaired glass

Another drawing I took with me to the workshop was one whereby I had tried to visualise one of the stories told to me by a migrant to Leeds who had travelled across the Mediterranean in a small boat. He had, he told me, a guardian angel in the form of a rabbit and he would look over the side of the boat to see if the rabbit was still following him, often catching glimpses of his guardian in the swell surrounding the boat. I had tried to represent this moment several times, never quite getting it right. This time I rearranged the image as a vertical, using the ability of lavender oil as a pigment carrier to suggest a liquid environment. The man's finger points to an eye in a wave form, enough suggestion I felt to then trigger an identification of the form with a rabbit's head. Because I had to keep the ink flowing in order to render the image as a whole, it felt as if it was more in keeping with the subject matter. 

 

Man at sea spots his guardian rabbit amongst the surrounding swell: Fired painted glass

The flowing line needed to make the 'Man at sea' image was an approach to drawing I also felt I needed for one of my interoceptual portraits, in this case of a man who used to be a runner, but who now because of hip problems, can only walk with the aid of a stick. He has put on weight since his running days, but still sees the runner within himself, even if he is the only one left who can see himself as he formally was. The constraints of glass has helped simplify the image. 

Digital print

Painting on glass

The two versions above are before and after firing, there is a shadow of the pen drawing, cast onto the white paper underneath the image, at some point it needs inserting into a light-box or window frame. This was a very different image to the next two, both done in response to internal feelings, the one was a response to bad earache and the other a general feeling of malaise. 

Interoceptual portraits: Fired Painted Glass

Each time I revisit glass as a medium to work in, I learn new things about it. I hadn't realised I could keep a flowing line moving at the pace I needed, thinking that I would not find an equivalent to my pen and ink drawings made on paper. Because the glass is so smooth the line runs even faster and you can control the speed by laying down a very thin wash of lavender oil which gives a slight hold to the nib as it passes over the surface, the final images are a better resolution of the idea than the earlier drawings, in particular because of the central concept, that you can 'see' the inner man that still exists inside a now much older and time ravaged body. 

In the case of the interoceptual portraits, it was also the use of a brown alongside the black that I was interested in. It made the images feel 'dirty' and more of the earth and I thought that this grounded what were images of invisible feelings, giving them the gravitas of a perceived reality. I was also looking for a language that had to do with the insides feeling warmer than the outside air and the frustration of not having any physical control over interoceptual sensations, hence no arms or legs. 

Easing the pain

I finally returned to an image that I had begun, but not quite managed to resolve. It was a visualisation of a story told to me by one of the patients I had been working with. During the night his spinal injury would become very painful and being an inventive person, he discovered that his bed was jointed and that it could be adjusted by himself by using the power buttons alongside it. He had found an angle for the bed to be at, that when he lay over it, it helped relieve his pain. He was though getting into trouble from nurses for playing with his bed settings during the night and making adjustments that hadn't been ratified by medical staff. My problem had been that I used fused glass frit to develop the image but I had lost the man in the feeling tone. I managed to bring him back by eventually simply drawing a looping line in black oil based paint and having it fired, so that it was integrated into the coloured frit surface. 

Once again I have to thank Jo-Ann of Hannah Stained Glass for all her help and support. 

See also:

The inner and the outer

New wine in old bottles

Stained glass: Session 7

Pain relief drawings

Parascientific visions and Rayonism

Mikhail Larionov: Rayonism: Pencil on paper

Mikhail Larionov: Rayonism: 1908 watercolour

Parascientific theories had a lot to do with shaping Mikhail Larionov's theory of Rayonism. These theories, although long debunked, have always held great fascination for myself, because of their poetic potential, rather than their failed scientific veracity. Larionov's imagery was based on “invisible” rays, that he said were similar to ultraviolet waves, x-rays and radioactivity. 

Alternative thinking traditions, especially those that had embedded into them ideas of energy and invisible forces, as ways to understand what constitutes reality, were often associated with ideas about the nature of matter and space. “Radiant matter” was an extension of the concept of Röntgen's X-rays, this, coupled with the discovery of radioactivity and the effects of radium as discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie, was in Larionov's time, fuelling an interest in how to visualise invisible forces. The theories which we now accept as truths, such as electromagnetism and cosmic rays, were at the time in competition with other theories, such as Mesmer’s universal principle of fluid matter or Reichenbach’s Odic force. Invisible rays were very popular and Prosper-René Blondlot’s N-rays, Louis Darget’s V-rays and the Y-rays of Serge Youriévitch, were all at one point or another taken seriously, before being dismissed as quackery, as non of them stood up to experimental testing. Rayonist forces it was argued, were invisible rays emitted by the human body. A similar concept, but this time rooted in the human brain, was Naum Kotik’s invisible ray concept, which was focused on “brain rays”, things he believed were emitted as the brain occupied itself with thinking processes. His theory reminded me of the Jean Grey character in X Men, who was often, like Professor X, shown in the comics emitting psychic mental waves of energy.  Larionov also taps into this idea and he stated that Rayonist pictures are born from the intersection of radiant thoughts and the ether’s invisible radiant forms, thus uniting the human / nature divide. In essence Rayonism engages non-human actants alongside humans operating as invisible ray transmitters, in this interplay of invisible forces. 

Jean Grey of X Men

Professor X

The Rayonist visualisation of triangular emissions seems very closely modelled on Julian Ochorowicz’s “rigid rays” or “physiological polar energy”, which he developed from visualisations of the magnetic fields that you can see surrounding the poles of magnets. These rays it was argued, were transmitted by all living organisms, a concept that reminded me of the Élan vital or vital force of Henri Bergson, an idea I then tried to visualise myself. 

A visualisation of body energy

Ochorowicz wrote a fascinating account of how as a scientist he became aware of the power of invisible energies. In his text, 'Mediumistic Phenomena' from 1913 he writes of 'A New Category of Phenomena' and asks himself "What Is Impossible?" He reflects on the fact that in 1878 he was investigating the reality of the discovery of the microphone, in which three pieces of coke, arranged in a certain way and connected through an electric battery with the telephone, were to send speech over a distance. Together with an engineer, Mr. Abakanowicz, and Mr. Bodaszewski, an assistant at the Department of Physics, they experimented doing everything according to the description, but their attempts failed. Ochorowicz wrote in his records at the time, “Humbug,” I thought to myself, “how could a piece of coal transmit speech?” Several days later it turned out that the pieces of carbon were poorly connected and under better conditions the microphone did transmit speech. During the same time period Professor Bouillaud had accused Edison of ventriloquism, stating that a metal plate could never imitate an instrument as complicated as the human larynx. These experiences persuaded Ochorowicz that invisible energies did exist and that there were a whole range of them. The transmission of sound and the popularity of the new technologies emerging as theoretical understanding became technology, such as the telegraph, the telephone and radio, was a model that was often used during this time.

One way to explain that various invisible energies could be seen to occupy the same space, was made popular by the invention of radio and then eventually further refined by the introduction of TV. It was the concept of 'tuning' that explained how all these invisible rays and forces could be in place but not in evidence. Think of a radio initially not plugged into the electric power system and turned off. It is subject to all the 'normal' energy forces and we see it via the reflection of electromagnetic light, can feel its temperature or solidity by touching it. It could be licked if we wanted to continue testing it out as an object. However if we now turn it on and begin to tune into the invisible radio waves that are out there, (which we can think of as invisible rays continuously passing through ourselves and the radio), then we can access vast amounts of information, each type of which is stored within a different band width, which the radio can then be tuned to. Because we cant tune ourselves into these invisible waves, doesn't mean they don't exist, it simply means that we don't have the right sensors. However, in very rare cases a person's mouth can act as a radio receiver and their body as an antenna. A metallic filling can act as a semiconductor that detects an audio signal, and the speaker may be bridgework or possibly a loose filling, basically anything that is loose enough to physically vibrate and convert electrical energy into vibrating kinetic energy, that would in turn then create sound waves. These rare cases, were often used as evidence that the body could in certain circumstances pick up subtle energies. 

Many religious beliefs include divine energies. For instance the uncreated light of the Godhead, the light in which Christ was transfigured before his disciples on Mount Tabor, the so called 'light of Tabor,' or the “Taboric light”, which is a hesychast  concept that emerged from Eastern Orthodox Christian Church practices. Saint Gregory Palamas in reference to Christ’s Transfiguration says, “And His face did shine as the sun, and His raiment was white as the light”. This wasn't the light of the sun, (created light, as in God said 'Let there be light'), it was the uncreated light; the energy of God himself, the energy that comes from God’s being and is transmitted to man. It was thought that Christ affected the eyes of the Apostles so that they could be able to see this uncreated light. In the icon tradition these rays of light energy were often depicted as triangular emissions. 

Russian Orthodox icon of the Transfiguration: Theophanes the Greek ca. 1408

As a Russian, Larionov would have been very aware of the orthodox icon tradition, and the triangular emanations that surround Christ in the icon above, are not too far away from the triangular rays that we see in Larionov's work. 

Larionov: Rayonist drawing: 1913

Rayonist drawings were not always made up of triangular rays, in the image above we have intimations of cell division and a more biological approach to the problem of how to depict the 4th dimension. This idea is perhaps linked to then current visualisations of etheric energy. I have posted in the past on Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater's depictions of 'thought forms' and sound, and they also wrote about a subtle energy-based force that was a transitional point between the flesh and spirit body; an 'aura' or plane of existence composed of etheric energy. Alice Bailey expanded the then thinking about etheric energy and her book 'Telepathy and the Etheric Vehicle' is still available, as well as there being an active Facebook page devoted to quotations from her work.

The seven layers of the aura

The alignment of the etheric body, the astral vehicle and the mind nature:

From Alice Bailey: 'Telepathy and the Etheric Vehicle' Facebook site

The conjunction of positivist science and occultism was an essential aspect of turn-of-the-century culture and I think this was what T. S. Kuhn was writing about in his book, 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions', where he described the proliferation of esoteric theories that often emerged, just before there was to be a paradigm shift in scientific knowledge. During this time Newtonian physics was being questioned by new discoveries and the new science of quantum mechanics and concepts such as spacetime and the forth dimension were yet to be fully articulated. As Mikhail Matiushin, who in his text 'Reference of Colour', developed his own theory of the 4th dimension, states in his memoirs, 'The question of dimensions was an issue that was on everybody’s mind, especially in the artist’s. There was a bunch of literature being written about the fourth dimension. Everything new in the arts and science was seen as something coming from the depths of this dimension'.  The expression “materialisation of the spirit”, which Larionov uses, refers to a specific term that was widespread among spiritualists. 'Materialisation', as understood by Theosophists, was produced by what they called the larvae, the eidolons, or Kamalokic "ghosts" of the dead, the occasional apparition of such shells was, it was argued, as natural as that of electric balls and other atmospheric phenomena. 

In relation to Rayonism, Larionov stated, that what he was seeking as an artist was “A form that results from the intersection of different objects and the artist’s will. The fourth dimension. Spiritualism, transversality”, and that, “All living things are immersed in a sea of radiant matter”. He believed that “All bodies give off rays, and the universe is therefore filled with a myriad of overlapping rays”.  This was how Larionov imagined the radiant space in his paintings and drawings, often drawing lines that operated as rays that speed out of objects, instead of objects as such. It looks to me as if the rays from the objects he draws find themselves criss-crossed by the rays coming from other objects, a process which generates new forms that emerge in the space between them. 

Natalia Goncharova: Rayonist composition 1912

I actually prefer the Rayonist drawings by Natalia Goncharova, who was Larionov's wife. I think that she had a better 'touch' or feeling for the materials she drew with. 

We still try to visualise invisible rays, high-energy gamma rays and cosmic rays being our more current rays of interest. Comic book artists have depicted them and of course scientists also use computer aided visualisations to do so but they still often have to rely on artists to make their ideas visual. 

Jack Kirby visualises cosmic rays

Cosmic-ray muons: simulation of a particle shower hitting the atmosphere 20 km above Earth

An air shower photographed in a bubble chamber

I thought it fascinating that an image of an air shower, (a cascade of subatomic particles and ionised nuclei, produced in the Earth's atmosphere when a primary cosmic ray enters it), is not that dissimilar to Kirby's idea of using broken lines to depict cosmic rays. Jack Kirby went on to develop a very powerful body of work that was focused on how to visualise invisible energies, but I shall look at that in a separate post. 

Jack Kirby visualises invisible energies

Lightening is another visual trope that has often been used to depict invisible forces, because when seen, it is always dramatic and suggestive of great power unleashed from the unknown. 

Gaspard Dughet: Landscape With Lightning

William Jennings: The first known photograph of lightening 1882

An artist's rendition of the detection of a cosmic ray by the Telescope Array experiment. When high-energy cosmic rays reach Earth's atmosphere, they collide with and break apart atomic nuclei, creating a shower of particles that is picked up by detectors on the ground. 

Osaka Metropolitan university and Kyoto university 

Ryuunosuke Takeshige

In Ryuunosuke Takeshige's illustration we can perhaps glimpse a faint memory of Gaspard Dughet's 'Landscape With Lightning', as well as more recent photographic images of lightening and it is perhaps in our exposure to the reality of natural forces, such as sunlight glinting and reflected off water and lightening strikes, that our drawn visual languages for these ideas emerge. 

Sunlight reflected on water

Somewhere behind all this I see an ancient Egyptian artist trying to depict the invisible light ray arms that emanate out of Atan, the Sun God. 5,000 years ago someone was creating a visual idea of how to depict invisible forces, a concept that then over thousands of years, weaves its way between astrological, religious, scientific and occult understandings of what things could be like that sit out there beyond our senses, but which still effect us; the most powerful in reality being of course the rays that are captured by green plant life on Earth using photosynthesis. If only plants could draw.

Atan

There are still a variety of approaches to 'invisible ray' healing practices amongst alternative medicine practitioners. These cover such things as energetic healing, subtle-energy fields, acupuncture, radionics, crystal healing, electrotherapy, radiology, psychic healing and other energy therapies all of which attempt to conjoin the physical with spiritual perspectives of health. 

There has recently been more interest shown in the work of these 'outsiders'. In particular William Reich and his theories of orgone energy were for many years seen as pseudoscientific, however as research into an integrated understanding of our mental and physical health has developed, it has been argued that his theories were not totally false. Orgone was described by Reich as an esoteric energy or universal life force. It was conceived as the anti-entropic principle of the universe, a creative substratum that pervaded all of nature. Orgone was seen as a massless, omnipresent substance, similar to luminiferous aether, the postulated medium for the propagation of light, a substance that explained the ability of wave-based light to propagate through empty space, something that waves should not be able to do. Orgone was in Reich's mind, a central component of a universe consisting of living energy, rather than inert matter. (Something that recent scientific discoveries as to how matter works on a sub atomic scale might agree with). Orgone could work as an organising force at all scales, from the smallest microscopic units, or "bions", to macroscopic structures like humans or anything made of matter such as galaxies, it was the glue that held everything together.

Reich argued that deficits or constrictions in bodily orgone were at the root of many diseases. In order to study these forces, he designed "orgone energy accumulators", that operated to collect and store these invisible energies as they flowed out from the surrounding environment. He stated that this knowledge could be applied medically to improve general health and vitality, in a similar way I think, to an understanding of vitamins. A lack of vitamin 'C' and the onset of scurvy and a lack of orgone energy and the onset of bodily fatigue, would be an analogy familiar to Reich's followers. These accounts of subtle forces or psychic healing were dismissed as pseudoscience at the time, and a United States judge at one point even ordered the banning and destruction of all orgone related materials. Only as a butt of humour was Reich's work brought back into popular culture; Woody Allen's film 'Sleeper' reflected on the fact that in the future Reich's work would be vindicated. When it was released in 1973, the film included a working 'orgasmatron', a fictional orgasm inducing device based on Reich's work.

The orgasmatron from Sleeper

Whether understood as a joke, or as an analogy or believed in as some sort of spiritual force, these ideas fascinate me. They reflect the fact that our human sensory capacity is very limited and that much of what is happening is totally invisible to us. For example, the earth's magnetic field's interaction with electrically charged particles generated by the sun, is at times visible as the aurora borealis and recent sightings of this as far south as Leeds have for many people been magical. The slippage between these sightings understood as scientific as opposed to magical phenomena, is very easy to make and the need to believe in something spiritual is real. Art, is perhaps much more capable of reflecting on these issues than science, its images do not require verification before they are responded to and art has a long history of being able to accommodate both spiritual and scientific understandings of the world. Indeed, people have a right to be wrong and when they are, they are sometimes far more interesting than when they are right. 

A visual exploration of the impact of wave energies on a form found on a coastal walk

See also:

Abstraction as an idea

Quantum entanglement

How to understand the virus Drawing the invisible enemy

Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc's theory of iconography, 

Benjamin Brett's idea of geometric psychology, 

Besant and Leadbeater's Thought Forms,

 Morgan Russell and Stanton MacDonald-Wright's Synchromism movement, 

Edwin Babbitt's   'chromo-mentalism', 

Lines as symbols of invisible forces

Drawing and thinking: How to understand the virus

There is so much disinformation around about how the corona virus spreads that I thought I'd look at how drawing can help clarify things when words don't. 

Plan of a call centre that was hit by the corona virus

In the diagram, it is easy to see how people sit next to each other in this work space. Blue chairs represent those who became infected. This is what happened. 
One infected employee came to work on the 11th floor of a building. That floor had 216 employees. Over the period of a week, 84 of those people become infected (the blue chairs). Notice how one side of the office is primarily infected, while there are very few people infected on the other side. Being in an enclosed space, sharing the same air for a prolonged period increases your chances of exposure and infection. The estimates were that 94% of infections were from respiratory droplets / respiratory exposure, and roughly 6% from door handles, elevator buttons etc). Another 3 people on other floors of the building were infected, most likely from doors handles, elevator buttons or from being in an enclosed elevator with the infected person. See the full article here. It is easy to see how close contact and being in an enclosed space are by far the most important issues in the spread of the virus.

Plan of a restaurant hit by corona virus

A single asymptomatic carrier went to a restaurant. The infected person (A1: Yellow) sat at table 'A'. Airflow was from right to left. (Black arrows) Approximately 50% of the people at the infected person's table 'A' became sick over the next 7 days. 75% of the people on the adjacent downwind table 'B' became infected. And even 2 of the 7 people on the upwind table 'C' were infected (believed to happen by turbulent airflow). No one at tables E or F became infected, they were outside of the reach of the air flow of the main air conditioning. See the full article here.

One person on a bus manages to infect several others, again it looks as if a contained environment, whereby people share the same air, is the most likely place for you to become infected.

Diagrams seem to make things much clearer.

Drawing is also of course about images.

I have already put up a post about some of the ways that we can think about the virus as an image. However there are many more images now circulating through various media outlets, all of which are making an impact on our collective psyche. As an artist I'm interested in how deeply they will impact on our sub-conscious selves.

Invisible germs revealed

One of the most interesting issues has been the need to find graphic ways to reveal the invisible. In this image above taken from a government information poster, the prevalence of ultraviolet light images to 'prove' the existence of germs and how hand-washing removes them has influenced the design and construction of the image. 

Ultraviolet light images of hand washing

However I believe the blue hand and glowing green virus on the door handle taps into a much older tradition of revealing the invisible.

Kirlian photography of human in lotus position

Kirlian photography can show an 'aura' around people, its popularity is very much to do with its other worldly suggestiveness.

Blue Vishnu 

Blue representations of skin were often a way to present a figure as being other worldly, as being something normally invisible made visible. What is happening is that there is an awareness that the pandemic is a mythic event and that imagery associated with it needs to tap into deep roots if it is to deeply effect us.

Etruscan death demon

Blue Etruscan death demons already existed by the end of the fifth century BC and demons and devils in Christian iconography were often depicted as being blue or green

The Devil presenting St. Augustine with the book of Vices:  Michael Pacher

St Theobald exorcises a possessed man: C14th Church of St. Thibault: France

In the detail of a wood carving above, blue represents an aspect of demonic possession and the majority of the images of the corona virus that circulate through various media outlets are coloured blue. 

Visualisations of the corona virus

Drawing (in these cases visualisation using CAD technical drawing and PhotoShop manipulation) can deal with both how to understand the spread of the virus in a very logical and clear way, as well as being able to find imagery that helps us think about an invisible entity. It is colour though that adds the emotional and spiritual value.

See also:

Hands, hygiene and hope

Drawing the corona virus

The virus is looking at you

Drawing and spirituality

Technical drawing

Indian aesthetics