Drawing a life

For a while now I have been contributing to an on line project called 'Drawing a Life'. We began the project because some of us had been part of an earlier online experiment concerned with drawing the body. Drawing Correspondence ran a six week program, 'THE BODY I AM IN' that lasted from the 19th October to the 23rd November 2021. The participants were from the UK, as well as various parts of Europe. After the sessions were over some of us wanted to continue, so a new group was formed and because of wider interest new people joined, whilst others for a variety of reasons didn't continue.

There was a lot to think about. In particular, what type of knowledge about other people and their bodies, could you communicate through drawing, especially if the information was accessed via the computer screen? This question has sustained us for a while but it has gradually been apparent that simply seeing people on screen and drawing them isn't enough. A few of us had similar questions and we have been undertaking projects designed to test out how we could take some of the ideas further. I think, for myself, it’s about the nature of the hand made portrait in a post selfie world. How can a growing awareness of the narratives surrounding other people's lives be visualised and woven into an image that evolves out of contact with that other person. As we have evolved as a group, we have been changing how we communicate, initially it was simply about spending time looking at each other via the computer screen and making drawings in response to what we saw. But then the more we talked, the narratives that surrounded the images started to become more interesting, the issue now being how could the narratives shape the imagery, without having to resort to simply adding text? We began exchanging things, making things such as puppets, thinking about animal forms that we could inhabit and above all telling stories about ourselves. The image below emerging from a complicated session, whereby I began by working on two joined together large sheets of watercolour paper, an image which I then took into digital print in order to intensify the colour and find more coherence between te image's parts.

C

The image below, was made after a the member of the group gave a theatrical  presentation about their life. As in the image above I worked across two large 5 by 4 feet sheets of watercolour paper, as they presented aspects of their story. Initially working on two separate sheets and then joining them together.

L

We had also begun to exchange things by post. This to establish an actual physical link, to give each other something tangible to hold and to break away from the thin screen presence. Once the sent objects entered the studio, they became the catalyst for more work and new narratives started to emerge.

A new narrative emerges

Working in this way reminded me of why I had decided to join 'THE BODY I AM IN' project in the first place. It was because I wanted to make myself more aware of that 'body I am in'. I was thinking about what it must be like to make a self-portrait if you had never seen a mirror or any other images of yourself. You would know what others look like and would be aware that you were a human just like them. You would also know that everyone had a different external appearance and that these differences in appearance lay within the bounds of a certain ‘human’ template. No one was over a certain height, noses were nearly always set between two eyes and heads were always within a certain set of proportions in relation to bodies. However, you would also be aware that you had a feeling tone that was you. Your optimism or pessimism index, your sense of bravery, your introvert/extrovert levels and all of those other feelings that make up a sense of yourself, such as whether or not you are in love, in pain or feeling lonely. What Jacob von Uexküll called the 'unwelten' or phenomenological world of any particular creature. This 'unwelten' being dependent upon the body form that perception was housed within. Therefore, a portrait ought to be able to assess these things as part and parcel of the process of depicting a human being. Internal feelings, (interoception) being perhaps even more important than the external appearance of someone. However, there is a powerful paradox in the middle of this and that is that we can never be sure about what another person is thinking or feeling. They may lie, they may have facial expressions that are very inexpressive or not easily linked to internal feelings and many of us are to one extent or another autistic, often high-functioning, therefore not noticed, but nevertheless, something to be aware of.

Interoceptual portrait

The observation of perception considered through drawing, is a research project held under the umbrella of the University of Porto, my role is to use drawing to explore the role of interoception as part of our perceptual experience. Because the world of seeing is like an ever expanding dictionary of what has been seen, things that are not visually seen but which are still being experienced, such as pain or anxiety, are when drawn, usually drawn in such a way that certain aspects of what have been seen are used in those depictions. Metaphor and analogy are important, because meaning is made by making connections with other things. A pain might for instance feel very sharp, or be more like a dull throb, in each case we have an implied form, one sharp, bright and pointed, the other lumpy, grey and soft. From such a basic starting point, a language of form can be developed. 

A throbbing pain felt within the body

But feelings can also be associated with more figurative imagery. A memory of a particular soft, cuddly toy might be brought to the fore, every time someone needed a mental cuddle. My felt understanding of ‘leftness’ involves a feeling of pain in my left arm, coupled with an image of a carbuncle that grew in the crook of that arm when I was a small boy. I still see that image whenever I have to think about the difference between left and right. It is part of my internal language and makes no sense to any one outside of my body. 

An image I made when involved with 'The Body I am in'

Sometimes therefore in order to give more information an image of an inner feeling might be located within a simple drawing of the body. In the case below a stomach condition effecting the chest area. 

The longer the ‘Drawing a life’ group stays together, the more I gather insights into the worlds of the other people in the group. The fact that 'L' has decided to tell the group a story whilst applying layers of clay to her face and painting it, opens new doors, ones that suggest to me that perhaps we ought to have a period of time when we exclude vision and rely entirely on sound to communicate. Then gradually we might bring the senses together again in order to construct portraits that don’t just rely on external appearance. If only we could touch and smell and taste each other too.

L

These two earlier versions of 'L' were made directly from the screen, drawn as 'L' told us about her life. However at that time the portraits made were mainly of heads drawn directly from screen presences, more recently performative presentations have made me reconsider how the normally invisible narratives of our lives, can be transcribed into an image without having to rely on existing illustrative conventions.

When we went to our daughter's final exhibition in Wimbledon, I met Adam Pearson, he had been life modelling for the students there and was also an actor who lives with neurofibromatosis, a genetic condition that causes non-cancerous tumours to grow on nerve tissue, the result of which is that he has severe facial disfigurement. He is also like our daughter and her sister an identical twin, his brother having the same inherited condition, but without the facial disfigurement. (There is a film about their life available at: https://vimeo.com/315774991)

We went for a drink after the opening and we talked about what it was like to be so clearly different to others. Eventually he had to go to get his train and he asked me to walk with him as a form of protection. He had been attacked several times in the past when walking alone, simply because some people just couldn't bear to see him and wanted to literally remove him from the family of forms that make up the possibilities of the human animal.

Adam Pearson

As we talked his features became 'normalised' it was as if the more I saw him as being just another person interested in why people are like they are, the more his external appearance didn't matter, perhaps didn't matter is the wrong term, the less difference it made. I was again reminded of the issues the novel the Picture of Dorien Gray and its various film versions, brought forward, something I wrote about in an earlier post, Adam was I thought, like a first man, bringing forth a whole new series of thoughts about what it is to follow the template of being human. 

Typical image of Dorian Gray's portrait

Meeting Adam had helped me to distrust external appearances. To not take them at face value as we say in English. A phrase that when looked up tells us that we are advised to look beyond the surface, questioning the initial appearance or literal words of a situation, person, or statement to find deeper meaning, hidden motives, or truth. It involves critical thinking and verification rather than blind acceptance. What therefore is an honest face? Again on looking up a definition new problems arise as to how we understand facial appearance. An "honest face" I am told, refers to a facial appearance that instantly signals sincerity, trustworthiness, and innocence, leading others to perceive the person as genuine and free of deceit. This definition is though followed by another statement, 'This subjective impression is often linked to soft features, high symmetry, and "baby-faced" traits rather than hardened or intense features.' After I had left Adam at the station my feeling was that his face was perhaps the most 'honest' I had ever come across.

See also:

What is a portrait?

The portrait as witness and control

Interoceptual portraits

The Lamed Vavniks

Invisible worlds

Reflections on 'The Body I am in'

Pilates and interoception

Roy Oxlade, Rose Wylie and raw image making

Roy Oxlade

Oxlade's images are odd, funny, sensual, absurd and visceral. He didn't like French art  "The problem with French painting," he wrote, "is it all seems a bit Montmartre." I.e. it had become mannered and he was always in a battle with what he thought of as English insipidness. 

It is very hard to make a surprising image, the older you get and the more practiced and knowledgeable the easier it is to slip into tried and tested ways of making images. It is very hard to continually surprise yourself, but Oxlade in many ways achieved this and in doing so left a powerful legacy to those coming after him. Hopefully this is not a legacy in terms of how things look, or a style, but is a way of ensuring that art and life don't become separated. Life is surprising, odd, funny, horrible, tragic and visceral, is chaotic in nature and of infinite complexity and so why shouldn't art be the same? We have all at one time or another burnt the toast and thrown it in a bin, but how many of us have thought that it might be worth a drawing? 

One of the best responses an image can have from an audience is, "That's daft", words that for me mean that something has happened to raise a question in someone's mind about the nature of reality. It might also be funny. Never under estimate the power of humour. 

Roy Oxlade 

Objects can be very funny, look at those domesticated thingies that hang around the kitchen, what do they talk about to each other when you are out? How do they appear to each other, what is the kitchen pecking order? Who knows? But it might be worth a drawing to find out.  

Roy Oxlade: The Yellow Lamp

On some days the light source is more lively than the model. Who has never gazed at the angle-poise lamp with admiration. Pixar have branded themselves with it. Oxlade I suspect surprised himself when he made the image above, an image that is indeed, 'daft'. 

Rose Wylie lived with Oxlade for most of his life and painted her own surprising images that in many ways surprise us even more than his. 

Rose Wylie

Rose Wylie still continues to paint and as she does so, she seems to be able to tap directly into scenes from her childhood and a freshness of vision that is childlike. (Not childish, I hasten to say). Some of her images are very large and it feels as if the very struggle to work on such a large scale is part of the awkwardness of the images, an awkwardness that is part and parcel of why they feel powerful and direct. However, Wylie like Oxlade can also become trapped in that loop that can catch any of us out. As you search for a childlike or raw vision it can become a style, and as the policeman said to the art student, "Remember style is the enemy of all art". 

I saw some drawings by Nadine Fienson not long ago from her 'Sex Toy’ series. They had a freshness that suggested that she was trying to tap into things she was still finding awkward and difficult, like life. 

Nadine Fienson ‘Revenge of the Sex Doll’

Nadine Fienson

I hope that Nadine was as surprised by her imagery's arrival as I believe Oxlade was. It felt like that to me, but that's perhaps because I'm also aware of her sophisticated ability to handle paint. 

Pig Sticker

Nadine Fienson 'The matriarch' 

Surprising yourself with imagery is also about allowing it to emerge by itself and sort of catching if off guard. It's a lot harder than it seems, which is why so many artists end up getting fed up with themselves. What they are annoyed at is their own fear of letting go. I still have that problem. I can sometimes look at what I have been doing and realise that I'm making parodies of my former self and when I do I need to stop, walk away and begin again. Some artists look for a style, my feeling is that as soon as you have found it you need to lose it. Having a style suggests that you are more important than the world around you, but reality is far more important than any one individual and it has no style. Style also suggests that things are predictable, and as we well know, life is not like that. 

See also:

Josh Armitage

Louis Soutter

Images of the city (includes some thoughts on Bomberg, Auerbach and Creffield) 

More on life drawing and David Bomberg's influence

There is a link to Rose Wylie at the end of this post on colour, she lived and worked alongside Roy Oxlade for many years.

An on line exhibition catalogue of Roy Oxlade's work 

The search for the real

I have been thinking about Hans Hoffman recently.  A second hand copy of his 'Search for the real and other essays' was going cheap and for a moment I thought about buying, but decided no, because it brought back too many memories. 

Hans Hoffman

Plato said that art imitates life and that the reality of life itself is something we can never actually perceive, all we actually experience is something akin to shadows cast by the light of a fire on the walls of a cave. He stated that there existed a world of true perfect forms, and that they lay behind what we experience as everyday reality. A work of art is therefore according to Plato, a copy of a degenerate copy of a perfect form. It is therefore even more of an illusion than ordinary experience.

This stinging rebuke has been problematic for many generations of artists and over the course of time, various artists at different times, have set out to disprove him. Hoffman was one of them.

Hans Hoffman was very influential on the teaching of drawing and painting when I began my own teaching career. The preservation of 'life' in an image was deemed vital to a painting or drawing's success and there were various approaches to this, mostly it seemed at the time to do with 'formal' principles and how they could be used to generate this life force. Hoffman had this to say; "The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature; translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalising this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive and every work of art should be alive." 

A drawing done in one of Hoffman's classes

The key to 'reading' a drawing of this sort was to watch both sides of a line. As you did your eyes/ brain would 'tick-tock', into surrounding space and back into the mass of the form. Mass and space perception being made by the visual events that made up the image. The crime was to shade it all in. 

The 'finishing' of a drawing, as above, was seen as killing it off and making it lifeless. It was in Plato's terms an imitation, and as such could never live up to the reality of the model. You can see the leg and the back are rendered 'realistically', but the experience of the perception of the figure, was lost in the attempt to render the figure as something separate from the experience. Hoffman's teaching was of its time and an essential element in the understanding of how abstract expressionism could be applied to direct perceptual experience. It is 2020 now and not the early 1970s when I first experienced Hoffman's influence on art education, a time when it was already somewhat dated. I don't need to draw in the way Hoffman suggests, but I still carry the lesson in my head, experience is about relationships and how they constantly change, about events, not separate things. 

Over the last few years I've thought a lot about what a big mistake it is to categorise difference. Art is of course part of life, but so are humans part of nature. The old nature / culture divide is in fact an illusion. We can't separate ourselves out from nature because we are nature. We can't separate art out from nature, in exactly the same way we can't separate a bird's song or a bird's nest from nature. The song and the nest are inseparable from the nature of the bird. What is perhaps more interesting is the dialogue the bird is having with bits of stick, old feathers and some dog hairs. This is the bird's reality, and we could spend more time trying to empathise with it. 

Words as nouns associate themselves with things. A dog, a man, a stone, a tree, and because of this we have a tendency to think that there are such things as dogs, men, stones and trees. However what we are really thinking about are sets of categories as set up by words. Going back to Plato, his 'ideal' I would argue was a problem with nouns. He thought there was an ideal 'horse', but this was, I would argue, because words work like that, every noun is in fact an 'ideal'. We learn that the word 'horse' stands for lots of different creatures that can be dappled, black, white, small, aged, wild or domesticated. However they are also events that take place between plants, landscapes and ecological systems; events that can also combine with the events that humans take part in. But nouns separate one thing from another and this makes us think all things are separate from each other. 

I am English, you are Dutch. I am male, you are female. I am white you are black. I am a Remainer, you are a Brexiteer. And so it goes. I am also over 50% bacteria, a living repository for a hosted colony that I need to keep replenished by engaging in a close association with my environment. 

Reality is another word, to search for it suggests that it can be picked out as separate from everything else. If there were no words we would simply live in the now and die in it and be reconstituted in it; one event, morphing into another, into another. 

Think of these words as links not things, as events in chains that join events, that sit alongside all those smells and tastes and sounds and inner body feelings, entering and exiting the event of you today and not as proofs or understandings or worst of all, as any form of 'reality'. 

Between one thing and another

See also:

Object orientated ontology and drawing
A line of disjuncture
Illusion
Mathematics and rightness Includes a reflection on the Jacob Kramer red spot, meant to 'tick-tock' between squareness and circularity. 

Jeanette Barnes drawings in Halifax

Jeanette Barnes

I was in Halifax over the weekend and unexpectedly came across some of Jeanette Barnes's drawings in the main Dean Clough Gallery. If you are in Halifax it is well worth a visit to the Dean Clough arts complex, not just for Barnes's drawings but to explore the full range of work that they have on display.
However it is Barnes that I wanted to look at in more detail, especially as she is an artist I have long admired and have posted about before. See this post on drawing the city.  
Barnes has one of her large drawings on exhibition, alongside several smaller drawings and images that mix print processes with drawing. It is the large, approximately five feet wide drawing that captures your attention, both because it is so well worked and because the spaces she develops are so convincing. The surface vibrates with her many decisions, some left and others removed, some sure and others not so sure, the whole surface gradually knitting itself together not as a smoothly woven cloth but as a constantly emerging and retreating exploration of perception. Her work has that quality of uncertain certainty that I have also commented on before and of course it is another practice that stems from Cezanne's questioning of what is out there and this relates to a philosophy of doubt.

Jeanette Barnes

When looking at Barnes' drawings above all I find them life affirming, they capture the excitement of looking, the looking is translated into the energy of life in the mark, the size of each drawing being directly related to the body's experience of the drawing's making.

Jeanette Barnes



The smaller drawings are also worth looking at because she changes the quality of the marks, obviously as she makes a small drawing she can see everything at once, so there is less moving backwards and forwards in order to see how different marks sit in relation to the surface of the picture plane. When printmaking, she sometimes responds to the first pulls of an etching plate, working against the surety of the printed mark, and adding a layer of more discovered spaces that interpenetrate the initial printed spaces and at other times in mono-prints she works with the flow of the surface as it emerges out of the turpentine/ink chaos of movement.

Jeanette Barnes: Print

Jeanette Barnes continues an old and important tradition of going out into the streets of the city and drawing and this is something that can still reap rich rewards.

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 

Drawing to an end

From 'Flood Story' Gerald Davies 

The flower of the bee orchid (Ophrys apifera) is shaped as an idea of what a female bee would look like to a male bee. However most of these orchids are now self pollinating because the bee population that used to pollinate them has now died out. The flower is now a memory of an extinct bee, the image of which is nature's own vanitas painting, a momento mori for an easily forgotten small event. The art of memory being something that is perhaps not just the preserve of humans. 
In recent posts I have begun to reframe drawing as something that is as much the provenance of nature as of human beings, and in this case we have a drawing of a bee shape that could have taken millions of years to produce. Millions of small touches or marks are made as one flower received more visits than another from a certain bee, until the day when one particular orchid had the perfect flower to attract a male bee and so became the template for many more to follow. 

Ophrys apifera

Rudolf Steiner predicted the demise of the bees in his 1923 lectures. Steiner was a philosopher who wanted us to see how important our perceptive imagination, inspiration and intuition were to the future of both humanity and the world. His philosophy of 'anthroposophy' asks us to look at science as something allied to spirituality rather than being its polar opposite and his drawings, often done to support his lectures on these subjects were very influential on Joseph Beuys. 

Rudolf Steiner: drawing done during bee lecture

In opening out drawing's definition, I'm more and more aware that as a species we have drawn doodles all over the planet Earth. It feels moreover as if we have scribbled all over it, like some sort of manic lunatic, who draws obsessive spirals over and over again until their pencil or pen begins to break through the surface of the paper and begins to rip it apart. We have rubbed out jungles and forests, sliced down into the rocks to extract our precious minerals, blacked out vast stretches of once fertile land by polluting it with our love for carbon. Eleven billion of us will be making our mark on the planet soon, and wether we like it or not, such a huge number is totally unsustainable. "Less is more" used to be a Modernist mantra, but I think we ought to resuscitate the phrase as the slogan for our coming times. The only way we will revive the dying ecosystems of the world will be if we can leave them alone to regenerate and if we keep our numbers expanding at the same rate there will be no room for this, no room for anything else except some sort of self induced asphyxiation. Climate change is forcing mass migration and tensions rise as the Earth fights back. It may be that the fast arising redundancy of antibiotics is a sign that nature is developing its own cure for the problem and that one of Earth's oldest lifeforms, bacteria, are evolving to the point that there will be a new terraforming, just as there was when cyanobacteria released the oxygen locked up in water molecules, to enable life to evolve on Earth as we now know it.   
The graphite drawings that go to make up the exhibition 'Flood Story' by Gerald Davies use speculative thinking about global warming and rising sea levels, to imagine environments of the future. Davies' drawings are like blueprints for the future, in them towns and cities are smashed and flooded, the details of devastation prevail, his drawings operating as some form of archaeological map for future fossil hunters, whatever species they may be. 

From 'Flood Story' Gerald Davies 

Davies is very aware of what possible futures we may be setting up for ourselves and his drawings reflect this. The Earth will though be making its own drawings of the events and as it does, hopefully it will still include us in the picture. 

For a much more in-depth article on the work of Gerald Davies click this link

For more Steiner drawings

Kate Raworth's Donut economics (including the power of drawing to visualise what is happening)