Detail from a Chōjū-giga scroll, illustrating a fable
Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga, is a famous set of four picture scrolls, belonging to the Kōzan-ji temple in Kyoto. In English these would be called 'Scrolls of Frolicking Animals and Humans', they were depictions of animal fables, alongside some pretty odd bits of human behaviour. I was particularly drawn to them, because they reminded me of Peter Bruegel's work.
Chōjū-giga scroll: A head tug of war
Peter Bruegel'
By exploring non western art forms and looking at how the images can relate to or indeed revitalise the Western European image bank, we can develop possibilities based on hybrid forms. As Homi K. Bhabha reminds us in 'The Location of Culture', the interface between cultures is a most rewarding place to be. These complex visual narratives question our assumptions as to how to depict time in a static medium. It's a long standing problem and I have referred to it several times before in this blog, and each time I do it's as if another piece of the jig-saw puzzle can be inserted. So what is it about picture scrolls that adds to the way we can think about time in a drawing?
Emakimono, or picture scrolls are Japanese handscrolls that have been made for the past 1,000 years, the first ones being roughly contemporary with the Bayeux tapestry.
Emakimono scroll: Japan: mid-Edo: Cockfighting
Emakimono scrolls can combine both text and image and they are designed to tell stories. They are to be looked at from right to left, and you roll out the scroll to gradually reveal the story with one hand, whilst with the other hand you re-roll the portion you have just looked at. This makes for a very physical engagement with the work, and you can move backwards and forwards through the scrolls, if you want to re-look in more detail at any section. The scrolls can be narratives of battles, religious stories, fables, folk or supernatural tales, and they teach moral values as well as contain historical information.
Scrolls can be up to 40 feet long and they are painted on paper or if on silk are backed with paper. The farthest (left) end is fitted with a roller around which the scroll is bound and when rolled up, they are secured with a silk cord and sometimes stored in specially made lacquerware boxes.
Emakimono are read in sections and there is often a written account of the story being visualised either at the start of the scroll, or interspersed between images.
Fukinuki yatai or "blown off roof" technique
I like the way the fukinuki yatai technique is used to bring in map-like perspectives. Fukinuki yatai translates as "blown off roof," or the use of a bird's-eye-view. Another approach is hikime kagibana, or the use of profile or back views of figures, facial views being eliminated, which enables clothes, postures or actions to take the weight of the narrative.
Hikime Kagibana style
The Genji Monogatari emaki is a hand-scroll of the Tale of Genji, a story often considered to be the world's first novel. The story follows Genji, the son of a Japanese Emperor and his descendants. It reflects the life of the Japanese nobility during the Heian period (794-1195) and features themes including ethics, aesthetics, and politics. I liked the fact that a drawing could be considered as a type of novel form, something that could hold a dense collection of stories and histories and ideas, and weave them all together in one art form. Most Western European drawings I would suggest are more like poems, condensed summations of experiences or thoughts, but there are times when you want to put a lot more into a drawing, and scroll formats are ideal for this. Time in this instance being about long periods of historical change, where events can unfold over several generations.
From Genji Monogatari emaki
The Bayeux tapestry is of course the most well known English drawing in scroll form. This is a drawing done in embroidered cloth, that is 70 metres long and 50 centimetres wide and it depicts the events surrounding the Norman conquest of England.
The tapestry as it is displayed at the Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux in Normandy
Just as there is in Emakimono scrolls there is considerable two dimensional invention in this long drawing. From the way that packs of horses are overlapped to suggest the forces of battle without having to compromise the flat scroll space, to the depiction of architecture as something that is cut open to show us what goes on inside. Size relativity is abolished, a person can be as big as a building and the top and bottom border operate as decorative containers to hold it all together, whilst a written narrative accompanies the images and adds to the textual complexity. It is a very powerful drawing and it is constructed within a format capable of dealing with grand historical moments. Again time is stretched out over the duration of these historical events, this time period being much shorter than some of the Emakimono scrolls, the story beginning with King Harold's experiences before the Battle of Hastings, and ending with the flight of Harold’s soldiers after the battle, a period of approximately two years. Along the top and the bottom the decorative borders also include scenes from the fables of Aesop and Phaedrus as well as scenes from husbandry and the chase. Once again there is a lot of information packed in, these scrolls were in effect the epic films of their day.
John Pule: ‘Kehe tau hauaga foou’ (To all new arrivals)
Enamel, oil, pencil, pastel, oil stick and ink on canvas 2700 x 10000 mm
More recently John Pule, the Niuean artist, has reinvented an old tradition of telling epic tales. I first came across John Pule in Paris when he was exhibiting at the Musée du Quai Branly and I immediately recognised his work as being a significant contribution to the way we can think about novelistic time in drawing. Pule's painting 'To all new arrivals' acts like a huge chart that maps a Pacific perspective onto a worldwide reality. Bombs and nuclear testing occur as images, alongside those of pollution and global warming. Contemporary and historical narratives that are both symbolic and instructive are developed; coupling a mythic past with contemporary images of conflict and tumult. Scenes from the New Testament act as vignettes inserted into our everyday world and diverse geographies and topographies are physically located into the same place. Once again there is a mix of fables and reality, historical time being compressed in order to achieve a sense of mythic time.
The need to tell big, important stories, that are novelistic in impact is still there and I believe we are passing through times that will from a future perspective appear epic and located within new emerging mythic frameworks. So don't be put off by the effort, get working on the various chapters (drawings) you will need and set off to chronicle the crazy nature of your own times.
Mythic map of Chapeltown: 9 ft x 4 ft Pen and ink
This is one of my own attempts at drawing on an epic scale. The drawing represents the collecting and fitting together of approximately two years of drawings done whilst walking through the streets of the area and weaving into the image various stories told to me while making objective drawings of street scenes in sketchbooks. It is hard to keep the concentration going over such a long period but always worth it in the end.
Some sections of a scroll landscape / body
I have used the scroll form myself at times. It is very useful if you are developing long images, in this case I was working out how a landscape and a body could become fused.
David Hockney on the same topic Skip the intro and begin watching as he begins to talk, he opens out several important issues in relation to spatial depiction, politics and the nature of perspective.
The various ways we think about time are central to an appreciation of portraiture. Several different temporal measures overlap and are read simultaneously. The first is a recognition of time as a factor in human lives. We are very used to looking at other people and are able to judge their age and social status at a glance. We might not be able to judge a cat's age so quickly, but we are very adept at checking out other human beings. So the first measure is probably from 0 to 100, broken down by us into baby, child, youngster, teenager, young man/woman, mature, old, ancient etc. Our particular empathy being probably with those that we judge to be of similar age to ourselves.
Picasso: Claude writing
The next measure is one that is dependent on the way a medium works and how it has been used. If the medium is one that operates in such a way that it leaves traces of its contact with a surface, we can analyse the traces and look for how many points of contact have been recorded on the surface we are examining. Looked at carefully a drawing or painting can reveal a story of its own making and as we follow this story we get a sense of how long the maker was engaged in the work's making. A typical example would be the drawings of Frank Auerbach, and I'm sure that one of the reasons these drawings are appreciated so much is that we can see the story of their making.
Auerback
Ginny Grayson is an artist that records the times of her work in progress. In her case it is all about the different times she made her observations. You can see the framed series of photographs taken as the work progressed in the image below.
Ginny Grayson
Luboš Plný is another artist that dates his drawings as they progress, but in his case he is documenting the gradual growth of an idea that comes from imaginative interpretation, rather than observation. See the dates written down the bottom right of the image below.
Luboš Plný
A historical time of making is read in relation to our own time period on earth, and the further away from us historically an image was made, the more this resonates.
Hans Holbein 1527
Roman period Egypt portrait from approximately 100 BC
26,000 year old portrait carved in ivory: Moravian Museum, Anthropos Institute.
There is also the time associated with the materials of the making. The Roman period Egyptian portrait of a woman above was made in wax encaustic on a wooden panel. Beeswax is a wonderful preservative and keeps colours fresh and alive over long periods of time. An ivory carving will last for thousands of years without deterioration if buried in the dust of a cave floor. The images above can startle us by their apparent freshness or make us thoughtful as we contemplate the time distance from our contemporary society.
A faded photograph
The materials that go to make a photograph are all notoriously ephemeral. Paper tends to be very vulnerable to both chemical and physical deterioration and many photographic processes are liable to fade when exposed to light. This can mean that although photography is a relatively modern technology, it can still be used to represent time passing.
The recent advent of the video portrait has added a further dimension to how we read time in relation to portraiture, moving images question many of our previous assumptions.
Andy Warhol: Film portrait of Edie Sedgwick
The video portraits trace their format back to the film portraits of Andy Warhol. An awareness of the historical time of making is still important to their reading as well as of the materials of their making, (all of Warhol's film portraits have been transferred to video because of the deterioration of old film stock) but added into the way they are understood is the durational aspect of the work. All drawings and paintings are static and seen by the viewer as a simultaneity. As an observer you need to put in considerable effort over a period of time to engage with an understanding of what you have in front of you. Stillness is very unlike life, therefore instead of automatically responding to an event, as you do when something happens, (i.e. moves), you have to intellectually engage and think about what the image might mean. Film and video seem to play out a period of real life, even if they do it over and over again, in effect the person appears as if they 'live again' in front of your eyes. The addition of movement suggests life. Conversely, when we stop moving, we are dead. Therefore our engagement with a video portrait is complex. It both operates as a recoding and we are aware of it as something that captures a past period of time, and as a reality, as it can move in 'real' time. Some video portraitists slow down the speed of their videos in order to further play with this ambiguity.
Bo Gehring: Portrait of Esperanza Spalding
James Nare: Video portrait of Jim Jarmusch
Most video portraits still refer to the long tradition of portrait painting and concentrate on the head, James Nare's portrait of Jim Jarmusch being typical, but there are exceptions such as Bo Gehring's portrait of Esperanza Spalding, which tracks over her whole body.
Some artists such as Dryden Goodwin, attempt to build an awareness of moving time into their drawings in a way that suggests they have been influenced by video portraits, especially those that use time-lapse techniques.
Dryden Goodwin: Red studies 2004/6
Time and people come together in Dryden Goodwin's work, he has an ability to both capture how someone looks as well as suggest the fragile nature of life within the liquid modernity of urban spaces.
Dryden Goodwin
Goodwin is happy to mix video with drawing and installation practices, his work celebrating those brief moments of encounter whereby we become momentarily aware of the presence of others. His ability to capture those short encounters in the way he allows his drawing hand to follow his eye tracking movements, is very refined and for those of us that draw, they become readable palimpsests, as his points and marks of looking build over the white paper and then over each other to create a layered but open and readable experience for the trained observer. Another issue is what happens when the same person has portraits made of them over time. When the artist William Utermohlen was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, he decided to confront the situation and carry on making portraits of himself. Before his death in 2007, he created a final series of self-portraits that record the stages of Alzheimer’s that he went through. Over a period of roughly five years he documented the gradual decay of his mind.
William Utermohlen
It is interesting to compare what Utermohlen did with Picasso's lifelong interest in his own image. The sophisticated 15 year old eventually becomes the 92 year old on the threshold of death.
Picasso: First and last self portraits
Even in his very last self portrait Picasso was still working through the implications of Cubism. His face pushes and pulls itself as it moves first one way and then another, its as if all his energy was fused into this one last attempt to hold time in motion.
Jackson Pollock: No: 7
Jackson Pollock is not usually thought of as a portrait artist but the image, 'No: 7' would have been recognised by Picasso as being one that took on the Cubist mantle and carried its next stage into America. The fast pace and dynamic rhythm of the New World are entangled with a moment of remembrance, a fleeting glance of what could be another human being fished out of the slipstream of time or as in the case of the image below, from a dream.
Jackson Pollock: Portrait and a dream
Los Carpinteros (Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodríguez) attempt to freeze time, so that they can help their audience think about the dignity of old age. This Cuban artist collective is best known for merging architecture, sculpture, design, and drawing.
Los Carpinteros: Portraits on buildings
They visited old people’s homes, nursing homes and asylums, looking for facial expressions of older people that could lend themselves to an architectural translation. Then they alternated between hand-drawn and digital processes in order to simplify the photographic image. What was an image taken by a camera in a brief moment, is gradually converted into an essence of itself, in a way that slows down the read.
Los Carpinteros: the design process
Finished portrait installed in a gallery
LED light cables were placed behind the frameworks to achieve these glowing portraits designed to function like domestic monuments; being both personal and commemorative, humble and heroic. The scaffolding and the portrait become one, the need for a carrying structural framework for both the drawing and the LEDs being another example of things coming together to make a new fusion or hybrid.
Tony Bevan
It is interesting to compare these pieces with the work of Tony Bevan. His portraits also attempt to reveal a structural framework, but this time in a much more emotionally intense manner, he attempts to also 'freeze' time in order to monumentalise the head.
Finally the busy post-modern time of now, with its streaming images of multifaceted information channels has seen a return to collage as a way to squeeze together competing image strands into the same portrait. Artists such as Nathaniel Mary Quinn demonstrating that there is always something new about time to think about when making a portrait. His images suggesting a type of liquid modernity that was documented by Zygmunt Bauman.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn
Time in Quinn's case being a flickering one that never quite stands still. It is interesting to compare his approach with Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's. Her portraits are always of imaginary figures that coalesce out of her mind as she paints. Her images seem as if they are of reality but are in fact realisations of her dreams and all dreams aspire to a state of being timeless.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Tam Joseph: School report
Tam Joseph's 'School report reflects the reality of young male black lives and how they are shaped over time by society's stereotypes.
Charles Howard Hodges: Master Adolf Johan Bernard Wattendorff
When writing this I’m thinking of drawing as a form of visual thinking. By such thinking, I mean considerations of mind, body and cognition variously channelled through the filter of vision. (Philosophically, this could take one in the direction of Embodiment theory.) What makes drawing as visual thinking particular in the context of art and design is intentionality, and it is the latter of which I try to be specific and that registers in and as the result. This said, a lot happens in drawing concerning the relatively autonomous behaviour of the medium that defies one’s intentions, and intentions are not necessarily always recognisable. However, on this occasion I’m trying to show through and as the drawing, ways in which one might observe perception. For this reason I’ve been recording the drawing process and my spoken thoughts while drawing as videos, specifically through an action camera attached to the front of clear plastic goggles worn over my glasses, Figure 1.
Figure 1: To show goggles, inside and outside, and action camera
both separate from and attached to the goggles.
This does also make the methodology more sharable, and anyone interested in it might take up the process and adapt it as needed. The action cam, however, appears as a thin blurred black rectangle imploded in front of and perpendicular to my vision, Figure 2.
Figure 2: Screenshots from Observation of Perception: Showing Part 1 of a 2-Part Drawing, video clip 26:52 min, 2019.
This is therefore both a tool to record the drawing process and one of two objects or motifs to observe. While the action-cam itself picks up sound, I record my speech, what I term a voice-over, into a separate audio device. The second tool, also an object or motif, is the goggles. Both of these may be said to operate as tools because, being very close to my face, they’re almost an extension of my eyes. In this sense I’m observing perception, in other words looking at looking. This point is debatably another example of the medium’s defiance, but what I want is a situation where, as nearly as possible, there is nothing in front of my vision. The tools, neither of which you the viewer can see in the videos except in the terms that the drawing presents them, are each responsible for a pair of faculties of visual perception. One of the tools is the action cam, with its wide-angle lens, which records visual content both central and peripheral to my vision, without of course distinguishing between either. I provide such distinction through my speech. The other tool is the goggles that register eye and head movement in coordination with the head. (The camera won’t record eye movements made independently of head movements, of which there are two possibilities; eye movements while the head is still, and less often eye movements in different directions to movement of the head.) Both sets of faculties I register as drawn marks and shapes, which provide the accumulative visual/material interest that gradually makes the drawing, Figure 3.
Figure 3: The two stages of the drawing recorded as the video Observation of Perception: Showing Part 1 of a 2-Part Drawing and Observation… Part 2 of a 2-Part Drawing. Dermatograph pencils, black ink, attached filing cards on white laminated cardboard,
109 x 79cm. 2019.
In the first blog entry (link), through reference to the Russian psychologist Alfred L. Yarbus’s non-digital eye-scanning device circa 1960s’, and the Italian Renaissance theorist Leon-Battista Alberti’s net or gridded frame to enable the plotting of observed coordinates, I try to explain that to my mind the mediation between perception and observation falls somewhere between the observer and that which is observed. The eye-scanning device is useful in this respect because it shows how one’s eyes scan across space, and Alberti’s frame because it can represent a material mid-way for consideration of life questions; questions of being. By substituting minimal objects, better conceived as tools of perception, for more tangible three-dimensional objects at obviously more distant positions in front of one, then what gets presented on and in the drawing is the mid-way, the mediator of sources of reference that are before it, as nearly as possible extensions of perception itself. In circumstances where I’m drawing only, without using the action-cam, I have only my glasses to which to refer. If, as in the following example, I still record my speech, it seems appropriate to write at least some of the observations onto and progressively into the drawing, Figure 4.
Figure 4: Drawing of reading glasses drawing viewed from inside the frames while being worn. Dermatograph pencils, coloured inks on white laminated cardboard,
109 x 79cm. 2019.
This might also be a key point in general about the experience of drawing: it’s an activity that starts on a surface and gradually, through its development, opens up the surface as space. My own drawing method however, which is mainly concerned with conveying information about its self-same process, does tend to prioritise the surface. Explained another way, I’m setting up an inversion of the circumstances whereby the observed object that’s usually positioned somewhere in the space beyond oneself and the drawing is immediately in front of one, in this case the glasses. There is no source of reference that’s logically in front the drawing, and in fact the drawing, that should be the mediator between perception and what’s observed, is further beyond the object in the positions drawer/agent – glasses – drawing, as suggested in Figure 5.
Figure 5: Drawing of reading glasses viewed from inside the frames while being worn + the actual glasses now suspended in front of the drawing to fit their drawn size
according to distance when seen from behind.
What’s now interesting about the circumstances so installed is that the actual space between the object, the glasses, and their mediator between perception and observation, the drawing, can be the space of a narrative, a story of whatever else could be taking place in and as a different criterion of perception, Figure 6.
Figure 6: Showing the photo of Figure 5, above, and a view of the actual space existing between glasses and drawing.
Artists often use the medium of drawing to rehearse and research narratives, or use drawing as the sole medium for this purpose – to name but one example, the contemporary artist William Kentridge. This leads me towards another kind of theory, which is the psychoanalytical theory of Jacques Lacan (1901 - 1981). I’d thought of mentioning Lacan in the first blog entry in the context of the glance, but since I reference the glance specifically in the video, Observation of Perception: Showing Part 2 of a 2-Part Drawing (see Figure 3, above), and hadn’t completed that at the time of writing the first entry, it now seems a better moment for further explanation. Lacan’s theorisation of the glance occurs in his paper, ‘Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty’ (1945). This paper is particularly interesting from the point of view of inter-subjective use of time. While the scenario that provides the context for Lacan’s discussion concerns three human individuals, I’m adapting this to the kind of dialogue that can occur between a drawer/agent and a drawing. Lacan explains that within the time frame of trying to make a decision or reach a conclusion about something, an initial hypothesis concerning that something is first put to the test of doubt. The period of doubt, which in decision-making need be no more than an instant, but an instant that can be of variable length, is in effect the glance. According to Lacan (2006: 168): ‘The time for comprehending can be reduced to the instant of the glance, but this glance can include in its instant all the time needed for comprehending’. What I like so much about this quote is the suggestion that the glance concerns uncertainty. The engagement with drawing, or more precisely the dis-engagement with other modes of thought during and as drawing, can be an extended time frame of the glance; the holding of decision-making in abeyance as uncertainty. In the following drawing of the action cam and goggles – from which I also made a video – I later superimposed the glasses, seen as before from the narrow space between my face and the glasses lodged on my nose, Figure 7.
Figure 7: Single-layer state of a drawing of an action-cam worn over goggles and the goggles viewed from the inside while being worn, and a second-layer state of the drawing showing the same drawing with orange glasses superimposed, viewed from inside the frames. Dermatograph pencils, black ink and coloured inks, attached filing cards on white laminated cardboard, 109 x 79cm. 2019.
What’s interesting here is that there’s conceptually a space between the two layers of mark making and cursory imagery that I leave alone. The several apparent positions of the glasses do seem to be increasingly in front of the placements of the narrow band of the action cam, but I mean a conceptual space that’s to do with my lack of conscious concern to integrate the two sets of imagery. However, the two sets waver in a kind of relationship that’s, in a sense, up to them. While the word uncertainty often has a negative connotation, drawing and other forms of creative practice stand a good chance of manifesting uncertainty positively, no matter what one’s disposition. Debatably, if art works, it’s imbued with affirmation, even if its content and the invested feelings are opposite. Insofar as an uncertain disposition would be to hang back, and a decisive one would be to push onwards – hesitancy versus boldness – I personally like the idea of time conducting a kind of backwards rotation as part of its movement forward, where it picks up the past and draws it through. This also seems like drawing; where each decision is consequential on the next, and the next one is in acknowledgement of some previous decision. There are moments in the video-recordings of the drawing as shown in two states in Figure 3, above, however, where such consequential decisions break down, and in the video particularly of the second state I appear to be searching around for something to do next. While this often happens in drawing, I’d much prefer a drawing to roll on as a continuum of action, Figure 8.
Figure 8: Screenshots 40:42min and 41:27min, with 1st voice-over, and interventions of a 2nd voice-over between the timespan of the two screenshots, of the 44:35min video Observation of Perception: Showing Part 2 of a 2-Part Drawing, 2019.
What’s interesting with the strategy of intervening in the first voice-over that’s spoken spontaneously while drawing, is that the intervention is squeezed into available moments of silence where I’m drawing only, which seems like a textual equivalent of re-working and revising the drawing. I show this also, in Figure 8, to indicate how the drawing and the voice-over are mutually both cooperative and distractive. A second point of Lacanian theory conveniently links the first blog entry’s reference to Alberti’s frame with the idea of a potential narrative space. Lacan adapted the idea of a mid-way in the optical pyramid to his own idea, in the psychical context, of an opaque screen, more like a ‘stain’ or ‘decoy’, that muddies vision, altering and affecting what we assume to be the objectivity of vision. (This is my simple interpretation of very complex theory. For more thorough explanation you might refer for instance to Harari, 2004: 119-40) Suffice it to say that the metaphor of muddied vision may relate to the more subjective aspect of perception: the fact that one often imposes personal interpretation on otherwise objective and sharable visual-material content. I’m intending to offer this question to a small group of fine art students as a contribution to their seminar class on Embodiment. After a drawing exercise that follows closely in the method of the above-described work, I’ll ask them to define the space that their glasses frame, or the frame of sunglasses, in terms of a narrative of their own choosing. Whether physically in whatever medium in the space as shown in Figure 6, right-hand photo, above, or as further development of the drawing, the only stipulation will be that the drawing should be seen to physically morph into the story. A colleague wrote me a comment on the proposed idea: ‘I see action through big drawing (space), glasses in some way combining a self to a field, which could be expanded space of imagination and place of vision. Physically and symbolically this is interesting, with the use of interpretative words and objects and also the context of subject and thing. I think the content analyses time, space, place, and will involve the students naturally in self related content.’ The idea of framing in one way or another is always important in the more instructive level of creative teaching, and in the above-described project I’ve been doing this for myself. The intention of the drawings is to explore a hypothesis that one can observe perception and visualise it as an observation. As in some instances of drawing – though not all – one hopes that the result conveys a degree of clarity of intentions. However, in the process, things may happen that cause one to become involved in other areas of research. I’ve given some indication of my own interests, and of how things can occur by chance in the course of drawing. If research is an additional direction, then through one’s practice a third and more integral possibility can emerge that alters one’s perspective, but in a sense, because it’s within the work instead of clearly declaring itself, it waits to be discovered. This other integral possibility may shift and challenge one’s determination to achieve clarity.
References
Harari, R. (2004) Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction. New York, NY: Other Press Lacan, J. (2006) Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. (First published 2002) New York, NY; London: W. W. Norton & Company Thanks to Mike for a fascinating insight into the work he is doing. It might be interesting for you to contextualise Mike's post by reading my own thoughts on that 'uncertain certainty' an attitude that lies at the core of most ventures into trying to record perceptual activity. His glasses are another drawing device or apparatus and therefore it might also be useful for you to think about how these devices have become integral parts of other drawing processes. Mike has sent a sharable file for those interested in more detail. He has extracted a 'voice' from one of his videos and given an account of how his spoken interjections are woven into the narrative of drawing making.
