Memory Drawing and hands

An old memory drawing test exercise

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

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

Drawing on paper from Mogao Caves

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

Guillo Camillo's Memory Theatre

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

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

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

Using hands to visualise numbers of days in months

We have all played this one: 

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

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

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

Bede. Diagram from 'The Reckoning of Time'

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

Hand of Sabazius

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

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

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

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

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

Manuscript illustration of a 'Guidonian hand' 1274 

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

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

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

 

Egon Schiele

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

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

Van Gogh: Hands

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

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

El Greco

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

The public domain review  A wonderful source of images

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

See also:

Drawing Hands

Drawing maps

Connecting the singularity: Aesthetics and memory

A steady hand

Artist's bridges and mahlsticks* have been used for as long as artists have had to keep a steady hand when drawing details or fluid curves. The mahlstick is probably the most familiar of the two, being central to many an artist's self portrait. 

William-Adolphe Bouguereau:1895

Notice how Bouguereau holds onto his mahlstick with the little finger of his left hand, whilst with the same hand holding his brushes and steadying his palette. There is rather fine series of hand adjustments being made here, and I'm sure he would have had a lot to say about the correct way to hold a paintbrush. 

Caterina van Hemessen: Self portrait: 1548

Caterina van Hemessen is also a dextrous controller of her materials, once again we see an artist holding brushes and a palette, but this time we can see the mahlstick in use and the artist's very typical thumb index and forefinger grip on a brush. 

Sofonisba Anguissola: Self portrait: 1556

Sofonisba Anguissola in comparison has a very light grip on her mahlstick and is resting her wrist rather than her hand, suggesting that she is looking for a more lose or free paint handling technique.  

Mahlstick

Using an artist's bridge as a marl-stick

Paintings of objects like buildings, furniture etc will require you to paint straight lines. The best brush to paint these is a rigger. These are pointed round long haired brushes. They are made to paint details, these long bristled brushes giving you far more control than shorter bristled ones.

Rigger brushes

Typical grip for using a rigger brush

Notice how the little finger is used to steady the hand. You just need to use the tip of a rigger brush, mixing your paint using a figure 8 movement, until you reach a paint consistency that allows you to move the brush without having to bend the bristles hardly at all. If the paint looks blobby or thicker on one part of the brush than another, you need to keep mixing. If you find using the little finger as a support hard to master, then you would use an artist's bridge. 

Using an artist's bridge

For many years I have been teaching students how to hold a pencil, or at least asking students to think about how they hold one and how alternative ways might help them with the development of their drawing skills. If you are using an artist's bridge then you might get away with holding your pencil as you would when you write. As you can see in the drawing above, in order to draw a straight line the artist is using a straight edged bridge as a ruler like control guide as well as a hand rest. The wooden bridges in the illustration further above have slightly curved edges, these bridges are for delicate hand control that facilitates the curvature of the wrist/finger relationship, so for instance if you were drawing a series of controlled short curves, as in certain types of cross hatching, then you might use one.  

George Grosz

George Grosz pictures himself using an artist's bridge but in a sort of off-hand way, as if it's incidental to his musings, his imagination flying around everywhere, the bridge almost an after thought, but it is still something he must value as part of his artist's equipment, or he wouldn't have felt a need to draw it. He feels in control of his world, he inhabits it centrally, a rock like ark out of which the bird of invention might fly and look for new land. 

Artists have to vary their grip in order to use their pencils, pens, crayons and brushes in ways that make sense. For instance the way you are taught to hold a pencil at school is more about gripping it tightly, so that you can control your handwriting. However this means that you are not able to use the full dexterity of hand and wrist muscles, and the finger/thumb grip often means that the pencil tip is hidden as the hand can block the line of sight between the pencil tip and your eyes. Below are some alternative grip strategies, all of which have positives and negatives, and as a drawer you need to try them all out and see which ones are useful, in which situations. 

I personally like to use the typical grip for using a rigger brush, with my little finger used as a rest, but I use a looser hold more like the image directly above. This allows me to make good use of my little finger like a spring, which allows for pressure changing as well as support for an unsteady hand and if I have an extremely difficult curve to manage, I rest my ring finger on the paper as well as the little finger. This usually means I'm controlling my hand movements from my elbow rather than my wrist.  

Carracci: Artist cutting a feather quill 1600, pen and brown ink

Carracci's drawing makes us aware that he was very aware himself of the importance of grip. Grip is involved in so many of an artist's actions and the making of our tools often influences how we might hold them later when we want to make marks with them. 

Pierre Dumonstier II: Right hand of Artemisia Gentileschi holding a brush: 1625

Artemisia Gentileschi holds her brush as if she is about to throw a dart, a precision gesture, one about how to approach the canvas when you really mean it. 

Artemisia Gentileschi: self portrait

In her self portrait Artemisia Gentileschi rests her left arm on a narrow table top, in order for her right hand to maintain control, the whole body being steadied by this action. Gentileschi appears to get far more physically involved with her painting than Caterina van Hemessen, but in their own ways both need to use supports for their brushwork control. 

Louis-Leopold Boilly (1761-1845), 

Portrait of a Young Woman drawing Herself, black chalk heightened with white

The young woman in Boilly's drawing is holding her drawing implement in the same way you would hold a pen for writing. This immediately identifies her as an amateur artist, she stares out at Boilly rather than concentrating on her own drawing, resting her inactive left arm on her active drawing arm. 

Lovis Corinth: 1924 

In contrast Lovis Corinth stares hard into the mirror and his drawing hand grips the pencil roughly, whilst his other hand holds onto the sketchbook, you get the feeling that this is not a very steady or secure platform on which to make a drawing and the resultant image reflects this. 

Watteau

Watteau draws his artist holding palette and brushes as if they are about to perform an exquisite dance, a sensibility about as far from the one Lovis Corinth displays as you can get. 

Émile Friant – Self Portrait

Émile Friant's self portrait is a beautiful study of balance, his hand and eye control co-ordinated delicately as the tip of his brush just touches the canvas. You can imagine his hand quivering as it moves in response to the nuances of what Friant believes he is seeing. This too is a sort of dance. 

Menzel: Studies of a man painting

Menzel: drawing of a paintbrush

In comparison to Friant, Menzel is a ruffian, he is painter who uses hog's hair brushes and not just uses them but destroys them in their use. No fine balance here just brute force and honesty. Look at the way he pushes the brush down to splay out its edges, he works with the image horizontal so that he can be on top of it, if the painting had been set on an easel it would be pushed over by his hand's weighty engagement with his image making, no wonder his brushes were worn down, mangled and pulverised. He must have understood this aspect of his approach as being of significance or he would not have been drawn to make an image of one of his brushes. He has a similar bluntness and direct honesty when it comes to making a self-portrait, just as a painting relies of the nature of the brushes used to make it, so a human being relies on a good set of feet, or plates of meat as my grandad used to call them, to hold them steady. 

Adolph Menzel: Self portrait

When looking at this painting by Menzel I can imagine him looking down at the painting and at the same time shifting his gaze to look down at his foot. Every painting or drawing is rooted in the way an artist uses their tools, this coupled with the fact that everyone is a bundle of nerves and muscles and blood and bones and microbes and the difficulty in co-ordinating all that stuff into a smoothly running machine, that can hold a pencil or a brush. In many ways it is in the control of all that bodily mass that meaning is made, and part of that meaning is in how we hold our applicators and move our hands, and deciding whether or not to steady them. 

Joshua Reynolds: Self portrait

I'll leave you with Joshua Reynolds, holding his mahlstick like a sword, shielding his eyes almost as if having to protect them from the brightness of his own reflection. He is a young man setting out to make his name as a painter, he doesn't really need the mahlstick to rest his arm, notice that there is no leather pad on its end, the mahlstick is more like a symbol for the trade he is entering, he needs no support.

*A maulstick, or mahlstick, is a stick with a soft leather or padded head, used by painters to support the hand that holds the brush. The word is an adaptation of the Dutch maalstok, i.e. the "painter's stick", from malen, "to paint". 

See also: 

A link to an excellent glass painters guide to how to use grip when using specialist brushes 

Drawing hands

The finger and mobile phone screens

Hands, hygiene and hope