From Vaught's Practical Character Reader
I fear this post may stray into foolish territories and open it with a reminder that lines have in the past often been subject to very debatable readings, so do take what I have to say on this topic with the proverbial pinch of salt.
I have written about lines as boundaries, as direction, as diagrammatic form and as metaphors such as life lines and knots in string but it is the emotional line that I'm more interested in at the moment. This is very closely associated with the expressive line, the line that appears to come naturally from an artist's feelings or emotions. However it is slightly different in that it is a type of line engineered to communicate a feeling. This feeling might be someone else's rather than something that is inherently within and part of the artist's way of drawing or making things and it is rooted in synaesthetic experiences. For instance if I say the words "kiki" and "bouba" and then show you two images, such as the ones below, I'm pretty sure you will know which one is which.
I'm going to start with some examples of 'embodied lines', ones drawn by myself in relation to the way our bodies hold within themselves emotional events and then see where these can be tweaked to vary feeling tone. The first issue anyone familiar with the history of these things is that in the ground initially covered by Klee and Kandinsky, they attempted to strip the language down into its basic elements, point, line, plane etc. For many reasons there is therefore no real reason to go back that far. I'm also by now aware that communication is complex and that in reality we cant experience an isolated line, it will always have colour, texture, direction and all sorts of associations with the interconnected and entangled world around it. I have therefore tended to talk about 'events' rather than 'things'. My attempt to get my head around this is also more to do with poetry than science, each 'line' looked at is part of an experienced event and an attempt to capture that in some way. They are I suppose 'impossible objects', things of the imagination, but in being so, I think they are no more 'real' or 'fictitious' than any of the other things I perceive, whether these be of outer or inner experiences.
A feeling of anxiety coupled with a tinge of the thrill of the unknown
The line image above was made in response to 'feeling tension in the backbone and how it arcs around and out of a clenched stomach', an awareness of which came via a conversation with someone about how their body was involved in their emotional world. A little like a wave, but a thin one that is more like a lightning strike. This could, I then decided, also be a line that responds to the feeling induced by a 'sublime' experience.
But how much of the feeling is due to the wave type associations, how much to the texture, how much to the particular shape and how much to the materials of its making?
The feeling changes slightly as the line/shape morphs.
As the blue drops away the feeling becomes slightly more brittle.
With less texture, but darker, that thrill of the unknown becomes more fairytale
The feeling is shifting again, perhaps more anxious
Each side of the line/shape has a different emotive effect
These all need road testing, but one thing that is very clear is that slight changes in texture and colour, shift the emotional associations through several different registers.
Anxiety turns to jealousy
As an anxiety is triggered it can open the door to other emotions, such as jealousy. A line's colour only begins to make emotional sense when it is embedded within another colour, and in this case, its energy if grounded at both ends, becomes tautened.
Confidence through achievement
The pride of a well muscled body that can stand tall lies at the heart of this line. Its verticality being its most powerful formal component. Bone gives this line its strength, off centred muscles suggest possible resistance to being pushed over. It is though still fragile.
Tired of life
The colour becomes muted and the horizontal of death and things being cut down, replaces the vertical.
Feeling broken, fragile
Now the line is broken, its former 'rightness' about to be snapped.
Becoming sad
Colour is required to get closer to a feeling tone for sadness. This line feels like a fallen branch, or a flower, its stem snapped and ready to be thrown out. The line's position within a frame is also vital, sadness is often associated with an awareness of death, which stripped down to its essentials could be simply _______________________________
It's interesting to compare this with Van Gogh's attempts to visualise sadness.
I read that the direction and form the line takes that follows the person’s back in this Van Gogh drawing is called a 'grief line'. However I can't substantiate this particular usage of the emotional line, but I can isolate it and present it as something to be tested.
The grief line abstracted
The sorrow line abstracted
Floral grief
A line that began within a body and that was thought of as belonging to a series of muscle and bone associations, has gradually been changed to one more associated with plant forms that are beginning to wilt.
Umbrella handle / bowed head
I used this emotive line when I was making a piece of work for Patching. The lily inspired ceramic flower had a bell clapper hanging inside, so that when the wind blew the flower chimed.
Memorial ceramic flower / bell
The line of sadness, is as a formal element, very close to the line of grief. However without colour, variation in associated shapes and textures, it might as well be the handle of an umbrella.
The inverted hemisphere line is another example of an emotive linear form. Not to be mistaken for the smile line, as in an emoticon, this line when used as part of an image's compositional structure can carry another type of emotion similar to sadness, as sort of heartache or sense of things coming to an end.
If you look at Watteau's wonderful painting of a pierrot in the Louvre, it has several inverted hemisphere lines dividing up the image.
Even the creases in the trousers take the form of inverted hemisphere lines
The vertical of the figure feels as if it is dropping down into a pool, colour kept desaturated, makes for an emotional register that feels something like how the world would be experienced if seen from under water.
An energised line falls
A basic children's art exercise is to make different line directions – horizontal, vertical, diagonal, and curved, especially when trying to help them to think about differences in emotions, like sad/happy, excited/bored and calm/worried, in particular when autism is suspected. But as students get older the exercise is rarely returned to as something to work on as a way of developing a more sophisticated basis for visual communication. There is a children's book 'The Way I Feel' by Janan Cain that uses colour and composition very effectively to support a growing awareness of an emotional life and I sometimes feel we need an adult version of this.
From: 'The Way I Feel' by Janan Cain
Cain's book has already been used as a primer to help youngsters think about abstract language and the example above compares a sad line with a silly line. As we get older our emotional lives are though not so easily categorised.
So I have decided that one of my projects will be to return to these basics and to develop a set of cards that can be used to test out whether or not there are any universal visual language forms that can be used effectively, as well as to provide a starting point for new emotional mixes by the simple expedient of shuffling the card deck once it is made.
Trying to regain balance after frenzied activity
In the meantime I'm off to Porto next week to deliver a workshop looking at issues very closely related to the concepts I have been thinking about in this post.
The workshop, 'Drawing the somatic body: Visual problem solving and imagineering' is introduced by the following abstract:
The fact that human experience is subjective and as much an emotional reality as a logical one, is something that drawing takes in its stride. Constable’s cloud studies are as much scientific observation, as they are an understanding of the impact that the weather has on our emotions. Buckminster Fuller’s drawings of geodesic domes illustrate his architectural philosophy, as well as being plans for buildings.
Drawing can be at its most powerful when visualising the invisible. When words fail us, drawings can provide the space for ideas to become externalised and therefore available to communal perusal.
The research objective is to explore how our bodies become measuring sticks when we come to assess responses to perception, and it is based on an understanding that it is our interoceptive network that is used to enable prediction loops to work; a network that therefore is central to our ability to survive.
Our interoceptual network is linked to an invisible but intuitively well understood neurological map of the body, a map that is the ontological bedrock on which we build images; from diagrams of electrical circuits, to maps of war zones, via how to build it illustrations used to construct the latest purchase from a home furnishing store. However, people often regard photography as the only authentic depicter of reality, which is why when trying to convince people of the power of drawing to depict thought, it is useful to focus on things that we cant photograph. Drawings of invisible but clearly felt interoceptual experiences can not only be used to foster cross disciplinary imagination and invention, the emotional range that drawing also encompasses, allows us entry into a visual engagement with the emotive processes that underlie many of our embodied mind’s conceptual models.
This workshop uses a drawing led methodology that has emerged from attempts to visualise interoception; it will ask participants to make their own drawn explorations of somatic feelings; drawings that will then be used as entry points into ways to understand drawing as a cross disciplinary practice. By using gestural mark and image making techniques, diagrams and mapping, this workshop will demonstrate that drawing is one of the most powerful forms of communication and that it can be used to make us more aware of the inner neurological maps of our own bodies. It will highlight how inner body mapping becomes the basis on which we build other drawn visualisations, as well as being the basis on which we build conceptually embodied concepts, such as the visualisation of justice.
Certain aspects of this work have already contributed to the i2ADS Drawing Across Disciplines seed project, ‘The Observation of Perception, considered through Drawing’ and associated workshop practices have been documented and written up as part of the forthcoming publication SKETCHING STEM: A Hands-On Guide on Drawing-to-Learn Approaches, for the Porto University led initiative, Drawing Across University Borders.
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