Showing posts with label outsider art. Show all posts

Tuesday, 7 January 2025

RIP Tony Tomlin

I have just heard that Tony Tomlin has died. He had Parkingson's and I hadn't seen him for a couple of years but every now and again I would still think about him and his work, as his life had often impacted upon mine, just as it had so many other people in the local arts community.

His art tutor, supporter and mentor at City College for many years Kevin O'Hare once fondly called him 'a craftsman and master of crappy materials'. Tony came to the old Jacob Kramer College (Soon to be Leeds College of Art and then Leeds Art University) in the 1980s and was on the part-time Fine Art and Craft course. He had a unique vision that never left him of a world where media celebrities cohabited with the people of Chapeltown; where his particular take on religion was mixed with his respect for art and artists and where the various tutors and lecturers of the courses he would take, were drawn and annotated by Tony, in his attempts to measure and tie down why these 'educated' people were themselves artists. He was often on a quest to establish the source of 'genius'. This could be the reason behind sports success or it could be that someone he knew personally had achieved a level of educational clout, that must have as far as he was concerned, have been because they too were a genius. The fact that they were now in a position to teach him, was something he needed to interrogate. His quest to find some sort of truth was at times heartbreaking, as it mixed an instinctive grasp of how society branded some people as outsiders and others as insiders, with a failure to see how he himself had been categorised. For many he was an outsider artist, but he was always trying to get the qualifications that would give him a licence to be a professional artist, an insider.

Tony operated as a reminder that the making of art in many ways cant be taught and that creativity is something that can be owned by anyone. He could make even the most basic drawing interesting, his comment on the drawing of scissors below is sort of blindingly obvious but at the same time confusing. He would have been proud of undertaking the exercise and his use of shadow is dramatic and clearly visually observed. He tells us, "DRAWN WITHOUT THE USE OF A RUBBER AND PENCIL", so how was it drawn then? Is this a biro drawing? The exercise was for Tony proof that he was undertaking a professional program of study and the shadow cast by the scissors is indeed proof that he could objectively observe the world around him when he had to.

Tony Tomlin: Scissors

Tony Tomlin: Johan Cruff

Tony was well known for his text and image work. They combine so that the text not just annotates the image, to both inform us of what it is and how Tony thinks about it, but it also develops a textural surface, one that his line drawing is physically embedded into. In the image above, 'Kick a ball' would have been a reference to playing football as a child on the streets of Chapeltown, the dates are both Cruff's time of greatness as a player for 'Ajax of Amsterdam' and a time when Tony was young. Tony comments on his own attempt to create this homage, "BAD" ART FOR CRUFF. The way that Tony could seamlessly integrate a childlike memory with the facts of a football fan, his amused commentary on his own work and directness in drawing eyes, noses and mouths as symbols rather than portraiture, make his Johan Cruff drawing, a product of both an everyday experience for Tony and an attempt to portray an emblematic presence of a wonderful footballer. The wisps of hair, he has drawn, that frame the top of the image, do though somehow conjure up something of Cruff's look from that time; a boy like presence behind the genius who took ball control onto another level. Tony, as has already been pointed out, was a romantic, always trying to measure himself against the attainment of the lone artist.

Tony asked questions of those around him, questions that I found difficult to answer. Who was fooling who? In the 1940s Cecil Collins wrote his text 'The vision of the fool'. The fool was a role that Collins identified with the artist and the poet. He stated that 'the fool' embodies ‘the eternal virginity of spirit, which in the dark winter of the world, continually proclaims the existence of a new life, gives faithful promise of the spring of an invisible Kingdom, and the coming of light’. Was this what we all saw in Tony's work? Perhaps, but I doubt it. Tony was a messy man. I had problems with him sometimes, as he did at times present difficulties for others around him, particularly young women. He had no 'turn off switch' and his texts were at times very disturbing, a quasi religious take on women in particular could be read as misogynist. Whether he intended it or not, he could cause considerable offence. There was another issue and that was how his favourable reception by the established Leeds art community, was read by those who stood on the edge of that community and who felt slighted and mis-represented by the fact that Tony was black. I was asked several times why were white people praising the work of someone that was obviously mentally challenged? This was a difficult question to answer, did I not think that by showcasing his work black people as a whole were being positioned as 'outsider artists', who made work by some sort of intuition, as opposed to the reality of many black artists who made work to directly challenge and seek to highlight how a white dominated post-colonial patriarchal society had treated them. Exhibiting Tony's work, it was argued, was an easy way out for the white establishment, as it didn't challenge the status quo and reinforced the notion of the black artist as an outsider and not being capable of being a 'professional' practitioner.

Tony's work when read as a type of outsider art, did show us new ways of seeing things, but did this simply titivate the jaded taste buds of overly sophisticated, well educated arts professionals? I have in the past had to question myself several times, as to why I was fascinated by his work. Perhaps his very existence was a challenge to my own reading of myself as an artist.

I was spoken to once by a disgruntled artist, and told that some people within the Leeds arts community treated Tony as if he was a pet, 'Wasn't it lovely that he could perform such tricks?', they said. I thought they had read the situation in the wrong way, but I could also see why they might have. On the other hand I knew that several people treated Tony with great respect and that they really valued his vision and personal stance on what it was to be an artist. For some his work gave them a unique insight into a mind that was different, a visual mind that had emerged from the streets of Chapeltown, but which had also engaged passionately with the art educational system. It was an engagement that had thrown up a strange anomaly, the fact that originality and difference did not achieve high grades and that the reality was that to pass an 'A' level or other art qualification at that time, what you had to do was show that you knew who was part of the accepted art canon, and that you could in effect 'copy' the work or processes of those artists that you had academically studied. These were all hard questions for someone like myself who was firmly fixed into that art education system and who had a strong belief in the power of art as a transformative discipline.

I drew his portrait once. He looked at me strangely and made me uneasy. His glasses had such thick lenses that they reflected the outside world back at you. As I drew I fell into his whirlpool eyes and realised I had been hypnotised. He told me I was a genius and then asked me if I wanted to buy a piece of his work. Somewhere I still have his mono-print drawing of a Mexican wrestler's face mask, entitled 'Jesus goes to Berlin for Hardcore Music'. I don't know what it means but it challenges me in ways that Tracy Emin's mono-prints have never done. Jesus operating in disguise as a Mexican wrestler, opens up a reading of Christianity that I had not previously thought about, and perhaps that is the point; Tony for all his confusing ways, was always going to challenge us and our assumptions about the world.

Tony Tomlin: 'Jesus goes to Berlin for Hardcore Music'.

So rest in peace Tony, a unique individual who in my life caused much heart searching, and who also gave much joy and richness. He left us with several conundrums, such as; 'who can be an artist', 'what is it that artists should do', 'who says what is good or bad art' and 'can art be taught?' He was a reminder that the pattern of humanity is sometimes cut as a difficult fit.

Monday, 12 August 2024

Venice Biennale 2024: Part two

My last post on the Venice Biennale ended with a reflection on presentation and possibly the most immediately arresting formal approach to this never ending issue was seen in the Romanian pavilion.

Șerban Savu: The Polyptych of Work and Leisure.

The wall had been extended in thickness, so that all his paintings could be inserted into shallow niches, making them sit flat, with their painted surfaces congruent with the grey painted plaster wall. 45 paintings of various sizes made between 2006 and 2024, were set out in a format that echoed those used in Christian churches and cathedrals. Indeed sometimes the images directly evoked that situation, as in the painting directly above, entitled 'Saint Christopher'. Serban Savu belongs to the Cluj school of Romanian artists, who focus on depicting the banality and uncertainty of life after the fall of Communism and whose work is characterised by a loose application of paint, often with dark, subdued palettes. This subdued tonal range reminded me of the Renaissance use of 'unione' techniques, by which you achieve emotional delicacy by tonal control. One way that controlled colour gradation can be achieved is by toning down colours by reducing their saturation, a method often used by Raphael.

Raphael: Saint Catherine of Alexandria

Raphael used this to achieve a certain monumentality of affect, suggesting that the Christian idea was a solid permanent thing and Savu by also restricting his palette suggests that work is somehow eternal. However as you get closer you become aware of the more impressionist application of paint and this begins to undermine the first impression. You then become more aware of the fact that Savu's paintings are populated by disorientated protagonists and lethargic extras, caught in the lull between work and rest and as you begin to grasp this, you realise his world is one where people are just as confused as we all are. The embedding of the canvases into the huge wall (2215 x 566 cm) and the formal layout, did though really impress me and it reminded me to spend more thought on presentation issues the next time I come to show work.

I have been aware of Madge Gill's work for many years, her drawings have a hallucinatory quality, checkerboard patterns tie her images of women into shallow spaces that suggest giddy, quasi-architectural constructions. Pale faces of nameless women, with ambiguous expressions people her images, crowds of them swirl about and push their way through a compositional thicket, which is in reality the organic shape of an energetic pen and ink drawing. When asked about her drawings she stated that she was working under the control of 'Myrninerest', her spirit guide, and that her drawings were some sort of magical outpouring similar to ghost writing.

Madge Gill

Gill's mediumistic communications from another world, proliferate in a dense web of repetitive mark making and the immense scale of the work presented at Venice, 'Crucifixion of the Soul' from 1936, is a monumental version of her characteristic approach. It reminded me of a stained glass window both in its luminous intricacy and the way it was made; she developed the composition by drawing on sections of her calico fabric as it was unrolled. I have not made any large drawings for a while, trying to focus on developing a wider range of imagery and looking for ways to open out the subject matter for my ceramic work, but this image reminded me that I need to finish the stained glass panel I have been working on and more importantly, that I have now developed sketchbooks full of imagery that needs to be activated by being brought together within both remembered and mythic landscapes as narratives. Some of my best work, (or what I regard as my most effective), has been done when I have set myself the task of creating large scale drawings that can hold within them complex narratives. They do though take a lot of mental as well as physical effort, but without that, the work can stay on a sort of 'OK' or satisfactory level, so I really do need to get back to making more ambitious images.

Outsider art, or art made outside of western art traditions, was central to this biennale's idea of 'Foreigners Everywhere'. Anna Zemánková’s images of invented plants and alien like organisms were another approach to what I think of as finding an internal affinity with an external reality. In her own words, she was “growing flowers that are not grown anywhere else”. The exhibition catalogue states that her 'forms seem to metastasise with a vital force of their own, laden with fruit-like appendages and delicate arabesques. The imagery of the pieces on display straddle both microcosmic and macroscopic orders, evoking a cartography of unknown astronomical formations as well as the reproductive structures of imagined plant life.' I couldn't put it better.

Anna Zemánková

Artists such as Madge Gill and Anna Zemánková who are considered as outsiders within a rationally focused western culture, can be seen, because of their mediumistic type communications, as being very similar to artists who in other cultures tap into the spiritual world, as a way to interpret the day to day realities of existence. Joseca Mokahesi, a Brazilian artist who lives in the Yanomami Indigenous lands. draws characters, scenes, and landscapes from his people’s universe, presenting myths and shamanistic chants, as well as moments from the everyday. Many of his characters are 'xapiri', spirits left by Omama, the Yanomami creation deity, to aid shamans in their tasks, who when summoned, descend and manifest in shamans’ bodies. The image directly below is of the spirit 'Hawahiri', drawn as a chestnut tree emerging from a mouth.

Joseca Mokahesi: A bee spirit

I could really empathise with this approach and have for a while been thinking that an animist way of thinking is essential to a reconciliation with a world that we have tended to mine for its resources, rather than find ways to communicate and commingle with it. Thinking about communication with things very different to ourselves might also mean that we need to see things differently and an artist/shaman such as Joseca Mokahesi, might help show us a way to do this.

Next to the space devoted to Joseca Mokahesi's images, was another Yanomami artist. André Taniki is a shaman who's artistic output is directly linked to his association with artist and photographer Claudia Andujar and anthropologist Bruce Albert. The drawings exhibited by Taniki were done in the late 1970s, and were made in conversation with Bruce Albert, when together they were searching for ways to depict shamanic visions. The structures of the drawings made represent the organisation of the cosmos from the point of view of the Yanomamis’ sense-universe. They are a sort of cartography which is visible only to the 'xapiri', the Yanomami shaman’s auxiliary spirits, and to the shamans themselves. The drawings, made using felt tip pens provided by Bruce Albert, made me think about the possibilities of translation and communication between different cultures and systems of knowledge.

André Taniki

This work also made me think about cultural tourism and what might be happening to these people once they had been exposed to the western art world. Nothing seems straightforward any more, but I hope both Joseca Mokahesi and André Taniki found something of benefit by taking the time to put their shamanic visions on paper and using them to explain to others some aspects of the nature of their lives.

Naminapu Maymuru-White: paintings on bark

Naminapu Maymuru-White, presented a series of bark paintings that show animal and celestial motifs, and which were based on centuries-old stories. These images are meant to invoke old wisdom, connecting the earthly sphere with heaven and linking ancestors to people living now. The paintings are of the Milŋiyawuy an indigenous name for the Milky Way. It is also the name of a river that flows into the north of Blue Mud Bay, where Maymuru-White lives, and the paintings are also about the river. Their restricted palette gave these images a certain gravitas, and the themes of landscapes, stars and other elemental forms, still seemed to ring true, even if these images had been lifted out of the Australian territories that they were meant to be set within. I do understand that many of these indigenous artists have been locked into a western art world structure and that they have begun to rely on money coming from purchases made from outside their community, but even so, it seemed to me that some of the old magic of landscape embedded storylines was still there; these images were effecting me deeply enough to want to have one of them on my own walls at home.

Archie Moore 'Kith and kin'

The First Nations people of Australia have a considerable presence in this biennale, the Australia Pavilion itself showcasing a powerful piece made by the artist Archie Moore, who’s kith and kin is both evidence and a reminder of how these first inhabitants of the continent have been treated since the British occupation.A huge chalk on blackboard mural traces Archie Moore's Kamilaroi and Bigambul relations back 65,000+ years, therefore including the common ancestors of all humans. Handwritten across the walls and ceiling, this huge family tree engulfs the audience. As the catalogue states, the central black ink made pool 'works like a void; a memorial to First Nations deaths in state custody attended by piles of coroners’ reports. Archie adds archival records referencing kin to demonstrate how colonial laws and government policies have long been imposed upon First Nations peoples. These bureaucratic papers documenting tragedies are cradled by the reflection of the family tree in the surrounding water. The artist uses his family history to make systemic issues uncomfortably tangible to audiences while providing a prescient reminder that we are all kin.'

Archie Moore 'Kith and kin'

The video gives a much better idea of how immersive Archie Moore's work was.

I began to wonder if things had actually changed at all. Primitivism as an aesthetic was often used by Europeans borrowing from non-Western cultures. The Art historian Kobena Mercer when writing about Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon in his book on black diasporic art, 'Travel and See', argued that Picasso's stylistic change in response to an African inspired aesthetic was individualistic and modern, but the artists he took ideas from received little to no recognition for their work. Picasso himself said about his painting "It's not an aesthetic process; it's a form of magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe, a means of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as well as on our desires." I think he intuitively as an artist recognised the magical intent of the work he was responding to, the issue being that the culture these works emerged from had no concept of the celebrated individual artist, the work emerging from a common cultural language of magical effect that many artists had used over long periods of time. If we can get beyond the idea of Picasso as a genius and simply see his work as a celebration of the human spirit, then we might be able to accept his appropriations as an acknowledgement of the inventive power of all human beings.

I'm still very much in awe of Picasso, he has taught me so much over the years and I still return to his work as a very deep reservoir of both formal invention and simple joyful, playful fun. So I will give him the final words for today's post. On entering the museum he found it damp and dusty and nearly left, but he didn't. He stated, "But I forced myself to stay, to examine these masks, all these objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose, to serve as intermediaries between them and the unknown, hostile forces surrounding them, attempting in that way to overcome their fears by giving them colour and form. And then I understood what painting really meant. It's not an aesthetic process; it's a form of magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe, a means of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as well as on our desires. The day I understood that, I had found my path."

To be able to look at the work of artists from other cultures and see within that art something to inspire and change yourself, demonstrates great insight and empathy, qualities that many people have decided are not ones with which to associate Picasso. Like many Spanish men of his time he believed in the myth of the bull male, something that now seems totally unacceptable, but I don't believe he can be blamed for something his entire generation accepted as being the way things were.

Sunday, 14 March 2021

The Karshan Collection's Louis Soutter drawings

Louis Soutter: Un chat a mort

It has just been announced that the Howard Karshan collection of drawings is going to be donated to the Courtauld Gallery. This is a significant collection including Cezanne, Kandinsky and Klee drawings, but in amongst the well known 'classic' artists I see that the collection also has work by Louis Soutter.

Soutter was put into a home for the elderly at the age of 52, as he had developed osteoarthritis and had become incapable of work. However he continued to draw, but in a much more direct way, as he could no longer hold a pen; so he dipped his fingers directly into ink and made what are wonderfully direct and totally engaging images. These are not naive images, they are too 'knowing' for that; the dark forms work powerfully and directly with the surfaces they are made on, figure and ground relationships handled with extreme confidence. The Courtauld Gallery's news has therefore given me an excuse to put up some of his drawings as a blog post; his images being ones that I have in the past liked to use as loadstones against which I try to measure the effect of my own drawings. It is always salutary to put your own images up against another artist that you admire.

Louis Soutter

There is something elemental about Soutter's work, his figures are always in movement, holding that edge between being ink and being human. His figure's fingers are Soutter's fingers; ink stained scrapings, blots and splodges being records of physical performances as much as drawings. Above all Soutter's images remind us of the possibility of personal triumph over adversity; some of his best and most memorable work coming from a time when in most people's eyes Soutter was incapable of doing meaningful work. These are images that also tell us something about the body's limits, about the onset of osteoarthritis and how this destroys fine motor skills, but these are also images about that dark energy that pours forth out of the unconscious, about life and dancing and being still capable of leaving a mark on the world, even when it would seem that a meaningful life was over.

Barthélémy Toguo

Friday, 13 March 2020

Between art, geometry, emotion and science

Nikolaus Gansterer

Geometry has been central to the way human beings have visualised ideas for thousands of years. However most users of geometry don't understand the mathematical principles that lie behind its success, they operate, especially if they are artists like myself, somewhere between maths and instinct. Those that don't normally use geometry will of course still make images and often powerfully emotive ones, but it is when the two approaches combine, that I think unique and fascinating images can arise.

For instance, Gaussian probability field graph paper is manufactured for the use of visualising mathematical statistics and graphing the appearances of random variables, but it is also used by the artist Nikolaus Gansterer to draw on. Nikolaus Gansterer's work is typical of artists that sit in that field that sits between art and science, his working processes are informed by logic and an idea of experimental research, but his working process is also informed by instinct and an artist's logic.

Nikolaus Gansterer: Probability Fields

He also uses various drawing devices which operate rather like a scientist's apparatus, (see an earlier post on this) and by doing this his work begins to take on a degree of authenticity that stems from the rigor of adherence to the processes that he has evolved. He talks about these drawings as 'interrogating the relationship between empiric and subjective truth', and uses both hands to draw them with. The 'right' hand being the one in control, the 'other' or less used hand being the one that expresses a degree of 'un-control' or expression.
You can download probability field graph paper from here. You don't have to understand how it is used, but as soon as you print it off, it exudes an aura of mathematical and scientific 'knowing'.

These rough drawings of ideas (above) seemed to take on a certain 'reality' or 'conviction' as soon as they were done on graph paper.

Kate Hammersley: Helium drawing

Kate Hammersley has a particular interest in materials and materiality, in particular in the way flow and flux is exhibited when materials come together. She was the first artist-in-residence at the University of Oxford Department of Engineering Science and in these drawings she is exploring both the material quality of helium and how balloons can be repurposed as drawing tools. Her apparatus in this case being the balloon environment she has constructed to enable the drawing. The final piece is usually shown as a video as the idea is durational rather than being about a fixed, static image.

Kate Hammersley: Helium drawing: detail

Karina Smigla-Bobinski: Ada

Interacting with other materials such as lighter than air gases can lead to some very interesting experimental situations. Karina Smigla-Bobinski's 'Ada' installation is a gradually developing drawing made by a sphere filled with helium and covered with precisely located and firmly attached charcoal sticks. She has taken on the idea implied by Hammersley and pushed it on much further. It is though at its core still a basic experiment using three dimensional geometry. What would happen if I made a plastic sphere, attached charcoal in a regular geometric pattern over its surface and filled it with helium?

Some artists sit in that gap between science and art, whereby an experimental approach is associated with the open ended 'I wonder what will happen if ?', attitude. An attitude that I believe should belong all scientist and the fine art practitioners.

The geometric opposite of a sphere is a hyperbolic surface. A flat, or Euclidean, plane has zero curvature. A sphere has positive curvature. A hyperbolic plane has negative curvature; it may thus be understood as a geometric analogue of a negative number. Negative spaces have intrigued artists as much as scientists and mathematicians, therefore it is no surprise to find this area rich in possibilities for crossovers between disciplines.

Structures that have emerged from the Coral Reef Project

The Crochet Coral Reef project has its roots equally in handicraft, marine science, community art practice, feminism, environmental consciousness raising and mathematics. The crenellated forms of corals, kelps, sponges and nudibranchs are biological manifestations of hyperbolic surfaces. These structures are ideal for maximising nutrient intake in filter-feeding organisms and they are clear 'demonstrations' by nature of how mathematical principles can be used. The project emerged from the beautifully named, 'the Institute For Figuring'. The Institute For Figuring is an organisation dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and engineering. As it states on its website, 'the Institute’s interests are twofold: the manifestation of figures in the world around us and the figurative technologies that humans have developed through the ages. From the physics of snowflakes and the hyperbolic geometry of sea slugs, to the mathematics of paper folding, the tiling patterns of Islamic mosaics and graphical models of the human mind, the Institute takes as its purview a complex ecology of figuring'.

Folding paper is one of the institutes interests. The Hindu mathematician T. Sundara Row's 'Geometric exercises in paper folding' is the classic text on this and is another of those examples of someone devoting nearly all their energies to exploring a very particular field in order to extract new thinking.

From: Geometric exercises in paper folding

The artist Dorothea Rockburne has said that, “I came to realise that a piece of paper is a metaphysical object. You write on it, you draw on it, you fold it.” She is interested in paper not just as the ground for a drawing but as an active material, its inherent qualities determining the form of the artwork. Rockburne studied with the mathematician, Max Dehn, in the early 1950s, and his teachings on the underlying geometries in nature and art affected her profoundly.

Dorothea Rockburne

What began as an investigation of geometrical possibility with T. Sundara Row, has gradually evolved into an art form. Rockburne gradually begins to develop free form inventions based on the principles developed by Row and passed on to her by Dehn. This is very like jazz improvisation and as Rockburne's work evolves it gradually opens out into a more lyrical space.

Dorothea Rockburne: Drawing that makes itself

The very formal investigations undertaken by artists such as Rockburne can be compared to more political work of artists, who nevertheless can also be influenced by concepts or images that derive from maths and science.

Ruth Cuthand: Bubonic plague

Ruth Cuthand: Typhoid

Ruth Cuthand is an American aboriginal Indian. She used the same type of beads traded by European settlers for furs, to make representations of the diseases brought to America by European settlers. These images of viruses which are based on electron microscope representations reflect a continuing power difference between the people of the Indian nations, and those people from more recent immigrant stock. Many Indians still make items for sale using these beads, beads which have over the years become associated with their culture because of their use in decorating both clothes and objects. However the immigrant WASP community is the one that possesses the powerful electronic microscopes, high levels of technological sophistication and more importantly a tradition of university education and connections that allow their children to aspire to lifestyles unavailable to poorly educated indigenous children. This white anglo saxon protestant community now regards its own people as owning these lands that once belonged to North American Indian tribes and tales of past atrocities are fast fading; Ruth's work being an attempt to remind everyone of how these two worlds are in fact still closely intertwined.

The 'myth' of science is a very powerful one and for those that sit outside it, uneducated in its concepts and structures it can take on an almost religious aura.

Daniel Martin Diaz

Daniel Martin Diaz is a fine artist based in Tucson, who represents the mysteries of life using geometry to construct scientific seeming diagrams. Immersed in scientific and philosophical concepts, Diaz has constructed a series of images that appear to come from another world, one that understands and uses both physical and metaphysical concepts in a similar manner to a science fiction novel such as 'Hyperion' by Dan Simmons. In his novels, Simmons fuses concepts of ancient religions with a future science that allows for travel between the stars. You could imagine Diaz's drawings as being used as illustrations for some of the chapters of Simmons' books.

Daniel Martin Diaz

Daniel Martin Diaz's work reminds me of Luboš Plný's drawings; drawings that combine his own very personal ideas about anatomy and psychology with actual anatomic structures taken from medical textbooks. His hybrid images deriving their conviction from both the intensity of the emotional engagement and the diagrammatic approach that he borrows from the science of medicine. Sometimes he gets so lost in his image making that it is hard to work out which way up these images should be. The bottom one of these three below being one of those drawings that record him working over a long period of time and from a variety of positions as he has worked his way around the image as it has developed.

Luboš Plný

Nikolaus Gansterer's probability fields don't seem too far away from Luboš Plný's anatomical diagrams, even though these artists are coming from totally different fields of art practice. Their images are neither one thing or another, and the slippage between logic and instinct gives them that indefinable 'edge' and keeps us thinking about whether or not we understand the world through the application of logic or through engaging with our emotions.

Asa Schaeffer: Spiral path of a blindfolded man

The drawing above by Asa Schaeffer was made in 1920 and shows the path of a blindfolded man walking through a field of wheat. Although done by a scientist to illustrate how we would walk in spirals if we couldn't use our eyes to locate ourselves spatially, the drawing also operates as an analogy for the human condition, we go on blindly until we are brought up short by an immovable object, in this case a tree stump.

In the field of data visualisation the Stamen company has begun to look at how to geometrically visualise emotions. This work overlaps some of the issues I have looked at before such as the relationship between music and visual forms, but it is interesting to see how they have progressed this area. Their 'Atlas of Emotions' icons go back to several older tropes of emotional geometry, finding the angle of perceived pain being a foundation course exercise from back in the 1970s, which itself was based in readings of Kandinsky's work.

From the 'Atlas of Emotions'

The interweaving of art and science is I do believe going to be very necessary if we are to embrace the full implications of living and being properly connected to this world. Without science we would have no hope for a future solution to the fast approaching climate crisis but without art we could be in a position of not being able to emotionally engage with a fast approaching future. Stories and beliefs, inner as well as outer worlds, will have to be harnessed and used to enable us to shape positive world views instead of the often found fatalism of those that have given up. As well as practical mechanical solutions to physical problems, we will need responses to our many and various emotional dilemmas. Hopefully we will eventually find ourselves woven back into the entangled fabric of everything, and as this happens we might finally realise that we belong.

Drawing