Ibrahim El-Salahi: Pain Relief Drawings

I have been working for a while on how to visualise 'somatic' or inner body experiences. But of course many have been there before me and I have just discovered another artist who has done some very powerful work in this area. The artist Ibrahim El-Salahi, took a closely related but very different approach to the subject and I have found it useful to compare differences. I have been trying to visualise the pain or inner feeling tone of other people as well as myself; usually looking for an area of commonality, between my own perception of feelings such as physical pain or emotional trauma and the way others may visualise them. This has been a very difficult endeavour and has made me very aware of the problems inherent in trying to nail down visual communication between people, mainly because we have no agreed codes or sign systems for these things, which means that everything is open to personal interpretation. 

Ibrahim El-Salahi: Pain relief image: Unique screenprint on linen 

Ibrahim El-Salahi is older than I am, he is now in his 90s. He gets sciatica and chronic back pain, and says that it is only when making images about his pain that he gets any relief from it. This immediately interested me as it suggested once again that the externalisation of a feeling by making an image of it does help to remove it. 

Between 2016-2018 El-Salahi a Sudanese artist who also has a base in Oxford, created a body of work that he had to make whilst confined mainly to an armchair. However this physical restriction in many ways drove, as it often does (think late Matisse), a high level of invention. He has made around 200 tiny drawings in pen and ink, each one drawn on the blank inside of the many medicine packets that he has had to open during the time of his suffering. These 'Pain Relief Drawings' have now been exhibited at the Drawing Centre in New York.

Ibrahim El-Salahi: Pain relief image: Unique screenprint on linen 

The small drawings El-Salahi made were processed by him as silkscreen mono-print images. Silkscreen stencils were made from the initial small drawings by them being scanned and then enlarged for transfer. However he worked with the silkscreen process in a unique way. Once transferred, the initial drawings, because they are so small are in the process of enlargement 'roughened up'. This allows for further textual intervention, if you are used to making silkscreen prints you will be aware that the photo-stencil is a reverse image, the gaps in the image are the areas that allow ink to be squeezed through the mesh. In El-Salahi's case, the transferred image is reconstructed by him pressing ink through the gaps in the gauze by hand (rather than using the traditional squeegee) onto a woven linen canvas. However because this method is so inefficient it has to be done over and over again, until the thick inky texture he wants is achieved. This both amplifies the character of the original marks and gives a renewed physical substance to a process that could have diminished the intensity of the original drawings. The movement between the photographic process of copying and transforming the drawings and the reinsertion of the hand techniques of pushing ink through the silkscreen gauze has particularly interested me, because I also want to work between analogue and digital modes and have worried about losing 'authenticity' or material gravitas in doing so. 

El-Salahi had this to say about his drawings. “I am surrounded by packets of medicine so I said ‘What a waste. Why don’t I use them?’ and I started opening them and chopping them to size and working on them. I had a number of pens with waterproof and fade proof ink, which the material of those kind of packages takes very nicely. It reminds me of the time when I found paper in prison, and did sort of little images as the nucleus. So I pray and bring peace and calm in my mind that I use as imagery, which can be transmitted to other people when they see my work.” He adds, “A small drawing is an artwork by itself, but at the same time when it is enlarged it works very well indeed. It has a great potential of moving from a small size to a large size – the organic growth of a picture, the work is alive. That is the nucleus. The idea of the nucleus, like the seed, if you have water and enough sunlight it can grow into a larger size. It’s the origin, that’s the main thing.”

 

Ibrahim El-Salahi: Installation of drawings at the 2022 Venice Biennale

I had seen El-Salahi's work at the Venice Biennale and was interested at the time in the way his drawings were displayed in long horizontal vitrines, a method I had been considering of displaying my own work. But most importantly for myself was the fact that his drawings, no matter whether tiny or large scale and printed onto canvas, were attempts to visualise those invisible sensations that we all have but find it very difficult to communicate to others because they remain inside the shell of our internal selves. 

 

Drawings by Ibrahim El-Salahi

Drawing made on the back of a medicine packet

El-Salahi’s drawings are also deeply connected to postwar European modernism, and yet at the same time they are embedded into a tradition of African and Islamic art history. Because of this he also raises our awareness of how hybrid cultures could be used to help the project of global communication. His work is inspired by Arabic calligraphy, as well as Surrealist figuration and geometric abstraction, a blend of traditions that could never have happened before, but in a post-colonial period, it is expected that artists will emerge from cultures right across the world with fascinating blends and mixes of visual modes and approaches. This is I believe something to be celebrated and it demonstrates the interconnectedness of everything and a move towards a much more non-binary understanding of cultures. They are not fixed things, but are constantly evolving processes. 

It is also useful for myself to have images to compare with my own. So here is what I think of as one of the best of El-Salahi's pain relief image silkscreen monoprints.

Ibrahim El-Salahi: Chronic back pain: Mono-print on linen

Below is one of my first drawings whereby I tried to visualise my own toothache. It is watercolour with pen and ink and was an attempt to fuse the 'socket' feeling of teeth, with the pain feeling that eventually seems to shift to being behind the eye. Looked at from a distance I am not happy about my fusing into the image a pained eye, but even so, it communicates something of discomfort and I was fascinated to see that El-Salahi had also invented a sort of 'internal' eye or eyes, in order I presume to suggest that he was observing his own pain. Even when we cant see something we try to 'see' something. For instance when you grasp what someone is trying to tell you, you often say, "Yes, I see." 

Garry Barker: Toothache: Watercolour on paper

The image immediately below is much more recent and it was initially a watercolour whereby different stains were pooled across unstretched paper. The image was then scanned into Photoshop and the element representing the pain's focus had its colour intensified, whilst a layer of more diagrammatic inserts was used to represent the way the pain both passed out of and was also at the same time held within the body. This was one of my first attempts to visualise what I eventually came to understand as a Markov blanket effect. An unfixed area of significance needed to have broken boundaries, because it allowed for percolation between one thing and another. I.e. it stopped me from thinking that there were always hard edged boundaries between things, only a constant transition between them. Perhaps the key issue here was time. If time was slowed down, as in a drawing, an instant of time frozen between the stages of a process could be captured, but in reality this was always part of a process of constant becoming. 

Garry Barker: Throbbing intermittent stomach pain: PhotoShop processed watercolour image

Ibrahim El-Salahi: Sciatica: Mono-print on linen

I had never seen El-Salahi's work before, but quickly realised I was working a very similar territory and that certain aspects of our visual languages do overlap. I get a sense of compression and the permeability of surfaces from the red image printed onto grey linen above. Perhaps he is trying to represent the way that sciatica pain travels from one place to another and as it does the compression of the lower back or bottom, transfers itself into a pain spreading down a leg. An image of a process rather than a thing. El-Salahi had begun with a small drawing made on the insides of a small cardboard box, it had then been digitally transferred and enlarged, and finally remade using a monoprint process. I had also been moving between analogue and digital ways of working. Did I also now need to revisit my own digital images and look at transferring them back into an analogue process in order to ensure they have the 'right' feeling tone? At the moment I'm making my analogue response in three dimensions, usually using clay and glaze technology, as in the images below but it is always a good idea to keep questioning what you are doing. 

Lung votive

Post cigarette lung

Arthritic fingers

See also:

Visualising pain

Paul Klee and Markov blankets

Monoprint

Drawing with a computer

Drawing and wellbeing

Visualising energy flow

How to use silkscreen as a graphite monoprinting process El-Salahi uses a similar process, the difference is that he is pushing ink through the mesh and not powdered graphite. 

Collage part three: Pop Art and Paolozzi

Paolozzi 

I’ve just been to see the excellent Pop Art exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. It was fascinating to see a really good collection of screen prints by some of the best British Pop artists of the time in one place. Colour is of course vital to how these works are received, but without the idea of collage so much of this work would not exist.
Visit this earlier post to give more context to collage.

Collage as a drawing technique is central to the idea of drawing as an inclusive discipline, one that is the result of ‘things coming together’. Collage can be brought right into the centre of drawing theory, if you decide that a mark left by a pencil on a sheet of paper can also be thought of as a type of collage. Sticking bits of paper onto a flat surface is not so different to sticking a crumbly graphite powder onto another flat surface. This way of thinking also means that the idea of drawing as traces can be included as part of a definition of collage. Traces of the earlier life of these paper fragments, connect to their 'Ur-history'*, in a similar fashion to the way the material properties of other drawing materials shape the outcomes of encounters between surfaces and objects within an object orientated ontology. 
*Ur-history was a term used by Walter Benjamin that focuses on any manufactured object's complex social and political history. For instance the ur-history of the pencil includes the lives of workers who manufacture the graphite, or mine it. It would include the lives and working conditions of the people involved in the wood industry, the paint industry that supplies the colour coating of the pencil's surface, the people involved in the distribution of the pencils to the various shop outlets etc. etc. (What I'm getting at here is that drawing as an idea can be about the inter-weaving of social history, politics, material thinking, chemical differences and sub-atomic theory, and can be seen simply as lines following the various threads of the Wyrd, linked narratives that are at times the domain of inorganic objects, at others part of the domain of sentient beings)

Paolozzi collage from the 1950s.

Eduardo Paolozzi's collage's from the 1950s still came across as fresh and vital, and you could see clearly why silkscreen printing as a way to further his ideas was exactly right as a medium. The way that in print all the various elements can be brought together in one unifying format really helped Paolozzi's ideas. The technique in this case providing the mechanism that helped the artist achieve the image's 'gestalt', a term widely used when I began my art education, that was taken from psychology and was used to describe the importance of the totality or wholeness of an image, and how this was in many ways of greater significance or of greater value than the sum of its parts. In the image below both the rectilinear structure and the restricted use of cyan and magenta as key colours ensure a particular emotional colour tone and geometric stability draw the various elements into a totality. 

From: General dynamic F.U.N. screenprint

Screenprint allowed Paolozzi to add controlled colour to the process of collaging together images, as well as giving him more control over the composition of the images, as individual elements can be resized as they are taken through the various reproduction processes. 
He was working in both 2 and 3D. However in both cases the essential constructional tool was collage and a clear sense of how 'disegno' (a term that fuses together our two different words, drawing and design, which was used during the 16th and 17th centuries to designate the formal discipline required for the representation of the ideal form of an object in the visual arts) works as an underlying principle.

Left image: cast metal from wax original. Right image: silkscreen print.

Paolozzi: Saint Sebastian, bronze

The bronze above was made by pushing various found objects into wax and making sheets of these wax surfaces, which were then cast in metal and welded together to form the standing figure of Saint Sebastian. The drawing together of the various elements allows for new narratives to be developed, this Saint Sebastian is made of all the bits of life that surround us, its wobbly legs mean that it is only just able to stand, reminding us that at his martyrdom he was clubbed to death and the image Paolozzi has made feels as if this figure has just attempted to rise up from a recent clubbing. This three dimensional drawing expands our notion of 'drawing in space' and incorporates 'constructivist' elements into drawing, in the sense of carving, modelling and construction being the three key forms of sculptural practice, which can all be also thought of as approaches to drawing. (Especially if you think of drawing as thin sculpture.)


The Comte de Lautreamont's famous poetic line, “As beautiful as the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table”, is of course often cited as being the trigger to the Surrealists' growing awareness of the importance of collage, and we can open the idea out to embrace all things that are happening, things are “as beautiful as the honey on my toast meeting my teeth and tongue,” or "as significant as the itch on my leg caused by a change in the soap powder used to wash my socks." The significance of Jarvis Cocker's 'Common People' is due to the chance meeting of a Northern working class lad and a posh Greek woman on the St Martin's fine art course. Things come together and make new things and as they do rich patterns emerge, ones that as an artist you can reveal as you work with them. 

From Paolozzi's 'Moonstrips empire news'

Of all the various series of silkscreen prints produced by Paolozzi the series I was most taken with was his take on the life and writings of Wittgenstein. Each of the prints included a short extract from Wittgenstein's writings and the conjunction of text and image worked to not only 'illustrate' new ways to interpret Wittgenstein, but to also open out further approaches to thinking about the nature of languages themselves, and how the physical substance and different perceptual mechanisms needed to 'read' them were an integral part of both what could be said and what could be understood.   

Wittgenstein in New York

Pop seemed to be a radical movement when it first emerged in the late1950s, but it is easy to forget that Picasso was making colleges many years before. Here is one of his from the 1930s. 

Picasso

The exhibition 'POP! Art in a Changing Britain' is on at the Pallant House Gallery in Chicester until the 7th of May 2018


Nb
If you are interested in the concept of the Gestalt and how it can be applied to the reading of an image, one of the best introductions is: 'The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination' by Anton Ehrenzweig 

Richard Hamilton: Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?

Another 'father' of Pop Art in England was Richard Hamilton, his collage above from 1956, highlights similarities and differences between himself and Paolozzi, Paolozzi built and constructed from the world around himself, Hamilton deconstructed imagery and its messages that shaped the world he was immersed into. 

See also
Collage part one
College part two
College part four

Articulated collage