Ostraca

A satirical scene

In ancient Egypt, when the artists who drew out the formal designs for tomb walls or sculptures had to try out ideas or just draw for fun, the most available surfaces to work on were the fragments of stone sliced off the reliefs and statues that were being carved all around them. We can forget sometimes that before carving could commence, drawings were made on the surfaces of the stone as guides for the carvers, but of course as soon as the carving work was underway, the drawings were lost. The people who made those drawings were artists and they would have wanted to make ideas visible far more interesting than the formal figures that they were having to draw for their day job, so I suspect that the satirical scene above, is just the tip of the iceberg of a body of images that have yet to be really explored.
These small, often insignificant drawings were called ostraca, and they were used for a variety of purposes at different times and by different cultures, all of which practiced stone carving as their main means of creating official forms of visual art.
As well as being used like small sketchbooks, sometimes these shards were used in the same way as note pads, places to jot down private thoughts, shopping lists or 'to do' notes.

Ostrakon scratched into a terracotta shard inscribed with 'Kimon [son] of Miltiades'

Shards of broken pottery were also used for the same purpose, (a single shard of pottery is called an ostrakon) and because these shards were so ubiquitous, sometimes they developed a more formal use, for instance in Greece, they were used like voting papers and there was a ceremony that took its name from their use, 'the ostrakismos', during which people could scratch into a shard of pottery, the name of anyone who deserved to be banished. If enough people voted for a particular person, they could be banished for ten years, thus giving rise to the concept we now call ostracism. I'm afraid as this blog is also concerned with embodied meaning, I ought to bring up the fact that broken pottery shards were also used for anal hygiene, whereby a curse was placed on the to be exiled individual by literally soiling their name. This is another example of what I have termed an 'externalised idea', a bringing out of the body, what was an embodied thought and creating an object to contain it. In doing this humans could communicate with other humans thoughts that originated invisibly inside them.

From the time of the Roman Empire, ostraka have been found that were used to document the activities of the Roman army, so they were also used as a recording device. 

I was fascinated by these things because I have always found notebooks and sketchbooks to be a vital part of my own practice, whether they are for working out ideas, documenting what I have seen, recording a thought or just jotting down a 'to do' list.

Limestone ostracon depicting a cat, a boy, and a mouse magistrate

Egyptian ostracon: Walters Art Museum

I think the stubble beard is a sign of mourning, and the hands are obviously try outs. There is something wonderful to be taken from the idea of a pharaoh needing a shave, it brings the god like figure right down to earth. These drawn on shards reminding us that all those marvellous structures of ancient times, were the product of people, who had everyday lives like us all. 

They enjoyed sex.

And the children the sex created were also allowed to draw on the same fragments of stone.

Children's ostracon drawings: Athribis, Egypt

Once you have children you need to tell them stories and it looks as if the ostracon below might have been an early attempt to illustrate one of those stories.

A cat herding geese

I was reminded that in my own sketchbooks I used to illustrate stories and songs for the children, such as the 'Frog he would a wooing go'.

Next to come in was Mrs. Cow, uh-huh

Next to come in was Mrs. Cow, uh-huh

Next to come in was Mrs. Cow

She tried to dance but she didn't know how, uh-huh

He took Miss Mousey on his knee, uh-huh

He took Miss Mousey on his knee, uh-huh

He took Miss Mousey on his knee

Said, "Please Miss Mousey, will you marry me ?" uh-huh

Things change but they stay the same.

See also:

Sketchbooks

Frances Alys uses a sketchbook: More on an artist and play

Reptiles of the mind

From: Zenodo.org/ 

William Blake wrote that if a person had a fixed point of view or never developed new thoughts, their brain would begin operating as if it had been for too long standing in stale waters and it would begin to breed 'reptiles of the mind'.  

I have been feeling rather stuck lately, and have found it hard to tap into my feelings, especially when it comes to engaging with the people I'm meant to love. I find myself not knowing what to say, realising it is my body that is talking, finding internal sensations churning me around, including a heart beating too quickly or irregularly, my chest feels tight, I'm breathing more quickly than normal and my stomach is clenched, all signs that there are powerful feelings swirling about, but I struggle to find words to name them. I also seek reassurance by seeking physical contact, when touch is probably the last thing someone else wants to give. I retreat into my comfort zone of drawing and making; I lose myself in image making and try to visualise these feelings but to what purpose, I'm not sure. As I draw I can begin to calm my inner churn, but then, out of the recesses of my subconscious, creatures emerge, these are I presume what Blake meant by 'reptiles of the mind'. So should I or shouldn't I let them free? 

I've also begun a process of scanning in some of my sketchbooks in order to support my role as a researcher. As most of my thinking takes place on the drawn page, it seemed to make sense to make them available as part of the research process. 

I have now scanned in two of them and have annotated them, so that my thinking process is more transparent and available to others, but now when I look at them, I begin to wonder if I have a thinking process, perhaps these images are simply traces of a troubled mind.

The sketchbooks 

An observational drawing sketchbook

An ideas development and tap into the subconscious sketchbook 

In the ideas development sketchbook are several 'reptiles of the mind', and I worry that they are a sign of an inability to deal with a proper emotional life, being products of a state of 'stuckness', rather than a record of the imaginative interrogation of an interior life. 

More sample sketchbook pages from: Zenodo.org/ 

So much of art making is maintaining a confidence that what you are doing is worthwhile, and lately my levels of anxiety have been rising to a point where doubts are starting to creep in and I'm questioning what it's all about. 

Perhaps it's just autumn settling in with its associated melancholia. 

See also:

SKETCH exhibition submission

Sketchbooks

Using sketchbooks to think with

Richard Diebenkorn's sketchbooks

The preparatory sketch

Some artists think it old fashioned, but it was and in many cases I believe still is, an essential tool in an artist's repertoire. The preparatory sketch allows you to think around an idea and it provides an important breathing space for the development of visual concepts that sits between the processes of initial observation and those of composition. Edward Hopper is a classic case in point. If we want to see Hopper's ideas germinating we go and look at his preparatory sketches.  In this instance, an observational drawing of a man from the back, sitting down at a bar begins an idea. We are sucked into the internal world of this lone figure and Hopper realises the potential that this small drawing has for something much larger, something that has a lot to say about the condition of human beings within a large urban metropolis. 

Observational sketches

The small observational sketches above are simple visual notes, the sort of thing any of us might make, often scribbled in a note pad while having a cup of coffee, but this image in particular gets through to Hopper and he draws it again. 

Edward Hopper sketch for the figure in the centre of Nighthawks

Hopper returns to his initial small drawings and redraws the man's back view, this time giving it more weight, solidifying the form and sitting it more firmly in a space. There is something about this figure, it begins to suck us in, as we look at it, it is facing in the same direction as us, towards the wall, but is focused on something we cant see. The hat begins to have more meaning, it is solidly on the head, but at the same time the circle of its rim indicates a rotational space that begins to revolve around the figure. 

The centre of the composition

Hopper realises that this figure has a powerful presence, one that has enough gravitas around which he can build a composition. In the drawing above you can see clearly how he is beginning to imagine an image where this figure sits in the centre, and that hat now begins to have another type of importance, not just as a compositional device but as a psychological one. It further anonymises the figure of the man, casting a shadow over him and sending him even further into himself, in effect making this man even more lonely. Once the man is established as a focal or anchor point, Hopper is able to think about how various rectangles can be made to articulate themselves around him. Finally in the actual painting the rectangle around this man will become as dark as the man himself. 

The man's interior darkness eventually pervades the entire composition, but earlier on in the development of the image his body stands out against the light. As other figures are firmed up they begin to establish relationships, a man and woman are clearly connected and they engage with the late night employee's gaze. It's a cold, rather unfocused relationship, but at least it is one that collects them together as a small group of three, the forth figure is acknowledged by no one, totally withdrawn into himself. 

The composition is almost firmed up

The final painting: Nighthawks 1942

Nighthawks was painted in 1942, a time of war in Europe, which is perhaps why I was reminded of it. In the final painting the rectangle that surrounds the central figure of the lone man has got darker, so dark in fact his figure is almost lost in its blackness. The other figures are at least lit by the glow of artificial light, even if it is a harsh cold pale lemon yellow one. 

Hopper has revealed the deep loneliness that people can feel, especially in a huge city full of millions of people. His thinking process as you can see is very formal, but he is using compositional processes that clearly reflect a deep understanding of the relationship between shape, position, colour, tonal value and their psychological impact. 

The process Hopper uses begins with a tiny sketch, perhaps done in a similar situation to the final image, perhaps a drawing done in the full light of day, but once he has spotted potential in the image, you can see him building his composition piece by piece, thinking it through, but still making changes even as he paints the final image. That darkening of the rectangle of light that surrounds his lonely figure of a man, being a final painterly decision that turns this image into a dark masterpiece, one that has lodged itself firmly into my brain ever since I first saw it in the 1960s. Now, 80 years after it was painted, in a time of post-covid and worries about war in Europe, it seems to me that Hopper's image has a particular relevance, reminding us of how easy it is to slip into isolated despair, even when surrounded by other people and it perhaps reminds us therefore to be more open to others, and to offer companionship when we feel we can. 

Hopper carried in his pocket a slightly altered quotation from Goethe. Art is..."the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me." My own interpretation of this being that our inner feeling tone creates a sensibility by which we filter out a particular view of the world and that is what I am looking for when I'm exploring the possibilities inherent in trying to depict our interoceptual understanding of ourselves. 

The original quote from Goethe states: 'The beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, re-created, molded, and reconstructed in a personal form and original manner.'

Reference: O'Doherty, Brian (1982) American Masters: The Voice and the Myth New York: Random House, p. 14.

See also:

Using viewfinders to compose an image

From perception to concept: why draw?

Wayne Thiebaud: Drawing as colour composition

Harold Speed's ideas on composition

Sketchbooks

The study

Using sketchbooks to think with

Tala Madani: Cell Men March: 2011: Silkscreen, digital print, marker, acrylic, ink on paper

I've been looking at the work of Tala Madani and in particular at the way she uses sketchbooks to help her think through ideas. As I use sketchbooks myself, both to think with and to record the things I see, I totally emphasise with her idea that sketchbooks not only allow you to work through an idea, they 'record' it, as well as preserving certain aspects of your ideas' gestation. I rarely paint from my own sketchbook images, being more a printmaker and sculptor, but there were moments of recognition for me as I looked at the relationship between her evolving ideas and their final realisation in paint. It's not good enough just to have the idea, you have to find the right format for it. In her case she has literally squeezed paint into a shape that carries her ideas. We all need to think more about our own ability to resolve ideas and how the various forms they might take manifest themselves out in the world. I wish I could simply accept that painting is what it is, but for me it also comes with a lot of other 'baggage' that unfortunately nearly always prevents me from taking the painterly route. However, whatever my own tangled up thoughts, I still think we can learn a lot from Madini's process. 

An Iranian-American artist Tala Madani uses her awareness of the complex relationship between men and women that occur in a society that is still dominated by ideas of the superior male and the 'domesticated' female. She is by virtue of her residence in the USA, able to stand aside from the reality of day-to-day life in Iran and see male/female relationships as partly funny, partly about inadequacy and partly about a real frustration on her part with attitudes that mean she cant express herself in the ways that she wants to in her own country. Her portraits of Middle Eastern men are used to play out possibilities that arise from a feminist imagination reflecting on the phallic centred Iranian culture. However by reacting in the way that she does and using oil painting as her communication medium, she is also engaged with a secondary debate in relation to the visual arts culture of the country she finds herself working and living in. Are women fully emancipated in the USA? Is she free to make her own way in the world as a woman? The line between how one society thinks of the roles men and women should take and another is sometimes not as clear as we would like to think. The USA has a strong tradition of Christian ideals including those associated with determining the roles that women should be allowed to play in society; the right to life campaign for instance seeks to abolish a woman's right to choose to have an abortion. 

Oil painting as a medium can also signify a particular history of art that saw women as unacknowledged background figures, whilst men played out heroic roles as genius artists.

Madani's work touches upon all of these issues, however making art doesn't solve real world problems, but even so, it does help us to think about the issues that surround them. Perhaps its real value is that we can begin to think about political and ethical problems without necessarily having to take up any one fixed position on them, and it is fixed positions that often lead us into conflict.

However, back in the world of sketchbooks, we are looking at a way of working that is traditionally seen as being about creativity and invention and Madani's use of them is very contemporary in that she is using those drawing tools we all have at hand now, such as felt tips and biros.

Pages from Madani's sketchbooks 

I like the fact you can see an idea evolving such as the thoughts about 'no nose', you don't need to know what this actually means for Madani, but you can see that she is thinking it through, emoticons have no noses and they are happy, so.....

Paintings that emerged from Madani's sketchbook ideas

I also like the fact that she uses little cardboard cut out figures to work out how her audiences might relate to her large paintings in gallery spaces. It's the sort of thing we might all do, it's easy and useful. 

Trying to work out how an exhibition might look

Tala Madani looks at the male gaze

Art21 has a very good video of her talking about her work, a resource that is live as of the date of this post: Find it HERE.

See also:

My own use of a sketchbook The evolution of an idea

Sketchbooks

Using sketchbooks to draw in the city

Sketch exhibition

Paul Klee's notebooks

Richard Diebenkorn's sketchbooks

Sketch

The evolution of an idea

I have a piece of work in an exhibition in Halifax at the moment. The exhibition, Temporal Terrains: an exhibition on wheels - is a Yorkshire Sculptors Group exhibition at Dean Clough  and it lasts from 7 Sept to 6 Oct 2019 and like (im)Material Disarray is another fringe exhibition linked to the Yorkshire Sculpture International 2019 festival. The piece is a complex one and I thought it might be interesting to look at how it evolved because I rarely show anyone the scrappy little drawings I do to work my way around a problem, but in many ways without them an idea would never get to fruition. 

This is the piece I have in the exhibition. 

‘How to move a plant in flower’  Garry Barker: A sculpture in three parts: 2019

Ceramic with metal, textile and wooden additions. 

This was the short text written for the exhibition:

Plants are supposed to be fixed to the soil, but in a post-truth age where nothing is as it was or as it ought to be, the distinction between plants and animals begins to break down. Therefore plants will move and as they do they will take on the characteristics of animals.  A selection of a small group of hybrid creatures that totter on the brink of self-discovery, as they ask themselves, “are we animal, vegetable or mineral?”

I belong to the Yorkshire Sculpture Group and they often set particular challenges to group members; challenges designed to ensure we don't get too complacent in our approaches to art making. I enjoy these responses but don't engage with all of them because I also need to keep focused on the issues I'm mainly concerned with, but this particular challenge did intrigue me.  

In particular I had been reading and thinking a lot about how as humans we have privileged ourselves in such a way that other things were ignored or simply seen as resources for humans to use. I had therefore set myself a task to try and make work that in different ways gave agency to non-human things. Such as allowing materials to work in dialogue with myself and trying not to force them to do my bidding, or to use recycling more (as in the (im)Material Disarray work), or to open my conversations out to include non-humans and to try and act as if my role as an artist was more like a conduit between things, or someone that revealed the interconnectedness between everything. Because sculptures had to be on wheels for this exhibition I thought this an ideal opportunity to test out some ideas related to the removing of distinctions between animal, vegetable and mineral categorisations. 

These are some studio shots taken when the sculpture was nearing completion. 

Flower heads develop animal tongues

A fleshy ceramic (mineral) flower emerges from a wooden branch

There is nearly always some book research that bears fruition in terms of ideas development and in this case it was an image I came across in a Medieval book of herbal remedies. The way the roots were drawn looked to me as if they were turning into bear's claws and it reinforced the concept of plants and animals being both things that moved. It is just that they have different time frames. 

Nightshade from a Medieval book of herbal remedies

I had already been making ceramic plants for an exhibition in Patching in Nottingham and had devised a system of stems made from ceramic exteriors with steel rod centres. I had made lots of these as test pieces so I could continue to play with them and see if there were other possibilities. 

This was where drawing came back in. 

Ideas for bases

 The 'flower' sculptures for Patching had rods that went straight down into the ground, a solution that would be impractical for what I needed, so I began to think about other forms and how these could perhaps sit on a flat base and be screwed into place. 

Ideas for 'bone stems'

As I was thinking about the way stems fitted bases I realised that if a plant was to become an animal its stems would have to be more like bones, so I began to look at the green stems becoming white. 

First animal head ideas

The stems needed flowers and the first ideas were simple animal head flowers, which as you can see were far too uninventive and a poor fit. 

As always when stuck for an idea I tend to return to objective drawing and feed my ideas with what nature invents. 

Plant heads drawn from life

There is something already animal like in plant heads (the fact we call them flower-heads indicates the connection). 

Bird flower

The bird head idea was then morphed with the flower drawing, it was better but still not right. 

I then returned to thinking about bases again. 

Rabbit base

Ungainly and too much like rabbit, but it was a germ of an idea. I liked the feet if nothing else.

A badly remembered Renaissance idea

The next drawing tried to morph several ideas of animal forms together and was based on something I had seen before. 

Simplified version of above

Ceramic version of the drawing above, mounted on a wooden base with wheels attached. 

In a simplified form it worked much better, but was now a bit boring, so I persisted. 

Slug base

The slug base

It seemed to me that the slug was a creature between animal and plant forms, (remember I'm an artist and can just decide on any form an invented life might take) I now had several ideas I could take into making and so I made about six or seven variations of these bases and began to test them out in the studio. But I soon came up with a problem and this was how to get everything moveable.

Idea for a cabinet in wheels

The first idea was to deconstruct an old piece of furniture and put all of my ceramic ideas into it, cutting holes for the plants to grow through. I went so far as to make the cabinet by reconfiguring a piece of furniture I took from my bedroom, but it just didn't work. However one of the heads I had come up with interested me and you can see its form in the final piece. I decided to use the idea of cutting holes through things in another exhibition, yet to be realised but coming up in October. 

I had been out walking and brought home with me some branches from a tree that had been recently cut down. There was something about the way the branching worked that gave me a clue how to embed the interconnection into the base construction. 

Thoughts about branches on wheels

I began to see in my head an idea of wheels being attached to the branches and then I could perhaps put rods into them to 'grow' the stems directly upwards as if they were simply further 'growths'. 

But this was far too unstable, and I added an extra branch.

My attention begins to return to bases that can then be attached to wood

Final idea of wooden bases with wheels attached, screwed into the branches.

Eventually with lots of trial and error I made wooden bases for the ceramic bases and then attached the wheels directly to these, rather than to the branches. 

However it was this sketchbook drawing below of a related idea that really helped the concept come to fruition. A ghost of a human confronts a bird and a plant, in a scene that could be from anywhere.

Animal and vegetable actors playing out a scene

I have missed out lots of other drawings of plants with tongues and other bases but hopefully you get the idea of how I use drawing to think through an idea. The textile hanging from the head of the 'Jar Jar Binks' type creature was printed by Spoonflower a company I have used for a lot of my textile designs. 

Design for headscarf

I had made several drawings of men attempting to climb ladders and these were based on ideas coming from reading about Raymond Lull and the ladders of his art. In these minerals are on the bottom rung and God at the top. Humans are above plants and animals, but not quite at the level of angels. My idea was to have a human endlessly trying to climb upwards but getting nowhere. We are at a quantum scale at the same level as minerals, animals and plants and that is something to be celebrated rather than dismissed. The work was about the interconnectedness of everything and so was meant to appear complex. 

So what looks like a pretty confusing mess of a sculpture, (well it does when you photograph it), does have quite a lot of thinking behind it. This is perhaps my greatest problem, I don't think through the lens. This is because I'm someone trained to draw rather than work from photographs and also I forget to try the ideas out as potential photographic images. I still spend a lot of time walking around my sculptures as we were told to do as students. As I do so I try to look for those awkward areas which just don't seem to allow the eye to move on and connect with something else. I strongly believe that the best sculptures make you want to walk around them. 

References

Nightshade from a Medieval book of herbal remedies is from Plant Series, No. 1. Manuscript MS408. Portfolio 2 by Gerard E. Cheshire

The 'Jar Jar Binks' Star Wars character first appeared in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. I wasn't thinking of it, but once the head was made lots of people began remarking on how similar the creature with the textile hanging from its head was to the Star Wars character. I quite liked this, it seemed to connect me to all those other artists that have tried to invent creatures by mixing various animal and plant forms. 

First version of the 'Binks' head

All those early years of reading comic books has something to do with how my imagination works too. The character 'Metamorpho' able to take on the characteristics of any mineral element being a particularly memorable well of ideas. 

For my early thoughts about interconnected 'hyper-objects' see this post.

See also other posts related to my art practice:

Garry Barker exhibition Workshop Press Gallery Ceramics and drawings

When the past overhauls the present Includes link to 360 degree view of exhibition

Drawing it all together

Library interventions

3D thinking Trying to use a 3D printer

Why I draw

(im)Material Disarray More ramblings on how I work)

SKETCH exhibition submission

More posts on sketchbooks

Sketchbooks

Using sketchbooks to think with