Drawing : the body

Showing posts with label the body. Show all posts

Wednesday, 12 August 2026

Venice Biennale 2026: Part four

Rajni Perera and Marigold Santos: 'Efforescence/The way we wake'.

I have been thinking about the fragmented body recently and as usual there were other artists already working in a similar territory and who were exhibiting in the Biennale. Rajni Perera and Marigold Santos were two artists that had combined to make a piece entitled, 'Efforescence/The way we wake'. These artists were bringing their two diverse backgrounds together, as well as their individual art practices.

Rajni Perera and Marigold Santos

I was interested in how they 'inhabited' the fragmented large body around which they had placed Gulliver like, small islands of activity. Sometimes the body was cut open and landscapes were inserted into the 'wounds' and at other times things 'grew' directly out of the surface. I didn't think the image was totally resolved but as there were two artists working on the same thing, perhaps that was to be expected.

Sometimes images of the body are imlicated ones, such as those that could inhabit the 'Disease Throwers' as Guadalupe Maravilla called his chair like installations.

Guadalupe Maravilla

These objects operate as both shrines and healing instruments.He combines sculpture, painting, performative acts and installation into a practice that seeks to heal both himself and society. Sometimes the work references his migration to the United States due to the Salvadoran Civil War, in this case he explores how the systemic abuse of immigrants physically manifests itself in the body, something that reflects on his own battle with cancer. This was particularly relevant to myself, as I am searching for ways to unite external environmental experiences, with internal interoceptual ones. I was interested in particular in the way that Maravilla was able to combine found objects, such as a bathroom loofah, with more constructed elements. Some of my earlier work, where I had tried to form some sort of hybrid form between furniture and human beings perhaps has more milage in it than I thought.

The figure can be brought to life in so many ways. Kaloki Nyamai is an artist from Kenya who thinks of his work as part of a ritual of rupture and repair. Part folk memory and part material language of rope, paint, sisal, canvas, newspapers, burnt rubber yarn and stitch, images of people float into and out of view, embedded into a surface into which they are stitched into place.

Kaloki Nyamai

Nyamai views his work as a continuation of his ancestral lineage of storytelling. He often draws upon his grandmother’s stories of the Kamba people, a Bantu ethnic group of eastern Kenya. The images he had on display at the Arsenale were huge and in their size they intimated a sense of the mythic. Their surfaces had a feeling of the archaic, dark yarn threads protruding through his figures, gave them an element of some sort of neurological quirk, a phantom hair hypersensitivity that bridges tactile awareness, body image and deep-seated grasp of a personal identity, that is itself rooted in a local history.

Nick Cave's work was perhaps one of the outstanding contributions to Venice this year. It was to be seen both inside and outside of the Arsenale and it was able to command the space around it, whilst at the same time being able to be of interest the closer you got to its intricately cast surfaces.

Nick Cave

Cave had had seven new works on exhibition that had been made to address the stages of grief when mourning, stages that could lead to a rebirth and a radical re-connection with life. These images were rooted in his 'Soundsuit' works, which began in 1992 as a direct response to the brutal police beating of Rodney King. The four policemen accused of his murder, were acquitted by an all white jury. One juror said that King, by being combative and ignoring the officers’ orders, brought the beating upon himself. The First Suit Cave made, was constructed out of discarded twigs gathered from a park, and was meant to be a metaphorical suit of armour. When he put his suit on and began moving, the suit made a rustling sound, hence the name "Soundsuit". The suit became his armour, as it served to completely mask his race and identity, creating an anonymous second skin that allowed him to be viewed without societal bias. The figures are now more sculptural, cast in black they fuse body and nature, sometimes having gramophone like hoods, that suggest the sucking up of everything or the 'sicking up' what has been consumed. Blooming nature, cast images of the sort of bird ornaments my parents used to have, all living in a tree cast from real branches. Conceived with curator Koyo Kouoh before her passing, Cave has created his own mythology, one that reminds me that it is again the hybrid that will lead us into an animist future and that there are sometimes events that become catalysts for change, the death of Rodney King, being something that Cave has used to create images of hope.

I have for several years been interested in the work of Klara Kristalova. She popped up again this year, as she was taking part in the 'How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?' exhibit held in the Nordic Countries Pavilion.

Klara Kristalova

Klara Kristalova's work for the Nordic pavilion was entitled “Lust for Life” and consisted of a fallen tree inhabited by enigmatic creatures. I always liked the fact that when asked about her work's meaning or gestation, she said, "I want it to contain something I cannot control and something I maybe cannot even describe, I just know if it's there after the final firing, and if it's not there the work is not good enough." Yes! She hits the nail on the head, art isn't something you control, it sort of happens and slips through your fingers as you make it. Sometimes it becomes something magical and at other times it doesn't, but you can't predict it, you just have to continue making work and keep your fingers crossed that at times you will be blessed with it coming into being, if only occasionally.

Fréderic Bruly Bouabré is an artist I first came across back in the late1980s in the Magicians of the Earth catalogue. This was the first time I had been confronted seriously with the fact that non-Western traditional, folk and self-taught art and the artists that made it, should be not only looked at on the exact same footing as mainstream Western contemporary artists but that it could be argued that perhaps these art forms held within them qualities that recent modernist approaches had lost and which were vital to our collective wellbeing. We were wondering around just off the Via Garibaldi and saw some images through what looked like a shop window and inside were several of Bruly Bouabré's images.

Fréderic Bruly Bouabré

He was an artist that continued making a series of images that were thought of as if they were links in a chain, or part of an ever expanding card deck, right up until his death. He had a preoccupation with the intersection between language and systems of knowledge, that was informed by the daily life of his Bété community but which he attempted to build a relationship to the broader linguistic and epistemological frameworks that surrounded him. Looking back on his work it feels as if he was reminding us that everything is connected and that he was giving us a sort of visual guide, a great encyclopaedic collection of images, that if we could shuffle them and lay them out like some form of massive tarot, we might, just might get a glimpse of his reality.

Werewere Liking

Werewere Liking has been based in Côte d’Ivoire for over forty years. Her practice spans writing; including poetry, theatre, essays and critical theory, as well as painting, sculpture, drawing and performance. Liking looks to open vibratory fields between the spiritual and the earthly. Her 'Genealogies of Lights', is a series of sculptures made of wood and of collected, recycled and re-invested objects, inscribed with memory and fable. They re-activate what was discarded to forge new cosmogonies where narrative and politics overlap. I found these sculptures whereby she also encased various angle poise lamps in paper mâché, fascinating as they lit themselves, their inner glow like some sort of life force.

Werewere Liking

In one of her images, the water transformed into a cemetery for thousands of black bodies searching for hope and a better future, what in my work I had developed as a story told by one man, she shows to be something suffered by thousands.

Laurie Anderson

Finally I need to remind myself of how important it was to me to come across what Laurie Anderson is now doing. She is another of those artists that have been fellow travellers for some time. I still think of O Superman, her hit single from the album 'Big Science' as being proof that a fine artist can reach huge audiences and that a fine art practice, does not mean your work cannot have popular appeal. Her black and white Notebook (2026), was a 360-degree immersive drawing, that felt as if you were immersed inside a blackboard that had been taken over from the teacher by the pupils. Even the paper covers for the lights were painted on, it had that feeling of a place graffitied during a wild last night party. Her reflections on modern life in America, mirrored many of my own thoughts, the difference being she lives there and has to endure the reality of what is happening to her culture.

Laurie Anderson: Notebook

Over a few posts my thoughts on Venice this year have moved from having to acknowledge that a few scraps of drawn paper smuggled from a Russian prison are as powerful in their affect on my sensibilities as an internationally famous American artist, who has made a big impact on popular culture. The biennale rests on the shoulders of individual artists, each one working to visualise thoughts about their experiences of the world. The externalised materials that they leave behind, those concrete casts of artist's thoughts, are still for myself things of magic and wonder. The bringing together of such a large number of artists, into such a culturally rich environment might have all sorts of issues associated with it, such as 'the art system orchestrating neoliberal cultural hegemony', as I was reminded of by an anonymous sticker artist, but I am personally enriched by the experience and I would hope many others are too. However it is not an experience available to everyone. Those living in poverty, enduring war and having no access to any form of cultural life, are all excluded and of course there are many people who dismiss artists as being fools and charlatans, their work being of no real consequence, in a world where only mathematics, science and politics matter. Add to this the problems related to sustainability, climate change and the large carbon footprint engendered by international air travel, I personally wonder how long international art biennales will be allowed to survive. But for now they are still there and they tap into our sensibilities, reminding myself in this case, of how rich and wonderful human creativity can be, especially when it is at the service of individuals attempting to touch the world of 'beyond' the everyday, seeking to make contact with that 'other' something, with that feeling that there is something else and trying to make an alternative meaningful vision of what it is to be alive. 'Be aware', is all I can suggest, that you need to do in relation to all this.

Thursday, 9 April 2026

The Cosmographical Diagrams of Opicinus de Canistris

Opicinus de Canistris was a thirteenth century Italian priest, mystic, writer and cartographer who created fantastic cosmological diagrams that literally, turn the world on its head. Unlike our present science whereby we strive to dig down until we find the tiniest element that might lie underneath everything, he was trying to give to his society a picture of how everything fits together. In order to do this he gives non human forms, both spiritual and human attributes. I think we can still learn something from his approach.

Comparison of the Natural Versus the Spiritual world in Relation to the Church of the Spirit

Diagram of the days of creation: With Africa as infidelity, speaking to Europe as Faith

Commentary on a Passage from Aristotle on the velocity of the planets

I had been thinking about how images could be used by an audience or perhaps more accurately how I would like the images I make to be used. In the minds of certain mystics imagery could be simultaneously informational, pedagogic and meditative in function and it is this complexity that I am aiming for when developing ideas for my art work.

I like the idea that images can be looked at again and again and that their meaning could be unravelled slowly over time. As always I'm looking for antecedents and in Opicinus de Canistris I found a precursor who used a combination of visual and written approaches to explore his very personal ideas about the cosmos, self-knowledge and God. He made a series of intricate cosmographical diagrams based on late medieval maps and charts of the Mediterranean and other drawings and diagrams of what were then contemporary ideas, whereby the spiritual and the material worlds were understood as interacting and intermingled. This fact was I thought very interesting, as it reinforced my own belief in an entangled experiential happening and that what was perhaps needed was an art form that could be used as a support for some sort of meditative experience.

Opicinus de Canistris was often found reflecting on the microcosm within the macrocosm and was concerned to renounce sensory experience, during a 'cleansing of the windows of the soul, so that the light of spiritual reality would transform his understanding'. Which is for myself a powerful indicator that he was taking this work very seriously, but not only that, he used diagrams as an aid to a process of self-reflection and analysis, something that I have also come to see as another aspect of visual awareness that reoccurs often in contemporary drawing practices. However I would like to embrace sensory experience rather than renounce it, as I believe that it is sensory experience that is vital to our experience of life.

The map of Europe as an idea containing several bodies

If you turn the image of 'Comparison of the Natural Versus the Spiritual world in Relation to the Church of the Spirit' on to its side, you can easily see a quite contemporary looking map of Europe centred on the Mediterranean. As this was drawn in the mid 13th century, it is a pretty good contemporary vision of the best mapping available at the time, but the personification of the landscape is something that has emerged out of much older traditions, ones that go back to ancient myths of the Earth's genesis; myths that pre-date the Bible.

Babylonian Map: 6th century BC

In the stone map made in Babylon above, you can just about make out the outlying regions, which are the triangles that project out past the edge of the circle. We still have the descriptions of regions three to seven, all of which must have been strange distant places in relation to the people of Babylon. So many of the stories about far off places would in those days have been more myth than reality, but you can sort of guess what is being referred to. The third region is where "the winged bird ends not his flight", the fourth where "the light is brighter than that of sunset or stars"; the fifth, due north, lay in complete darkness, a land "where one sees nothing" and "the sun is not visible"; the sixth, "where a horned bull dwells and attacks the newcomer" and the seventh, "where the morning dawns". In such maps we can see a fusion of reality and fantasy. As maps become more attuned to the realities of politics, they change shape and can reflect other ideas such as the fact that we need to pass through the landscapes of the world if we are to interact with them. We pass through one place after another.

A linear tube map

Maps can operate in a variety of ways, just think of how our London tube maps are simplified into linear forms that can be printed up and placed over the doors in train carriages. This is an old idea, one the Romans used to use.

From Iberia in the west, to India in the east: an ancient Roman road map

Map of the cursus publicus

The cursus publicus was a system that allowed for the flow of power to operate. Rome needed to set up a complex communication system to allow its agents to travel throughout its territories unimpeded. Each identified town, village, site or area would have been responsible to the needs of any travelling dignitaries such as magistrates; providing horses, food and safety for public servants as they passed through. I was interested in the maps of the cursus publicus, as they don't look like the ground from space as current Google maps do, they are very much the product of information, one area of responsibility having to follow the next one, similar to the way names are placed on tube maps, so it is very clear what places a traveller would have to pass through. However there was no need to show how this relates to some sort of accurate geographic positioning. As long as the traveller knew that on leaving area one at some point area two would take up the responsibility for their safety, all was well. This I realised could be used by my own visualising of the interior of the body. I am trying to express something about emotional shape and colour; something that I know exists and that it does so within some sort of inner body map, but that map doesn't have to be located in any sort of one to one correspondence with the interior of the body as laid out in contemporary anatomical diagrams. I am reassured therefore that my idea of taking a long journey through an imagined body/landscape, might after all be a viable one.

Two tests from part of a journey through an imagined body/landscape

Interoceptual portrait

I would like to feel that there is a connection between my own attempts to create an Interoceptual portrait like the one above and images made by Opicinus de Canistris, such as his diagram of the mystical body of Christ. The overall shape can be enough to state that this is an image of a human being. Embedded into the image is partly the idea of a map, partly the idea that a body could represent something much more than itself and partly the idea that any individual can go off on a tangent and discover something mystical about both themselves and their vision of how things might be and that is always something wonderful.

Reference:

Opening to God: The Cosmographical Diagrams of Opicinus de Canistris

Thursday, 3 July 2025

Life drawing as contact improvisation

A fast biro sketch made in my notebook to remind students that the model stands in space.

I recently hosted a celebratory life drawing session in honour of the achievements of an ex student of mine. He has for a while now been holding life drawing classes in Hull and has developed a core following of students, but is now moving on and another tutor is going to take over the classes. He wanted to mark the occasion in some way and so he invited me to teach a session in recognition of how a metaphorical baton is handed on from one artist educator to another. This reminded me of an another event I was invited to participate in back in 2017. The 'Fully Awake' Exhibition held in Glasgow at 'House for an Art Lover', was focused on the legacy of Fine Art teachers and I was chosen for my contributions to an understanding of the processes behind idea and image generation. In particular my contribution to opening out possibilities as to how stories can be translated into a visual simultaneity. In this exhibition I represented an older generation of art tutors and I was chosen by Steve Carrick, then Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Chester, as an important influence on his own practice, and he in turn chose one of his students as being someone who was themselves now carrying on the baton. The exhibition concept had been put together by Sean Kaye and Ian Hartshorne another two connections from my time working on the Foundation course at Leeds College of Art, Ian was a past student and Sean took over as head of the fine art strand, when I was pulled out of teaching to undertake management tasks, something that I spent a couple of very uncomfortable years doing.

In Hull, I felt I needed to do something that reflected how things had changed in relation to life drawing practices and that there was now much more awareness of the role of the model in the situation and I wanted to put on a session therefore that gave the model more agency and that brought the drawers into a three way dialogue, (drawers, tutor and model), that broke through the myth of life room objectivity.

The life model had decided to wear a thick black dressing gown made of a wooly material, which made him sweat. So I decided to use this as a starting point for the session. He was shaking his hands in some sort of attempt to cool himself down, so I asked him to just go through the moves he was making as cool down exercises and to now think of these actions as the focus for the session. He had a towel with him and he didn't know where to put it, so we agreed he might as well carry it over his shoulder, as he would normally do if he wasn't modeling. Whilst doing this I also engaged the drawers with their own body languages as they began setting up to draw. I asked them what they were thinking about and started to bring the model into the conversation. He told a story about how during one class he wished the session would end quickly because a nice looking woman was 'looking at him', which meant that he was starting to think that he might become aroused. He made it to the end of the session he said with relief and he had therefore decided that he must try to think of nothing when he was modelling in the future. His story reminded me of a life room conversation from back in the 1970s. I was as a young man hosting a life drawing session at the Swarthmore Adult Education Centre in Leeds, when the model came up to me and said, 'That man is looking at me', and I knew exactly what she meant. All the other drawers were engaged with the task in hand, which was trying to locate the figure in space, but this particular man was hardly drawing, he was looking at her. I then had the difficult job of informing him that it was better if he left the session and that I could tell that he wasn't capable of working in the required way, which was essential if students were going to progress into higher education. This was in fact an embroidered falsehood, only a few of the students in the group wanted to progress, but it worked and he left with a refund that came out of my own pocket. I wonder with hindsight if I could have handled the situation better? That story being a reminder to myself of how difficult life drawing sessions were and still are, in relation to the implied sexuality of the situation. I can't remember the number of times that some anonymous man I have met in a pub or waiting for a train, has grunted some guttural noise in response to the fact I had let them know I was an artist. In their mind all they could think of was that artists spend most of their time gazing at naked women. It's a sad indictment of our culture that this comic stereotype is still in place.

Back in the room booked out for the life drawing session, I began miming the various stances now taken by the drawers as they set up to draw. I suggested that one set of poses the model could take in the future could be based on these mimes. I was of course asking the students whether or not the life class could be used to reflect upon the situation itself?

The next issue was to expand on an idea of figure drawing as some form of contact improvisation. I worked with the model to get him to undertake a range of classic poses, poses I would first take up and then he would if asked copy. As he moved, I moved an imaginary drawing implement with my hand, sometimes sweeping my arm in an arc and at other times twisting my wrist movements to make tiny hand turns. My drawing movements were echoing his body movements. If he held his arm out, I would extend mine, my imaginary drawing implement tracing an invisible line in the air as I moved. We then looked at how people were standing or sitting in relation to the situation and I asked how in their minds they inhabited their own bodies and whether they imaginatively could inhabit other people's bodies. Drawing in this case, could become a sort of 'inhabitation' of another's form. We also discussed mirroring, the way that we copy body movements of those we encounter, the classic being how we fold arms or cross legs in response to our perception of others doing the same.

Eventually we began drawing, and for the whole session I simply asked the model to continue with his cooling down routine, breaking every 15 minutes to ask questions of the various student approaches to their drawings. I took the approach of every picture tells a story. The drawings reflected the various abilities of those in the room in relation to measurement, control of medium etc. Several people still starting with drawing a head and finding as the drawing went on that they couldn't get the feet in. So lots of basic stuff to teach like how to measure, as we went on, but what these attempts did highlight were certain psychological implications in relation to how we see each other. I pointed out that in 'normal' conversation with another person we would not look at their feet and that we would concentrate on their face to check out whether or not we were in communication. However when one person in the room takes their clothes off, immediately the conversation is warped. Some broke their drawings down into flat areas, others developed centralised images, some were focused on mark others on tone. Each approach suggested a different narrative about relationships and how they could be visualised through drawing.

It felt that by the end of the session everyone was more aware of the possibilities for change in relation to the way that situations of this sort were constructed and that the key issue of how to make images of another human being was opened up anew for the students. In particular the man who was going to take over the life drawing sessions in the future took part and I would hope that what went on helped him to think through how he will host his sessions in the future.

We have been aware of these issues for some time and in particular Nina Kane unpicked many of the narratives surrounding life room practice when she worked for the Leeds College of Art Adult Education department during the time when I was its manager. I thought her work with the Leeds Art Gallery and its collection was exemplary and her reflections are still available. (A link to her work can be found at the end of this post.)

This was also a time (I think it was 2008) when the management at the college decided that life drawing would no longer be supported as a key component of the art curriculum and the life room was discontinued and the space put to other uses. The idea of continuing to fund a contested space was perhaps in the minds of a management driven by finance, as well as being faced with many mainly feminist voices calling for life drawing to be removed from the curriculum, difficult. Instead of using the situation to open out the issues as Nina had done, it was much easier just to drop what was a quite expensive activity, as both a tutor and a model had to be paid for, as well as changing facilities made available. There were also incoming health and safety regulations that highlighted potential dangers in having a nude person on the premises, regulations that demanded answers to hypothetical questions that made life too complicated for the average part-time tutor. So having been employed by a principal who insisted that I be able to draw from life and teach life drawing, I had now become one of the last people to ever undertake any life drawing within the institution.

Things were so different when I started teaching in January 1975. Frank Lisle, the then principal, (in an earlier role teaching in Bradford he taught David Hockney to draw), employed three full-time models, Ann, Mavis and Rosalie. Life drawing was central to all the courses and I was employed, not just to teach printmaking but also to teach life drawing on Fridays to Foundation students. I'm again reminded of those times, because a film crew are in the university at the moment, developing a documentary about Lem Mierins' life. Lem was the inspiration for the well known comedian Leigh Francis' comic character Avid Merrion. Francis was taught by Lem as was the director behind this documentary, Phil Dean and as I'm one of the last members of staff that would have worked alongside Lem, I was interviewed. Lem is remembered for his language, a mixture of Latvian and English grammar, his iron will that he imposed on the life room and his very dapper appearance. He taught students how when drawing to reduce the model down to as few lines as possible. These lines had to be smoothly drawn and the model had to be placed perfectly on the page. I used to watch him draw, every line controlled, never a wobble and if it was Mavis, he had a model that had a shape that fitted perfectly into an imperial sized sheet of cartridge paper. (In 1975 metric paper sizes were introduced, but it took a few years for paper stocks to reflect this and we worked on imperial sized paper up until the later part of the 1970s.) He was an abstractionist and the life drawing studio was where he abstracted human beings down into formal essences. Then once your eyes were trained, you could apply this skill in other ways, such as in the precision kerning of the space between two letter forms. (This was in the days before computer typesetting) As you might guess we disagreed fundamentally on our relative approaches to drawing. I began with searching for space and then mass, he looked for flat pattern and formal organisation. Neither of us was at that time questioning why all three life models were women and it was accepted that whoever ran the life class, their philosophy would be the controlling factor. Things have though changed over the years; in Leeds in particular, the influence of Griselda Pollock's work was huge and as early as 1976/7, I remember Kate Russell, one of the Foundation staff, coming back from one of Griselda's sessions over at the University of Leeds totally fired up with the need to bring Feminist ideas into the course thinking.

Lem Mierins: Life drawing circa 1978ish

Lem Mierins:

Even after all these years, I still have the need to look at and draw naked people. I understand that people want to know how to visualise the various ways that we sit or stand and how the muscles and bones within our bodies come together to support us. But most of that understanding could be developed by using a clothed other person. When I undertook the 'copying other people's body movements workshop' hosted by the choreographer Katja Heitmann, the fact that everyone was clothed was an integral part of the way that people moved. Clothing and body movement are entwined. Perhaps by beginning any life drawing session with a 'how to get to know another person's body' set of dance type exercises, we could begin the process of 'knowing' another person's body in a different way. If someone really needed a longer time to look at a body, they could sit themselves in front of a large mirror in the privacy of their own space and then set about analysing how to draw that wonderful complexity we call the human body, from their own image. But at some point, someone will want and perhaps need, to draw from a naked other human.

Life classes are still being held in libraries and pubs and education institutions right across the city of Leeds, and I am aware that at times I feel the need to practice my ability to render the wonderfully complex form of the human body and that these types of classes offer an opportunity for me to do that. But I wish that more thought could be put into what the situation entails, as I believe that if that was done, eventually much more interesting drawings would emerge. I would hope that images that had far more to do with how we communicate through our bodies, would evolve out of a situation that was less about a myth of objectivity and more about the very subjective and emotional struggle we all have to communicate with each other.

Drawing