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. 

See also:

Katja Heitmann and embodied memory

Kimon Nicolaides and the natural way to draw

Life drawing: a reflection

Drawing as translation

The art of the life model: Nina Kane

The art of the life model: Nina Kane a further report

Katja Heitmann and Embodied Memory

Notebook page: The movement archivist trying to retrieve someone.

I recently went to a workshop at Yorkshire Dance led by the choreographer Katja Heitmann. Since 2019, she has been building an archive for human movement: Motus Mori. Working with what she calls movement-archivists, people that I would call observational dancers, (similar to observational drawers), she collects and preserves movements from people of all ages, bodies and backgrounds. From these observations Katja creates new artworks.    

For instance in her work COMMUNITAS, she states, '16 performers aged between 20 and 75 exchange their personal movements amid everyday reality. They support and follow each other’s movements until a collective body emerges. COMMUNITAS brings together 6 self-taught movers and 10 academic dance students from Fontys Academy of Arts, in a moving theatrical ritual. Accompanied by bubbles of spatial sound, they form ritual islands of focus and devotion'.

I was very impressed with her work on embodied memory, and in the workshop I became very aware of how each and every body is a record of its own history; the way we walk, sit, stand etc. each movement of our bodies telling stories, as well as expressing emotion. The workshop also focused on how memories are triggered by physical movement and during the lecture/performance, Katja Heitmann worked with a German dancer who had been operating as a body archivist. As she shared findings from her research around body memory and dementia, she asked this dancer to illustrate what she was referring to.

The dancer sits in the style of a remembered person

I had taken a sketchbook, so was able to do a little drawing between the sessions where the audience was invited to perform. The drawings didn't amount to much, but the work done with our bodies did. We were for instance introduced to the different ways that certain people walk. The professional archival dancer, was asked by Heitmann to remember particular individuals and then to concentrate on how they walked. He would then physically seem to reshape himself and go into the body form of each remembered person, which was an amazing thing to watch, as his neck lowered or straightened, his torso twisted or lent over and his whole body changed. But then he would walk. We would watch and follow. Some people stride heel first, some are flat footed, others raise their knees, some make short chopped movements, others almost skip, some feet splay outwards, some knees touch, some legs bow, whilst some walkers have toes that point to an invisible line passing underfoot. We also explored how each person sits, how we hold our hands when at rest, and how we rise as we stand. We have all developed unique, bespoke body movements and these movements are the language of our embodied being. 

I was gripped by the workshop and wanted it to go on and on, and once it had finished began to ruminate on how all this new information could be processed and brought into the work I have been doing in relation to interoception and the visualisation of embodied thinking. What was so refreshing about Heitmann's work was that it eliminated poor translation technologies. She didn't trust photographs as a body archive technology as they were flat static things, she similarly didn't trust video footage as it was also disembodied and written descriptions were similarly faint echoes of the body's reality. Drawing I felt at least captured traces of a moving hand, but I could see what she was getting at, only another body could truthfully and accurately archive the embodied reality of human beings.  

Notebook pages

I felt I was being taught a lesson. She was right in stressing the limitations of other media as body archive technologies, and it made me think about what I was doing. I am I hope still doing something useful, but it is not archiving how we think and experience our lived reality. My work is to open out the imaginative and poetic potential of experience and its visualisation, rather than to capture the outward visual experience of it. I am not an observational documenter of the world, I am a visual explorer who seeks to tap into the possibilities that sit underneath observations of perceived reality. 

The imagined interior begins to bleed into an external reality

See also:

On horizontality, the body and other things

Drawing and dance

Is drawing a language?

Drawing as translation

Documentation and drawing practices

Turner: The weather and breathing

Turner , Vignette: Study of a Ship in a Storm, c. 1826-36. Watercolour on paper, 18 x 22.7 cm.

It's a small image, but one with a deep resonance for me. Sometimes we forget that Turner made studies for his paintings. His work looks so spontaneous that it is easy to mistake the freshness for unstudied invention and think that he found his images in a welter of paint and brush-marks. The fact is, that like Edward Hopper, Turner thought a lot about how his images were going to look and he made studies in order to test out the veracity of his ideas. However unlike Hopper's solid composition studies of light and shadow, Turner is looking for images that emerge into a spotlight and drift in and out of vision on an edge of visibility. These are moments captured in the flow of watercolour, rather than trapped in the grain of a drawing. His 'Vignette: Study of a Ship in a Storm' is one a group of images that I presume were studies for images such as 'Snow Storm-Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth'. He did several images of boats at sea during storms and of course there is the famous story of him being strapped to the mast of a ship during a storm, so that he could look at the reality of the experience, and stare it in the face. Whether or not he actually did this, doesn't matter, because what he could do is imagine what it must be like and convince us of his vision by the manipulation of materials to create a powerful 'likeness' that convinces us that this was an authentic experience. 

J. M. W. Turner, 'Snow Storm-Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth' 1842

I believe that at the core of art's image making process is the idea that the universe is made of physical stuff and that as Seth (2021, p.20) states, 'conscious states are either identical to or somehow emerge from, particular arrangements of this physical stuff'. Artists can therefore work with material processes to create metaphors by making their own arrangements of physical stuff (paint, drawing materials, clay, stone, found objects etc.). These arrangements or physical conglomerations are like in someway, those other particular arrangements of physical stuff that are not art, those organisations of materials that we call life experience. By making these arrangements, (art) we help ourselves come to terms with the chaos of the arrangements of materials we experience as 'life'. In this case Turner's previous experience of being caught in various storms, is processed by him using watercolours and other paints, in such a way that although they are not the same as the original experience, they are analogous to that experience and 'like' it. This is watercolour paint on paper or oil on canvas and not wind and rain and sea, but the physical conditions that lie behind the events experienced are paralleled in the way that Turner manipulates his materials. In his case working with the potential flow of paints, rather than trying to force paint to do things that it shouldn't do. 

J. M. W. Turner, studies for a ship in a storm

Turner is a wonderful model to follow, his brief sketches above, pointing to a deeply felt visual  awareness of his own experiences. Of course Turner had the ability to render experiences from his memory, coupled with the imagination to visualise them in a way that is 'authentic' to others. 

As artists we are never alone, all the artists we have ever looked at become fellow travellers on a journey to find the images that make sense to us in the time that we find ourselves to be in. Turner was an artist that had to face a growing awareness of a new age of industrial revolution, an age of steam and fire, one that would though eventually fuel climate change and global warming. He fuses weather with human endeavour, ships which when seen close to, are massive constructions, are rendered tiny and insignificant in the face of a boiling sea. He seems to sense the future changing of weather patterns, his images a sort of Tarot reading for the future, indications of our collective fate in the face of the wrath of the Earth's climate. 

Covid feels as if it is but one aspect of the Earth's anger at our foolishness; now avian flu spreads out across the world, as sea levels rise and we all begin to worry about a coming winter of war and energy shortages and a lack of leadership when it comes to halting carbon emissions. My personal experience of these events was of Covid and during the summer I had a few moments of intense drama as a result of its attack on my respiratory system. 

Respiration is like the weather, at most times your breathing is regular, rather like the soft breezes that are nearly always stirring a few leaves or animating some blades of grass. But every now and again there is a dramatic event, such as when breathing is no longer automatic. In this case I couldn't get air into my lungs, covid had somehow found my weak spot, asthma, which for a while had been controlled and almost as far as I was concerned gone; it flared up and I was caught out, outside without an inhaler. First of all coughing uncontrollably and then finding I could no longer get any air into my lungs. I nearly collapsed, but as soon as I was able to I tried to visualise what it felt like. The internal 'storm' I had experienced was like the weather, something that had blown through me, but something that was also blocked, as if it was trying to blow down a narrow valley, but there had been a landslide and the route was blocked. 

Above: Studies for the internal awareness of breathing problems, the final image was an attempt to visualise the moment when air broke through into the blocked airways. 

The studies above were made using watercolour and ink based liquid solutions, with added granular bits that were a product of drying out solutions and grinding the results into powder and adding this to the various inks and watercolour solutions I was using. As well as hand manipulated and materials led image making, some images were then further manipulated in PhotoShop to heighten colour saturation or to add a layer of graphic forms designed to indicate where constriction was occurring, in a similar way to how a doctor would draw on an x-ray to show where a bone was broken or where a tumour was present. 

Frank Auerbach: Studies for Primrose Hill 1968

Frank Auerbach's drawings above, feel as if it is still windy, they respond to trees and bits of paper being blown around, sketched while he himself was being wind blown.These images, as well as my own and Turner's appear as if they are dissolving back into the world they come from, they are not fixed, they are events.  For myself this is an important process, as it echoes what is going to happen and has happened and is happening constantly and forever throughout the eternity of the universe's existence. The flow of elements and their constant metamorphosis is very like the weather, shapes blown into being for an instance and then dissipating as the wind changes direction. My moment of breathlessness a tiny insignificant event within the ever interlinking events of nowness. My problem breathing reminded me of the void, as I tried to take in air, suddenly I found non, instead there was a vacuum and the vacuum was an emptiness into which not then perhaps, but one day I will have to empty myself into. The images I have been making are very like thousands of other images artists have made, far too many to identify individually, but all perhaps made in recognition of the cosmic flow of everything. This reminds me again of one of the etymological roots of our word 'art'; the phoneme 'rt', the ancient indo/european sound of the dynamic process by which the cosmos continues to be created. 

Kano Motonobu - Ink Landscapes

The landscapes by Kano Motonobu above are from the early 16th century. They are hardly there, images of mist and light, ink dissolving into water as reality fades. They were prized in their time as reminders of the insubstantial nature of existence, of the fact that we dance lightly over the Earth and that we need to treasure the fragility of our lives. These images, like Turner's  have been faithful fellow travellers for myself, reminders that art is a collective activity, that it is not about originality but about being able to pick up the baton that is passed to you by the many that have gone before and being true to the flow of time and the materials that you interact with.  Perhaps the Buddhist world understands these things better than most, as it is said, 'this world mostly relies on the dual notions of existence and non-existence,' these are however extremes and we negotiate our way between them.  

The world is for the most part shackled by attraction, grasping, and insisting.

But if—when it comes to this attraction, grasping, mental fixation, insistence, and underlying tendency—you don’t get attracted, grasp, and commit to the notion ‘my self’, you’ll have no doubt or uncertainty that what arises is just suffering arising, and what ceases is just suffering ceasing. Your knowledge about this is independent of others.

This is how right view is defined.

‘All exists’: this is one extreme.

‘All doesn’t exist’: this is the second extreme.

Avoiding these two extremes, the Realised One teaches by the middle way:

From Kaccānagottasutta: Bhikkhu Sujato: Linked discourses on causation

References

Edgar, D: (2019) Agitating the void. Tracy special issue: Drawing Phenomenology: tracing lived experience through drawing Volume 14 Issue 1 ojs.lboro.ac.uk/TRACEY

Morton, T. (2013) Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. New York: U of Minnesota Press.

Seth, A., (2021) Being you: A new science of consciousness. London: Penguin.

Sutta Central: Early Buddhist Texts Available from here

Choong, M.K., (2000) The Fundamental Teachings of Early Buddhism: A comparative study based on the Sutranga portion of the Pali Samyutta-Nikaya and the Chinese Samyuktagama (Vol. 32). Otto Harrassowitz Verlag.

Shìh, H. (2013) Dependent Origination= Emptiness”–Nāgārjuna’s Innovation? An Examination of the Early and Mainstream Sectarian Textual Sources. Journal of the Centre for Buddhist Studies, Sri Lanka, 11, pp.175-228.

See also:

The etymological root of art

Edward Hopper's preparatory sketches 

Alina Popa: Disease as an Aesthetic Project

Facing a blank sheet of paper

David Edgar's presentation on the void

Absence, emptiness and the void

Non western aesthetics

Drawing and mindfulness 

The Vignette

Drawing and healing

Pseudo-Galen, Claudius

In the West art and anatomy have a long association; they are entangled together, which I suppose was a necessary condition as the ability to render objectively accurate images of the body necessitated artists study anatomy. Dissection of humans however was largely forbidden in the ancient world, but early medical thinkers such as Galen and Vitruvius were still able to come up with theories for how the body worked by dissecting animals, and from the information gathered, they deducted how the inner mechanics of humans worked, often by linking this knowledge to observations of exterior signs of illness such as changes in body colour and condition. This internal / external interrelationship would dominate Western thinking for centuries and in many ways still does. 

Galen' s Tripartite Scheme, explaining how the blood circulated through the body

I love a good diagram and Galen has diagrammatic ideas as to how the body works. He believed in Hippocrates' Humoral ideas, which pointed to the existence of four fluid humors in the human body: blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegmatic. Humors were divided into the body and a perfect harmony among them resulted in perfect health. Galen also linked the humoral theory to Aristotle’s ideas, which stated that the basis of existence resided in four elements: water, air, earth and fire. Each vital organ would be linked to one type of humor, which in turn, would be related to a natural element. We can see therefore how the body can also be seen as a landscape composed of the same basic elements as the environment that hosts it. The components of the body reflecting the ingredients of the earth. However it is Vitruvius who provides the classic image that we all remember when it comes to the proportions of the body.

Vitruvius

Theory and observation come together in the Renaissance and interestingly in his drawing 'Vitruvian Man', Leonardo did not represent Vitruvius's proportions, instead he used those he found himself after measuring several male models, a sign that things were changing. Vitruvius wrote his 'Ten Books on Architecture', approximately one thousand five hundred years before Leonardo read them. It is the only text on the subject of architecture to survive antiquity, but of far more interest is that it was also one of the first texts in history to draw the connection between the architecture of a human body and that of a building, not only is the bi-lateral symmetry of the body seen as a model for architecture, the interrelationship of body proportion is also seen as something that should be extended into architectural design. This, coupled with the fact that Vitruvius also states that the architect should also have a knowledge of the study of medicine. A building like the humans it is made for can become sick, because climate or air flow can effect the healthiness and unhealthiness of sites, and as Vitruvius goes on to point out, the use of different waters can also lead to illness if not controlled properly. The Romans were very good at building in underfloor heating, channelling water and creating steam baths. By extension an unhealthy body has characteristics similar to an unhealthy building. These characteristics I would argue are similar to those that compose what Henri Bergson in his book 'Creative Evolution' called the ‘élan vital’, an energy that runs through everything, not just living things. The implication of a force such as élan vital is that all materials have the potential to be informed by or formed into others, they just need to be in interaction with each other in some way. So you could describe something like metamorphosis or hybridity as a product of interactions between different energy states. For instance some of the interrelationships between interoception and perception are at their most interesting at the transition or liminal stage, between an external perceptual awareness of lets say a foot and interoceptual messages coming from a foot pain source, such as a bunion. One type of awareness passes into and becomes another type of awareness. This perceptual edge-land is for myself where visual invention conjoins with visual observation.

Image from an interoception awareness workshop

Like Russian dolls, these energy fields can sit one within the other, each one similar to the others, but each one also unique and having its own features. It is in the transition space that sits between the drawing of a man and the drawing of geometry that an idea grows. 

Leonardo: Vitruvian Man

Even though the Catholic Church prohibited dissection, artists and scientists performed it to better understand the body. Renaissance artists wanted knowledge of the inner workings of the human body, which they believed would give them the necessary skills to paint and sculpt it in such a way that body positions represented appeared realistic or natural. 

Andreas Vesalius: On the fabric of the human body in seven books

In the 16th century the physician Vesalius published his influential work, 'On the fabric of the human body in seven books'. He was an anatomist as well as a doctor and in making observations from his actual dissections was able to establish that many of Galen's theories were wrong. As these 'advances' in medicine were undertaken, what they also seemed to do was develop an idea of the body as a 'mechanism' or purely physical organ, advances in representation going alongside advances in medical procedures. 

However there were other traditions. 

Hua Khar Jaintsa 'Course of the Lifespan Principle' (1995–96) Pigment on cloth

In 1991 the 5,000 year old body of what was to be called Ötzi the Iceman was discovered. Entombed in ice shortly after his death, the glacial conditions protected much of his tissue, bones and organs and in particular because his skin was preserved, his tattoos were too.

Ötzi the Iceman with tattoo locations

80% of the tattoos found on the iceman overlap with classical Chinese acupuncture points, in particular those used to treat rheumatism, a medical condition that contemporary forensic archeology tells us the iceman suffered from. Other tattoos were found to be located on or near acupuncture points as well. Various herbs and medicines were also found alongside his remains, all pointing to ancient medical practices, that suggest the iceman belonged to a society with a surprisingly advanced health care system.

It is instructive to compare the Iceman's medical care with Tibetan medicine, a holistic practice with an approach that focuses on the conjunction of mind, body, and spirit. Also known as Sowa-Rigpa medicine, it is an ancient medical system that employs a complex approach to diagnosis, incorporating techniques such as pulse analysis, urinalysis, behaviour and dietary observation to determine what is wrong and uses herbs and minerals alongside acupuncture to treat illness. Hua Khar Jaintsa (active 1990s), created several intriguing images whereby the principles of Tibetan medicine were explained. The image 'Course of the Lifespan Principle' clearly illustrating the relationship between acupuncture points and the way that energy flows through the body. Hua Khar Jaintsa has created a body of work that reflects on many issues related to human development as well as on medicine and it stands comparison to many western European artists who have also attempted to explain the normally hidden aspects of our bodies.

Hua Khar Jaintsa: Early Human development

Hua Khar Jaintsa: Vulnerable points

It is interesting to compare Hua Khar Jaintsa to both Alberto Morroco and Luboš Plný.  Alberto Morroco was the artist who in 1949 created the images for one of the definitive anatomy textbooks. 

Alberto Morroco

Luboš Plný makes anatomical images of the human body, but he is also concerned to depict its functioning, its limitations, and its mortality. Sometimes labelled “anatomical self-portraits”, he combines coloured inks with acrylic paint and collage with organic elements such as blood, hair, the ashes of his dead parents and used medical aids to depict the body.  He makes precise records of skin, musculature, bones, circulatory systems, and organs, embedding his observations into montages consisting of drawings made on the basis of everything from 19th-century anatomical guides, X-ray images, photographs of Madonnas and any other medical or religious items that he comes across. 

Luboš Plný 

Plný seems to have intuitively understood that as in Buddhist influenced health practices such as those practiced in Tibet, India, Nepal Siberia, China and Mongolia, healing is about confronting and transforming suffering and rebalancing the mind and body to equilibrium and not about waiting until someone is sick, so that you can then cure them. This equilibrium is something the body itself is constantly seeking to achieve, using its hormone systems to effect change when it senses things are out of balance. 

Hormone Map

A brief look at a hormone map gives you an idea of the complexity of the body's feedback mechanisms.  It also gives a chemical insight as to why an unhealthy body can affect mental health, and how poor mental health can affect the state of the body. The energy field that moves between the body and mind is called in Tibetan medicine 'duawa' and this is shaped by a combination of environment, diet, history, behaviour and belief system.  For instance it is believed that if we eat the wrong foods, they can accumulate in our bodies and eventually manifest as illness. In terms of my understanding of what my own art practice is and what it could be, it has been important to understand that historically Tibetan artists created powerful images that were used as practical guides for well-being. 

Tibetan Buddhist paintings of medical issues are used to help people understand the relationship between their condition and treatment, these images can combine physical, mental and spiritual conditions as well as illustrate how treatment could help them. This is a step beyond the work of a medical illustrator, and would seem to me to incorporate medical illustration with religious art, conceptualism and expressionism. 

This fusion of various different disciplines offers for an artist such as myself a lot of freedom, whilst at the same time giving me a sense of purpose, especially as I continue my search for a way to visualise various forms of interoception. Here is another image, this time taken from an illustrated handbook of reflexology. The image of feet also has depicted within it images of the various parts of the body that are interconnected to them by energy flows which are themselves stimulated into action by applying pressure onto particular areas of the soles of your feet.

Acupuncture reflexology 

The conjunction of images suggests a fluid liquidity of an embodied understanding, that compresses head, lungs, stomach and heart into a body that can exist within the flattest flatness of flat feet. 

Holbein: Dead Christ

I am interested in a way of making images that combines Holbein's veracity, with an acupuncture reflexology diagram, with a chemical stain, with architectural space, with an emotive mark making system and a conversation between two people whereby they agree that a feeling tone can be not only depicted, but in that depiction captured and therefore externalised and making it available to healing rituals. As I struggle to find the right approach, I as always look around for artists that I think have developed a practice that feels as if it is hitting a spot at least near to where I would like to be. For instance Palden Weinreb, a New York–based artist draws on Buddhist teachings in his art practice, he makes works that help us to regulate our body rhythms. In the work below a pulsing white light brightens and dims in echo with our breathing patterns, encouraging deeper, more thoughtful, slower breaths. These regulated breaths may well have physical, psychological, and emotional benefits. He is essentially making a mandala within a mandala, a cycling light sits in the centre of a series of nested half spheres, the artwork as it pulses operating as an instrument for meditation. 

Palden Weinreb

Weinreb's work is though but an echo of a very old Tibetan tradition, which includes the making of mandalas that have now been produced by anonymous artists for hundreds of years. These artefacts are though rarely to be seen on their own and would normally be accompanied by prayer or some other ritual. 

Tibetan Mandala

There can be constructed between any two things a hybrid, therefore different aspects of the representation of humanity can be brought together, non figurative or more abstract images can be brought together with representation, sometimes to instruct and at other times to provide images that help foster moments of reflection or meditation. These hybrid forms are I believe necessary ones, because they allow imagery to operate across boundaries and to link together previously separate concepts. 

From a series of images developed initially as foot votives

Colour and light would appear to me to be central to the way we develop metaphor, light in particular has often been used to provide a gateway into spiritual reflection. 

Fused glass: memory of rib pain

Fused glass: Lower leg insect bites

I have looked at drawing with light in the past, and I have more recently been made aware of the healing power of both colour and light. 'Colour halls' were used for healing in ancient Egypt, China and India and I still remember first coming across SAD lights in a restaurant in Glasgow some years ago, and finding out then how much a lack of sunlight in winter effected northern people's circadian rhythms. 

The various energy fields that move between the body and mind can all be thought about and reflected upon within the process of image making. Some of these processes will have historically belonged to the realm of religious imagery, others to more general ideas of spirituality but others have now entered the world of contemporary medical practices. Whether these issues are seen as belonging to art as therapy, or to art as a focus for meditation and a doorway into spiritual enlightenment, or simply as a way to use our hands and making skills as route into good mental health, I do think that we ought to be far more aware of art's potential to become once again part of the essential wellbeing of life. 

See also:

Drawing and urban acupuncture 

Drawing bodies

Flesh

Paper and skin

Science and myth

Drawing with light

Working with stained glass

Drawing and quantum theory