Decor Art

A painting from my parent's house

My step mother died last year and it took a while to sort out her affairs. However, her niece contacted me recently to tell me that everything was now in order and that a couple of items that she believed had come to her aunt from my dad needed to find a home. She had found a couple of cross stitched copies of paintings made by my mother as a distraction when she was dying with cancer and two small paintings. It was agreed that my sister would have one of the paintings and a cross stitched image that was based on a Rembrandt painting and that I would get to have the other two images. I didn't remember ever seeing the painting I received, but my sister did remember hers, as it was on the wall of one of the houses she lived in when she was a girl. I am though a lot older than her and my parents, who tended to move house every two or three years, had lived in several houses after I left Dudley.  However, the more I look at the painting, the more I become intrigued. 

The painting's signature 

The painting is signed, with a name that could be Kine, Kinn or Klien or something similar. I found out that paintings signed with the "K" last name were often painted by what were called "Decor Artists". There were many European and American painters in the mid-1900s who painted cheap, commercial oil landscapes and signed them as "Kine", "Kinn" or similar, which were sold in furniture and department stores. These mass-produced "factory paintings" were also by the late 1980s made in overseas workshops such as Dafen Village in China. Skilled but uncredited painters used their skills to quickly create and reproduce works. I also found the following statement about this type of painting.... "while many vintage decor paintings from the 1950s–1970s possess a certain charm or historical value, they generally hold little to no long-term monetary or gallery value". This use of various types of value systems of course intrigued me; historical value in this case was there, but no monetary or 'gallery' value. In the art market, gallery value is the standard retail price an artwork commands when sold through a commercial art gallery. It typically represents the base "Artist Price" doubled to cover the gallery's commission and operational expenses. As these paintings were sold in furniture stores, they were obviously thought of as 'decor', however I have seen people go into galleries and ask to look at paintings that would go with the interior decorative scheme they had implemented for their house. The use of the word 'charm' when researching qualities associated with these paintings, opened another aesthetic conundrum for me. For instance there is such a thing as 'curated nostalgia'. It draws from vintage or cottagecore* themes; such as cozy country cottages and whimsical florals. This creates a comfortable, safe and deeply familiar visual environment. The cozy feelings evoked are deeply emotional, and I realise that these paintings are perhaps far better at communicating certain types of emotion than the work I'm supposed to be developing in relation to my research into the visualisation of interoceptual experiences. 

There is one particular artist who is celebrated for his work in this area. Thomas Kinkade, is renowned for cozy, idyllic cottage scenes. His signature style features glowing windows, sun-dappled pathways and vibrant gardens, his paintings capturing a nostalgic and for many people welcoming warmth. His paintings are celebrated for evoking deep feelings of peace and a loving home.

Thomas Kinkade

Kinkade’s paintings depict an idealised, nostalgic escape from modern anxieties. By utilising luminous painting techniques, easy to read symbolism and familiar, therefore safe imagery, his works are like a comfort blanket. The feelings expressed in these images are related to the feelings that my parents wanted to have evoked when they purchased the painting I was sent. Knowing my dad he probably bought it second hand from a salesroom somewhere, maybe part of a job lot, bought sight unseen. He liked that sort of adventure. 

But there is another approach to this type of image and that is its stereotypical nature. A stereotypical image is an oversimplified and often fixed visual representation of a particular idea or concept. If decor artists were to make images by the thousand, they needed to have a clear idea of what people wanted and therefore would need to work with stereotypes. 

I decided to look at what was offered in similar outlets today. Wilco had landscape prints,

Idyllic Country Scene 

Wilco accompany their presentation of two 'Idyllic Country Scenes' with this statement: 'Bring a peaceful countryside charm to your home with the Idyllic Country Scene Framed Art. This beautiful artwork features an assortment of serene rural landscapes, perfect for creating a calm and cosy atmosphere in any room. Set in a classic frame, it offers a timeless charm and makes a great addition to living rooms, hallways, bedrooms and even offices.'

Posterlounge the Fine Art print company is slightly up market of Wilco, it asks, "Are you inspired by atmospheric landscape prints? Countryside Cottage by Dominic Davison being a contemporary offering by them of a by now familiar theme, the difference is that Davison is a digital artist. This is how Posterlounge introduce Davison's work.
'Pure romance, a grandiose attention to detail, warm summer evenings and an idyllic holiday feeling… All these things mark British artist Dominic Davison’s digital masterpieces. The biggest source of inspiration for Dominic’s wall art is his chosen home, Buckinghamshire, featuring picturesque cottages, green meadows and quaint forests. His unmistakable style is inspired by artwork of all kinds.'

Countryside Cottage by Dominic Davison

Both companies tell us that these images are 'idyllic'. The Oxford English Dictionary informs us that "Idyllic" is often used to describe a scene, place or experience that is peaceful, charming, and picturesque and is associated with a serene, flawless, or stress-free rustic environment, it can refer to anything from a beautiful countryside landscape to a perfect, carefree childhood memory. This idea is an old one, the OED goes on to explain that...'the word "idyllic" derives from the Greek word eidyllion, meaning "little picture" or "short poem." Historically, it refers to an "idyll," which is a literary or artistic genre used to depict an idealised, peaceful vision of pastoral or rustic life.' However, this romanticised outlook, where nature is innocent and untainted, has been intentionally constructed and passed down through centuries of literature, art, and philosophy. The Roman poet Virgil’s Eclogues depicted idealised shepherds philosophising in meadows, while in reality shepherds had to deal with a harsh difficult to negotiate landscape that included wolf packs, disease and extreme poverty. During the 18th Century Marie Antoinette had a fake rustic hamlet built at Versailles, so that she could play at being a lady peasant, at the same time the real French peasants were starving. Farmers today struggle with debt, climate change and corporate takeovers, the countryside can be a very harsh environment, often far away from comforts such as local hospitals or cultural outlets such as theatres or art galleries.
It would seem that the more industrialised and urbanised we become, the more we romanticise the countryside. Hence the 'idyllic' stereotype. 

Back in the 1990s Komar and Melamid set out to find what most people would like if a painting could be made exactly to their wishes. Intending to discover what a true "people's art" would look like, the artists began the process which resulted in America's Most Wanted and America's Least Wanted paintings, which were exhibited in New York at the Alternative Museum under the title "People's Choice."

USA Most wanted painting

France most wanted painting

Turkey most wanted painting 

They went on to conduct surveys in several other countries and as you can see from the three samples taken from their research, what people wanted was very similar in each case. Michael Govan had this to say about their project.

In a way it was a traditional idea, because a faith in numbers is fundamental to people, starting with Plato's idea of a world which is based on numbers. In ancient Greece, when sculptors wanted to create an ideal human body they measured the most beautiful men and women and then made an average measurement, and that's how they described the ideal of beauty and how the most beautiful sculpture was created. In a way, this is the same thing; in principle, it's nothing new. It's interesting: we believe in numbers, and numbers never lie. Numbers are innocent. It's absolutely true data. It doesn't say anything about personalities, but it says something more about ideals, and about how this world functions. That's really the truth, as much as we can get to the truth. Truth is a number.

-Michael Govan, Director, Dia Center for the Arts

Govan's statement was I found worrying. Faith in numbers is I find problematic, but I could see what he was getting at. I was more interested in what this group of images represented in terms of visual psychology. It has been argued that people love landscape images because of the prospect and refuge aspects of evolutionary psychology, such as the safety instinct whereby we are biologically drawn to landscapes that offer a vantage point to survey surroundings (Prospect) and sheltered areas for protection (Refuge). Images featuring lush green colours and accessible water (like lakes and rivers) are meant to be universally pleasing because they signal survival, food sources and seeing water, that even in pictures or video projections, signals safety, relief, and replenishment, and in turn it produces wakefully relaxed brain waves. This is a process also called "soft fascination", whereby water engages us in a gentle reflection that quiets the mind, allowing the brain's cognitive networks to recover from stress and anxiety. Landscapes can also serve as blank canvases for the viewer's imagination, acting as a form of visual therapy, giving the mind a space in which to mentally inhabit a space far away from daily stresses, a place that is a serene, idealised environment. It is argued (biologist E.O. Wilson,1984) that humans are evolutionarily wired to respond positively to natural, adaptive environments (like water and vegetation) and neuroaesthetics supports this by identifying the exact neural pathways that light up during experiences of beauty. It has been found that when viewing natural scenes certain particular neural pathways are indicated as being used and these same scenes when examined using stress reduction theory research, show that viewing these natural scenes immediately engages the brain’s calming, restorative responses, lowering cortisol levels and blood pressure. Therefore there is a direct connection between aesthetics and the brain's production of chemicals to control emotion. Landscape scenes that evoke the Golden Hour, use warmer tones combined with lower colour saturation, mimicking the sensations we get from experiencing early morning and evening light. The feelings invoked by those times of the day are often felt by people to be both spiritually uplifting and emotionally warming. Landscapes serve as blank canvases for the viewer's imagination. They act as a form of visual therapy, allowing the mind to mentally escape the traumas of now and transport someone away from their daily stresses into nostalgic, serene and idealised environments. I do wonder however, how much of this has been culturally manufactured. Perhaps nature and culture are in this case interwoven, but its also useful to remember that people who live in the Amazon view their environment not as a "wilderness" or an "idyll" but as a living, sacred entity.

In 1984 Roger Ulrich published a ground changing paper, 'View Through a Window May Influence Recovery from Surgery'; patients that had a view of a landscape through their window were discovered to heal more quickly that those who did not. It would appear that not only does exposure to landscape views effect people's mental state, but that it can also be beneficial to their physical health.

Wittenstein would look in these situations at 'use value'. He believed that languages act as sets of tools, "meaning" being determined by their practical use within specific social contexts. Therefore in terms of 'use value' a painting of this sort may be used to benefit someone's mental health. It could be argued that we often get mixed up when trying to think about the 'value' of an image and although the painting I have been sent has no monetary or gallery value, it may well have been used by my parents as a window into a nostalgic, idealised environment, that allowed them to escape the everyday realities of their lives in Dudley.

So what does this mean in relation to what I'm normally looking at in terms of visual imagery? Perhaps a bit of a wake up call in relation to who uses what imagery for what purpose. Most people like images of landscapes, because these images make them feel better. I sense by most people I'm talking about the majority of people who have hard lives, especially those working in towns and cities, where nature is rarely experienced as a raw elemental force, more as a breathing gap or space for leisure and an escape from work. The rich can afford to buy abstract paintings that often are not that different from Komar and Melamid's 'Least Wanted' paintings. They can afford to like difficult things.

America's Least Wanted painting

Harsh colours and spiky, abstract forms, are, Komar and Melamid found, the least wanted shapes and colours to have in a painting. Probably because of what they represent. Harsh, bright colours and spiky shapes represent danger, tension, and aggression. These visual elements trigger heightened cognitive arousal and mimic natural cues associated with threats or intense stimulation. Spiky shapes, sharp, jagged and angular forms remind us of aggression and pain, because they resemble thorns, teeth, or claws. These forms trigger primitive survival instincts and raise alertness. Harsh, bright colours, high-contrast hues and highly saturated colours demand immediate attention, as psychologically they represent warning signs, urgency, and intensity. There is also a certain amount of synesthesia at work, whereby a perceptual phenomenon stimulates one sensory or cognitive pathway and involuntarily triggers an experience in another. Such as when spiky, jagged shapes are triggered in the mind by sharp, explosive sounds. We instinctively associate jagged shapes with the twisting and fast bodily movements that are often made in response to sharp percussive noises and in turn these movements can be visualised using forms that like a frenzied dance movement, sharply zig-zag from side to side. 

Because I'm often working with people in pain, it is this area of visual form that tends to dominate the images produced. But as it seems clear from the above, these images are the least wanted in terms of 'pictures to live with'. 

So what in my case is the 'use value'?

I have tended to think of the use value of my research as raising awareness of interoceptual sensations and feelings. I have also thought of the work I do as art. Some of the images that have emerged from the process are I think powerful in their own right and when put into a gallery context are open to interpretation, just like all the other images seen in galleries. Once removed from their initial 'use value' context, they slide into a further use as imaginative images of the body, that help me to visualise ideas about the cosmic body and my thoughts about how we use images of our bodies to visualise the wider world. 

Most importantly, this post allows me to find a connection between what my parents might have thought in relation to using a visual image in their lives and what I do as an image maker. I have for too many years thought of myself as someone 'different' to my parents, but the reality is I am very similar. 

*Cottagecore is a lifestyle and design aesthetic that romanticises rural, simple living and harmony with nature.

References:

Ross, A., (1995) Poll stars: Komar & Melamid's" The people's choice". Artforum.

Ulrich, R.S., (1984) View through a window may influence recovery from surgery. science, 224(4647), pp.420-421.

 

Wittenstein, L. (2012) Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. London: Simon and Schuster.

See also:

The zig-zag

Emotional landscapes

Drawing and wellbeing

Portrait as stereotype

Drawing and healing traditions

 

Wong-Baker faces are meant to be a very clear and useful guide for patients who are having trouble communicating levels of pain to their doctor or other relevant medical professionals. As they are drawings they are supposed to cut through verbal and written language problems and can be used by a wide range of ages and people of different cultural backgrounds. However I suspect they are as ridden with problems as any other supposedly 'objective' language and that what we regard as a fixed set of expressions are still prone to a wide range of interpretations by others. These faces are another example of atomisation, or a need to reduce complex reality to easily understood components. 

Another attempt to visualise pain is the Schmidt pain index,  which has four levels of pain and is targeted at insect bites.

From the Schmidt Pain Index

I have been trying to use drawing to visualise interoceptive experiences for the past three years and although some of the drawings seem to be communicative of basic feelings such as a pain in a particular place, I have been finding that it is very hard to reach a consensus of opinion in regards to more nuanced feelings. However this is perhaps a challenge rather than a disappointment, as it is obvious that we all inhabit very different internal imaginative worlds and therefore one person's image of pain is another person's image of excitement. 

The longer I work in this area the more I become aware of parallel developments in relation to visualised body images in other professions, in particular in psychotherapy. Psychotherapists use the term 'guided imagery' when referring to a situation whereby a patient is helped to recall images from long-term or short term memory. They also work with patients to create imagery from fantasy or to make them from a fusion between imagination and memory. Guided imagery is defined as 'the assisted simulation or re-creation of perceptual experience across sensory modalities'. (I.e. this is not restricted to vision alone)

The use of imagery has been central to world wide rehabilitation traditions and is a critical component of many healing experiences. When we investigate the roles played by the placebo, suggestion or faith in a recovery from illness, it is clear that as well as using modern medicine and its procedures, people often use both positive thoughts and particular imagery that can carry those thoughts, in order to help themselves recover from both mental and physical problems. Those that do, often recover much faster than those that don't. (Robson, 2022) My own work has resulted in a range of imagery that is mainly the product of self analysis, however I am very aware that when I have conducted workshops with other people the nature of the images produced keeps changing. 

In his article, 'Raising Pain Tolerance Using Guided Imagery', David Bresler points out that mental images are formed long before we learn to understand and use words. He states that they 'lie at the core of who we think we are, and what we believe the world is like', His article also raises awareness of how belief systems as a whole can be shaped by our mental images and that therefore they play a very powerful role in our ability to tolerate pain or heal ourselves when ill. He defines a mental image as 'a thought with sensory qualities' and then introduces various types of guided imagery as ways to put into effect an 'active imagination' whereby elements of the unconscious are invited to appear as images that can communicate with the conscious mind. He states that:

'if people can derive not only symptomatic relief, but actual physiologic healing in response     to treatments that primarily work through beliefs and attitudes about an imagined reality, then learning how to better mobilise and amplify this phenomenon in a purposeful, conscious way becomes an important, if not critical, area of investigation for modern medicine'. (Bresler, 2010)

Bresler points out that the body responds to imagery in the same way as any other external experience and in particular the autonomic nervous system easily understands and responds to the language of imagery. Therefore if you imagine you are very ill, or that your pain is hard to bear, you are very likely to find that you become very ill and that your pain will be hard to bear. 

It is Bresler's statement that 'elements of the unconscious are invited to appear as images that can communicate with the conscious mind', that really resonates with myself. This could be something stated by a Surrealist artist back in the 1930s and as I strongly believe that Surrealism is still and always has been, one of our most powerful visual thinking devices, is a central plank of my personal artistic manifesto. 

There is of course a dark side to this, the harsh reality is that the most common way that people develop imagery is by worrying. What we worry about is never happening in the real world, only in our imagination. In my case I have plantar fasciitis in my left foot and heel and I have to get on and do things like write this blog to distract myself from worrying about it and thinking that it will go on forever. The reality is that this is a temporary problem, but I can make it worse by worrying about it. As Bresler puts it, 'people in pain worry all the time. They worry that their pain will never end and that they will remain helplessly immobilised by something they cannot control and cannot endure. As a result, they usually have little difficulty describing an image of their pain at its very worst. Bresler quotes patients as describing their pain as being like, “a swarm of fire ants are chewing on the nerve”, or “a gigantic elephant is sitting on my chest.” If you worry about something its image becomes in effect sharper and more real, and then it can become a major focus of your life experience. In this case we need to beware of self-fulfilling prophecies, for images have the power to create their own reality in the body.  Bresler goes on to state, that if a person has developed really clear images of pain, these images can have profound physiological effects on them that can increase their experience of suffering and interfere with their body’s natural pain relieving abilities. So I have to be careful not to fall into this trap and to find ways of using images to guide myself and others away from wallowing in pain, and to instead provide the imaginative waters that will allow them to swim away from it. 

Getting rid of these images can be a powerful healing tool and this is where my experience of working with votives can make a difference. By making images of people's pain or problem and then ritually removing these pains by either breaking them, burying them, burning them or doing something focused on externalising the feeling that was put into the image, you are in effect also helping them resolve and perhaps remove their association with the 'real' pain or problem. For instance in one case someone I was working with imagined their cancer as a 'little man' that resided inside them, this 'person' was clinging on, and needed to be told to go. 

The 'little man'

Once visualised as an actual drawn and in this case a printed image, its reality was such that it began to overpower the previous mental image they had. The ritual process of tearing it in half and throwing the pieces away, helping to release the grip that a mental image had had on themselves and their own well being. If this area of visual thinking is to be of help to the wider disciplines of medicine and psychotherapy, then it will have to be capable of incorporating these sometimes quite difficult to visualise images that can arise from people's imaginative view of their inner feelings. This is a recognition that the subconscious workings of each person's own healing processes need to be supported and recognised if they are to access and utilise the insights, resources, and solutions that arise from their own interoceptive awareness.

If we are to develop a shared ‘visual’ vocabulary for symptoms and sensations of pain and other interoceptive sensations, we need to stockpile these various representations in order to see if there is indeed a common language or if there is not, to see if this image bank does at least help release the potential of others to visualise their interoceptive experiences. If so, because visual representations have the ability to communicate a wide array of feeling tones or intuited things more efficiently than verbal languages, especially in a situation where medical professionals are linguistically challenged, such as dealing with patients who have no or limited English; images can generate insights that otherwise might be missed and they may also develop possibilities for visually augmenting written information.

When making a more detailed analysis of the images produced, the fact that drawings are stable artefacts that can be returned to and examined in detail, means that we can use them to avoid the problems of image decay that is associated with any mental maintenance of an image in someone's head. 

This issue also relates to the fact that in workshops I have found that people are at their most inventive and sensitive during the first hour or so and that after that their awareness levels drop and very few new visual ideas emerge.  However the time spent in the later half of a workshop can instead be profitably spent adjusting the various images made during the first half of a session and exploring the various visual languages used, and most importantly to test out their communicative possibilities. 

However it is also important to remember that the use of this process in alleviating pain or helping people improve their existing condition, is often associated with using these images to externalise inner feelings and to in doing this help in the removal of these 'bad' feelings or thoughts. 

The drawings and objects made can help enormously in guided image meditation, giving people time to inspect the imagery, and to then move on to a transformation stage whereby they take control of the imagery in some way. 

Once generated and maintained, a mental image and associated drawing can be reflected on interpreted and its understanding transformed and a shift in perspective made. 

With the assistance of a guided imagery practitioner or in this case an artist, a participant can be helped to transform, modify, or alter the imagery, in such a way as to either substitute images that provoke negative feelings, or that reaffirm disability, for those that elicit positive emotion, or to even get rid of the negative imagery by doing something to it, such as breaking it or throwing it away. I.e. they begin to rewrite their own internal stories whilst keeping the essence of what their stories are about. These processes are similar to imagery restructuring or imagery re-scripting, (Holmes et al, 2007), all of which are about people taking control of their own journey. 

Through this process, people can hopefully change their relationship with the images that have been in the past indicative of the distressing, painful, or debilitative nature of a condition, and in taking control of the image making process or sharing it with someone else, develop their capacity for self determination and the ability to cope with life.

Helping people to use their own imagination in this interactive way maintains a focus on the depth of emotional feelings that are central to therapeutic growth. Working with another person that takes them seriously is a wonderful affirmation of them as individuals and by opening doors for them into how visual imagery can carry important information, it can also become a process that leads to the development of a new interest in art itself. 

These approaches acknowledge many other drawing and healing traditions, some of them being disciplines that are thousands of year old. 

Payne, Levine and Crane-Godreau, (2015) point out that somatic experiencing as an aspect of interoception, is a concept that is embedded into ancient embodied wisdom traditions and their more recent offshoots. Listing Yoga, T’ai Chi and Qigong, as well as the Alexander Technique and the Feldenkrais method. When drawing and making we use our bodies to externalise our thoughts and perhaps central to the awareness that we have of the relationship between the body and the mind, is the way we breathe. This connection with breathing can take us back to the traditions of the Ayurveda, considered by many scholars to be the oldest healing science. Ayurvedic healing traditions originated in India more than 5,000 years ago and recognised that mental and physical health come together and that their interrelationship is based on the need for regulated energy flow. This awareness of the deep interconnectivity of all these ideas takes my mind back to older posts, and I don't want to duplicate what I was thinking about then, but I do want to highlight ideas about the use of drawing or image making to externalise thought and how in that externalisation hopefully we are able to have some sort of control over things that might otherwise stay hidden and undermine us from within. 

However drawing and image making is not at its best when trying to illustrate a concept developed via academic research. The research can inform the background out of which an image may emerge but if the image is to be alive to its own emergence into being, it has to feed off whatever it is becoming and that means unpredictability and a certain amount of chaos is always embedded into the process. My own 'medical diagrams' tend to be records of conversations, such as the one immediately below which was made in conversation with someone who was dealing with tinnitus. 

Once the initial conversations have settled down and been assimilated into a visual language, final images become free floating and emerge as a product of their own internal necessity. The further away in time they are from the initial making process, the more I forget what they were initially a response to, and the more they become things in their own right. They operate as a type of animist extension of a thought, a thought that materialised itself and then went its own way. 

Various images that arrived out of a process of visualising interoceptual experiences

Bresler, D. (2010) Raising Pain Tolerance Using Guided Imagery, The Behavioural Medicine Report Dec 4th Available at: https://www.bmedreport.com/archives/18655

De Vignemont, F. (2010). Body schema and body image—Pros and cons. Neuropsychologia, 48(3), 669-680.

Holmes, E. A., Arntz, A., and Smucker, M. R., (2007) Imagery rescripting in cognitive behaviour therapy: Images, treatment techniques and outcomes. Journal of Behaviour Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, Vol. 38, No. 4, pp. 297–305.

Kosslyn S.M., Ganis G., Thompson W.L. Neural foundations of imagery. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. Vol. 2, No. 9, 2001, pp. 635–642.

Payne, P., Levine, P.A. and Crane-Godreau, M.A., 2015. Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Frontiers in psychology, 6, p.93.

Pearson D.G. Mental imagery and creative thought. Proceedings of the British Academy. Vol. 147, 2007; pp. 187–212.

Robson, D. (2022) The Expectation Effect London: Cannongate

See also:

Minjeong An

Drawing and healing

Still thinking about what I do

Why interoception

Schmidt pain relief index for insect bites

Ibrahim el Salahi: Pain relief drawings

Marion Milner: Art therapy and perceptual research

Tired

Footpain 

I’m engaged with research at the moment that explores certain aspects of perception, in particular in my case the area of perception that is called ‘interoception’; our awareness of things such as heart rate, a need to urinate, feeling sleepy, having a pain, or emotional states such as feeling the weight of the world on one’s shoulders. These are all ‘real’ things that we feel or perceive but which because we can’t see them, we have no clarity as to how to depict them when we are communicating with other people. If you have been following this blog you might have noticed that quite a few recent posts have touched upon issues related to this research, but in reality it is an interest that goes back many years to a time when I was teaching observational drawing, and it is an interest that has since been re-kindled by Mike Croft who was my guest blogger just over a year ago, and who posted a very interesting account of where his own research was taking him at the time. Since then our interests have begun to dovetail, my own fascination with how we communicate the un-communicable, has taken me into an area that explores how drawing or image making can operate in the overlaps between perceptual investigation, phenomenology, dream materials and other non-verbal representations of our inner somatic world. This has led part of my investigation to explore the relationship between psychic experience and its visualisation which was a preoccupation of Marion Milner and other members of the Independent Group of the British School of Psychoanalysis, all of whom were concerned with two central questions: ‘what is the relationship of pictorial expression to a growing awareness of a psychic life’, and ‘what aspects of self experience can be actualised by the making of images in a way that is not possible through verbalisation alone?’ Milner had a long time relationship with a client called Susan, who during this extended period of psychoanalysis began to draw images that reflected her deep unconscious perception of her self-perceived fight with sanity and madness. Milner then reflected on these experiences in a wonderfully rich book, ‘The Hands of the Living God’, a text that contained approximately 150 drawings made by Susan and which when I first saw them, alongside Milner’s interpretations, made me realise how communication is totally reliant on context. 

Drawings by 'Susan'

Susan's drawings also reminded me of how much the world of the professional artist can overlap with the world of psychoanalysis, and the fact that similar forms crop up over and over again across world cultures and over vast periods of time, therefore, I would argue, that there is something deeply meaningful about the way that we return to these forms when we need to express our feelings. However the world of therapy is very different from the world of art and Lygia Clark found the cross over fraught with misunderstandings. Clark's work seems to slide between art and therapy, but she I'm sure would argue what she was doing was therapy and not art. 

Lygia Clark: Stone and Air: 1966

Louise Bourgeois

Shangaan pottery (South Africa)

Pre-historic cave images

Visual experiences that arrive out of inner vision or entoptic forms were often characterised by abstract geometric patterns, which have been classified into four categories of form constants: (1) gratings, lattices, fretworks, filigrees, honeycombs, and checkerboards. (2) cobwebs. (3) tunnels and funnels, alleys, cones and vessels. (4) spirals. It is believed that these patterns form irrespective of an individual's previous visual experiences. They are internally directed perceptual experiences, directly formed out of the biological structure of our visual system. They reflect the subjective experience of looking into yourself, and the patterns seen it could be argued, expose the underlying operation of our brains.

Geons

I have gradually over the years begun to explore the area, initially as a response to those ‘entoptic’ images and more recently, especially because of the importance of 3D computer graphics, I have begun thinking about sets of form ‘primitives’ called geons. Geons have four basic properties: View-invariance: so one can be distinguished from others from almost any viewpoint. Image stability or resistance to visual noise: i.e. still recognisable when viewed behind a bush. Invariable resistance to recognition failure due to changes in illumination direction, surface markings and texture. High distinctiveness: such as being straight or curved, having parallel or non parallel sides, positive or negative curvature. These qualitative differences can be readily distinguished thus rendering the geons and the objects composed from them, readily distinguishable as well. However, there are several limitations to the development of a visual language based on these spatially determined three dimensional differences, the most important it would seem to me, to be that they don't account for the constant dissolving of images back into the world of events. The process of reducing all images to basic geons, suggests that we can pick objects out of the world for contemplation; and that we can atomise our experiences in such a way that a type of Cartesian duality allows an observer to separate out from the subject of observation. I have been at pains to question this possibility in several ways over the past year or so, and I’m indebted to Jorge Louis Borges, who in his short story ‘Tlön, uqbar, orbis tertius’ had this to say; ‘It is no exaggeration to state that the classic culture of Tlön comprises only one discipline: psychology. All others are subordinated to it. I have said that the men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes which do not develop in space but successively in time.’ Borges put his finger on something that I had not really understood well enough before and this was the relative importance of time and space. I had been for many years prioritising an investigation of space in my drawings and have gradually come round to the idea that time is much more important. The two of course are conjoined in ‘space-time’ but perhaps because of the importance of perspective as a visual system, I had been led to see position as being more important than duration, but I now suspect the opposite is the truth. Cubism was always more about time than space, it was about the difference between the compressed simultaneity of a painting or drawing, made in response to the extended time through which an experience happens. It is this particular conclusion that is the main driving force behind the development of the first body of images that have emerged from this research into inner body feeling. Because the initial experiences, or perceptions are not located in a traditional perspectival space, a form that can see itself from the inside as well as an outside is needed, one more reminiscent of those creatures that inhabited Abbott’s ‘Flatland’ and as I bring Abbott into the discussion perhaps I also then need to acknowledge the importance of W. B. Yates’ poetic observation, that poetry is made out of a ‘mouthful of air’ (1899) something that is also happening as I write these sentences. 

Shoulder: inner itch

Irritable bowel 

The need to scratch an ankle

References 

Abbott, E. A. (1992) Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions New York: Dover Publications 

Biederman, I., (1987) Recognition-by-components: a theory of human image understanding. Psychological review, 94(2), p.115. 

Borges, J.L. and Ducornet, R., (1983) Tlön, uqbar, orbis tertius. Erin: Porcupine's Quill. 

Dill, M. and Edelman, S., (2001) Imperfect invariance to object translation in the discrimination of complex shapes. Perception, 30(6), pp.707-724. 

Edelman, S., (1999) Representation and recognition in vision. London: MIT press. 

Froese, T., Woodward, A. and Ikegami, T., (2013) Turing instabilities in biology, culture, and consciousness? On the enactive origins of symbolic material culture. Adaptive Behavior, 21(3), pp.199-214. https://froese.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/froese-et-al-13-turing-instabilities-in-biology-culture-and-consciousness-on-the-enactive-origins-of-symbolic-material-culture.pdf Accessed 5. 2. 21 

Halton-Hernandez, E., (2019) Spirals, Whorls, and Faulty Containers: The Psychoanalysis of Form in the Art of Marion Milner’s' The Hands of the Living God' and the Sculpture of Louise Bourgeois. Free Associations, (75), pp.49-64. 

Milner, M. (2010) The Hands of the Living God London: Routledge 

Yeats, W. B. (1899) The Wind Among the Reeds. New York: J. Lane, The Bodley Head Bartleby.com, 1999. www.bartleby.com/146. Accessed 6. 2. 21

See also:

Posts on various entoptic forms

The spiral

The zig-zag

The hashtag

Dots and spots

The dashed or dotted line

The cross

Lines

Posts directly related to the current research on perception

Mike Croft on the observation of perception

Drawing textures

Drawing texture Part two

Drawing and perception: the curved surface

Surface and inner body perception in an age of CGI

Qualia

Somatic awareness and texture 

Drawing it all together

Drawing and wellbeing

The linking of drawing with wellbeing and mental health has become central to several local authority and government agendas over the last year or so. So much so that I worry that there is someone out there who thinks that art can in some way replace or fill gaps in the health service that are the result of years of austerity and low levels of funding. A colouring in book in no way replaces proper mental health care. However it is also good to be reminded that art can be a force for good and that a healthy cultural framework does help support wellbeing.

But what is it about drawing that helps us feel better? For myself it is a way of externalising my thoughts and dissolving myself back into the world. 

Many of us are on lockdown because of the global corona virus pandemic. It is a time when many people will face severe challenges to their mental well being, in particular because we are social animals and on being deprived of that social life we struggle with what to replace it with. Drawing can be a way of exploring the fact that a social life isn't just about how we relate to other people, it can help us form new relationships with the wider world. Every morning I go out and walk in order to take some exercise and I always take a sketchbook with me. I make at least one drawing during my time outside, and try to spend at least 20 to 30 minutes on a drawing, which means I have to slow down and concentrate. 

What I have also found useful is to have a particular interest, so that when I'm looking for a subject to draw, I have a filtering device. The other week as I walked through my local woods, I noticed some very rudimentary structures being created. They looked very unfinished and I suspected that they were mostly made by children, but as my walk is very early in the morning, I will never know who builds them, as I come and go before the builders arrive. I see these structures as signs of a desire for shelter, of a need to build things, but none of the people doing the building have the skills to make something robust. Gradually an allegorical idea begins to emerge from observational drawing. 

Unfinished structures: drawings from my sketchbook 

What is perhaps more important is the fact that I have to look carefully at how these things are constructed and in the looking I get lost, and as I get lost I forget about the current problems we all face, and stand there outside in the fresh air being in the moment, experiencing an awareness of something that isn't me and more importantly, the act of concentration on how to make a drawing lets me forget my worries. 

It is important to me that I'm drawing something that is part of the ecology of the woods and that it is a sort of interface between humans and trees. Nobody is destroying anything and the living trees are used by people to lean various lengths of found branches against them, which means that no one is trying to cut them down. I can imagine both a future and a past where these simple structures would be developed much further and would become dwelling places, the important issue being that the structures are built in sympathy with the trees rather than replacing them. As I begin these trains of thought, I'm of course linking myself back into society, thinking something that connects all humans back into the natural world.

The Zulu or Nguni Bantu word 'ubuntu' means, 'humanity' but it can also be understood as 'I am because we are', it is a word that reminds us of a belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all, not just people, but everything. Trees, rocks, dogs, plastic straws, electric light bulbs, the wind, soil and Bob Dylan. 

When people use drawing to find their way out of difficult places, they will often find themselves using imagery that is a metamorphosis between the human body, nature and the world that humans have constructed. It's as if the mind searches for ways to dissolve us back into the environment from which we emerged, a way of healing that recognises our need to be entangled into the fabric of everything. 

This drawing of a head and a church set in a garden by Bobby Baker, fuses together internal imaginary thoughts with memories of real experiences, seamlessly conjoining differences of scale, material and concept. In the drawing below, the waters beneath the head/bridge crossing a brain/lake, flow out into a body/garden, all enmeshed together; memories, dreams and experiences of the world, all finding a place that fits into a coherent idea of something that transcends logic and the different categories that words tend to place the world into. 

From: Bobby Baker's 'visual diary' of her road to recovery from depression.

When the artist Bobby Baker was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, followed by a breast cancer diagnosis, she set out to visualise her experiences by making drawings that gave form to her private catharsis. Baker because she is a professional artist, could like Leonora Carrington another artist that chronicled her own mental breakdown, observe herself at the same time as she was suffering from both these physical and mental issues. The activity of externalising the experiences she went through, though a process of making imagery, seemed to be a vital part of her recovery process. 

Leonora Carrington

In Carrington's case she was a Surrealist and accepted the fact that the subconscious mind was as important to an artist as the world of logic and order. For Carrington as well as Baker confronting their own mental conditions, was also a result of the particular self awareness that artists develop as they try to fine tune their own sensibilities to the world. If artists can help themselves through this process, perhaps they can help others who are not artists to externalise their inner feelings too. 

Shamans also develop often hidden or unconscious links between people the landscape, plants and animals, believing that the wellbeing of someone is dependent on how well an individual is in some sort of empathetic union with their environment. The shaman's job being to re-establish contact with whatever has become disconnected. It was Joseph Beuys that introduced me to the aspect of an artist's role that could be seen as shaman-like and although I only met him a couple of times, his ideas stuck. 

I have over the past year been talking to people about their illnesses and trying to visualise or 'externalise' some of the images that people have about things that are often hidden or difficult to talk about. They have in effect become disconnected with their own bodies. In order to help the process of re-connection I decided to design a set of 52 cards that could be used as an opening gambit for conversations. After trialling and making a few changes I have now been commissioned by the University of Leeds Cultural Institute to have a quantity of packs of these cards printed, so that they can go out to various community groups and be used as part of the Beyond Measure: Research and Evidence in Culture and Health project. This way of working avoids the gallery and in effect makes the pack of cards a travelling exhibition that can be carried around in someone's pocket. 

In the process of drawing and designing the cards I was reminded of how important colour is to feelings of wellbeing and therefore I concentrated on producing the cards as rich colourful images that would initially stimulate thoughts about feeling rather than about any sort of scientific analysis of any medical problem. The cards are designed to begin a conversation and trigger stories and have no healing properties in themselves. However there is an overlap between them and some of the work I have been doing making votives for people who have wanted me to help them externalise and in effect 'banish' a pain or a problem. 

Images of cards and the pack used to contain them

In the case of walking and drawing these are activities that promote wellbeing by directly engaging with the external world and in the cases of Bobby Baker and Leonora Carrington drawing is seen as an activity that directly engages with the internal world of the mind, but that also leads to wellbeing. In the case of the cards, the images of body parts that are set out alongside images of viruses, bacteria or wounds, are drawn images that have been through a process of 'design' to ensure that they all belong to the same family of forms. The cards can be engaged with in a similar way as you would a tarot card game, so there is a different type of physical engagement as you have to initially play with them, rather than contemplate them. All of these approaches are however centred on drawing, drawing that gradually, in the case of the cards, becomes simplified as images are turned into 'icons' or 'symbols'. 

 

Drawing as an approach to communication using image making is a vital tool for human wellbeing and by going 'beyond' the verbal it can help develop an understanding of things in ways that are more 'holistic' and attuned to the body as a whole rather than just the mind. 

See also:

To be absorbed in drawing

Drawing and mindfulness

Notes taken in response to Richard De Marco's Leeds talk on Joseph Beuys

Just do it A reminder not to think about it too much