Drawing as a sign: Black emulsion on wall 2017
It has been observed that these posts are somewhat random in
nature and that there is nothing to provide a common thread; my next few posts will
therefore attempt to tie a few loose ends together, but I will as always ramble around somewhat. Perhaps first of all if you are more academically minded it is important to let you know as readers what my ‘methodology’ is. It is perhaps best summed up by the poet Yates, who stated when asked about where his poetry
comes from, “It is composed out of a mouthful of air.” If there is a more theoretical base to my observations this is rooted in the old Northern European idea of the Wyrd. The Wyrd emphasises the interconnectedness of everything, a little like the spider's web analogy, whereby if you touch one part of the web, all the other strands vibrate with that touch. It is very concerned with, 'what is in the process of happening'. More recently, because I was reading Karen Barad, the concepts of 'diffraction' and 'entanglement' have become useful to me, in that they also help me to think about how all things are connected and these words give me a way into critiquing the commonly accepted idea of an individual 'seeing' the world or of having a 'point of view', as being concepts that give far too much privilege to the isolated observer. Kurt Vonnegut coined the phrase, "Lonesome no more." He suggested that this would be his running slogan if he was ever to run for president. I would vote for that, I think that loneliness is one of the worst feelings we can have and as a species we are meant to be connected to the world and each other and when we are not we feel bad. Drawing can also remind us of how we tend to prioritise the intellect over feeling and in doing so it can help relocate us back into the world by questioning this priority. Because drawing is grounded in the materials of its making, we can learn from the process of drawing itself, we can experience how materials themselves shape thoughts as well as actions and things. Therefore I believe we can use drawing to begin to feel at one with the world. We are inseparable from the world, we act in the world and in conjunction with the world, but our particular society has encouraged us to believe that we are to regard ourselves as special, somehow different and more important than other things and in thinking we are special, we also fall into a trap of treating others as if they are only important in relation to how they can help us with our own self realisation. This is of course a paradox that I can't escape, because I am part of the society I live in, I have to respond to its ideals and views of how I am supposed to operate and I have been 'trained' to see myself as an individual, in fact as someone regarded as a creator, I have been encouraged to be original, my work is valued as being 'different' or praised because it offers an alternative view on the world. Artists are often seen as outsiders and this is for many people their value to society, but I have a nagging feeling that this is all wrong and an artist should help us all see what is common, what is wonderful about simply existing as part of the awful complexity of existence.
I have a three year old granddaughter and she loves talking to me about the drawings I make, she enters into a dialogue with them immediately and easily. This is important to me, and I would hope that what I do is accessible to a wide range of audiences, and that in trying to use a common language I do not make the work poor or weak in its form or that I over simplify the concepts and ideas I work with.
I'm someone who draws and as my drawings evolve they have a life of their own. However that is not to say I have no intentions, simply that I don't work to a plan. Often my intent is discovered half way through the making or even after the fact. I can therefore be accused of flitting from one thought to another, rather than following a linear narrative, but I'm not trying to argue the rightness of my position, simply giving out a health warning to those who might want to measure the academic rigour of anything I have to say. At my best I am lost in what I do, when I try to think about it too much I become disassociated from both art and life and find it difficult to experience things. I sometimes try too hard to make relationships with the world and other people, and in that trying too hard I can lose touch with feelings and it is feelings that matter.
The title of this post, 'Drawing as entanglements of life' was arrived at so that I could open out what I believe is a very difficult issue, how to continue a meaningful drawing led practice in a world dominated by photographically captured images. I understand drawing as a rich historical practice, one that includes many cultures and approaches. But I also think that the ubiquitous presence of photographic images has tended to give more weight to some ideas about drawing than others. Perhaps the most important issue here is that drawing is so often seen as being something to do with a certain sort of representation. I know it's a cliche but as with most cliches there is an element of truth in there, the phrase "it looks just like a photograph", is still used by people to praise the drawings they come across and it is a phrase that always makes me shudder, not because of its naivety but because of the power that lies behind the assertion. The person that asserts that the drawing is good because it looks like a photograph, is actually saying to me, "I know what things are meant to look like and this image is a clear demonstration of that. It reflects back to me a basic belief I have about the world and it is that it looks like what I see in photographs." When you look at the history of this idea of representation it includes within it the tradition of Renaissance perspective and the concept of a drawing being the capturing of an image on a flat plane, a plane that appears to drop down between the viewer and the scene that is being drawn, such as in the diagram below. This is of course a wonderful idea, but it is an idea that can also work like a trap. The image is captured, in the same way a photographic image is captured and in that very capture I have a problem. The problem is to do with how life is frozen, immobilised and cut out of context. It is also a way of owning things. If something can be separated out as an identifiable thing, it can be traded, just like a trapped animal can be killed and sold for its skin or its meat. This separation can also be seen as a point of view and a point of view is often what is looked for in our society. It is what I am developing as I write, my point of view being that it is very hard for me to really see what is going on, if all I can do is see the world from fixed individual positions. Everything is as far as I can see, a dynamic series of unfolding interactions.
I love this drawing of how perspective works, it sums up for myself the issues that come with the idea of how to visualise or make representations of things. For instance, the drawing above uses an oblique projection to visualise the idea of perspective, this itself suggests to me that the maker of the image realises that perspective has its limitations, and in this case I would suggest the drawer wanted to show that the object to project was the same as the projected object, and if this drawing had been done in perspective the object to project would have had to be drawn with a different vanishing point to the projected object, therefore they would in effect not just appear to be different in size but also shape. The thin slice that has been captured (projected object) is in this case exactly the same shape as the thing in the world that has been captured (object to project), it is just smaller, however the line it is dawn with remains exactly as wide as the line that contains the object to project. I.e. it suggests that representations can have a one to one correspondence with the things they represent. I like the fact that the shape of these objects is of a sort of amoeba or potato form, one of those organic shapes that moves between one thing and another, because this does suggest that all forms are constantly in transition. The aA, bB, cC, dD, eE, fF and gG relationships are clearly indicated and geometrically linked, all of course directed and fixed in place by the eye at V, which appears to be very logical, but which is also somehow very wrong. It suggests that this capturing process is how we experience the world and that we take a straight lined geometric, God-like or hunter's position in relation to reality. What is in reality being represented is a frozen set of positions or relationships, an image that probably accurately reflected the world view as it was in 15th century Italy.
The great chain of being
In the diagram above God sits in prime place and then as we move down the different levels we see humans being set above animals, plants and inorganic things. It is this hierarchy that the developing idea of humanism was going to replace, however what humanism seemed to aspire to was to replace God by humans, thereby simply re-drawing the diagram with mankind at the top. This type of diagram is very familiar to anyone interested in politics.
The Capitalist Pyramid
Pyramidical structures always imply something being on top, something at one point directing relationships with all the other things in the system.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a similar structure and once again our best interests are found at the apex of the pyramid, there is no question as to whether or not this is a good or bad thing for the rest of the universe.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs
By establishing these patterns it feels as if we have accepted the idea that hierarchies are always how things are meant to be. I feel as if I need to at least move the layers around or look for some less controlling formats.
If I stand behind a window and look out at the world, I can, if I keep my head very still, trace around the objects I see with a pen that uses ink that allows me to draw on glass. Students being introduced to drawing in the 19th century would typically have had to make drawings using equipment such as Ablett's glass plane, equipment designed to reinforce the idea of things being what they are when captured in one particular position.
Adverts from an early 20th century book offering an introduction to perspective
The text that supports the drawing of Ablett's glass plane states this: "The teacher with the position of his eye fixed by the moveable iron ring, traces with brush and Chinese white the outline of the object, (rod, disk, cube or chair etc), which is placed on a table or the floor on the further side of the glass. The pupils, one by one, look through the ring and see for themselves that the lines traced on the Glass by the teacher, coincide with the outline of the model. The teacher then points out in what way the representation on the glass differs from the real object, and produces the outlines with ruler and brush to show the vanishing points. The pupils must afterwards make a drawing on paper from the real object, each one from a different position in the room."
It can't be a coincidence that Duchamp's 'To be looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost and hour' was made at exactly the same time that Ablett's glass plane was available for sale. So here I am exactly 100 years later, dipping my toes into the same waters, but this is the difference between art and science, artists are forever revisiting the same issues, but scientists believe they can disprove things and then move on.
Duchamp: 1918: 'To be looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost and hour'
Although the teacher when using the glass plane is asked to point out the different between the set exercise and working from a 'real' object, this type of controlled looking is very like making a stuffed animal of experience. But a stuffed creature in no way gives you an idea of the vitality of an animal, of how it engages with the world around it and of how it is part of an empathetic or autopoietic relationship with the world around it. The photograph freezes time, it in effect kills life, but it has become such an ubiquitous aspect of our lives that we have not noticed that we are surrounded by its little killings. Everywhere we are faced with still, dead, immobile images of ourselves and others and yet all people seem to want is more and more of these images. I'm often asked' "Why didn't you take any photographs?" when I was at a family event or other special occasion. I'm criticised for not making some more images of frozen moments, images that somehow people have begun to think of as real or as an entry point into thinking about what's real. I don't want to be a pall bearer, I don't want to be reminded of an experience by chopping it up into thin bacon slices. A pig smells, has weight, makes constant noise and acts through time; when experiencing a pig you are forced to engage with it and it with you, but photographs of pigs are more like the packets of freeze dried bacon bought from the supermarket. When I see people taking selfies I feel it's as if they want us to have casts of their skin, death masks for everyone, slices of themselves for consumption, easy to capture and easy to consume. The photographer John Rosenthal once stated that, "It is from the deadest places inside ourselves
that we take most of our photographs.” Read his original essay here. He was thinking of a different issue, but one not too far away from what I'm thinking about. It was often said that 'primitive' peoples feared having their photographs taken because it was as if their souls had been captured. Perhaps we read this in the wrong way. 'Primitive' peoples it could be argued are engaged in life as a whole and we have become more self-conscious of our lives. In this self-consciousness we need to check ourselves constantly, the mirror in the doorway being often the last thing we look at as we leave the house. The photograph becomes a check-in, a registering of a slice of reality that we would like to have exist for us. But this is no reality and it is we who are the naive 'primitives' if we think that these little captured moments can have any baring on a lived life. A lived life is inseparable from the confusing happenings of constant experience, only when we are long dead does the entanglement stop, only when the last memories of our existence are gone, only when the atoms of our physical shell have all moved on and are part of something else is our entanglement un-entangled.
I also like to think of drawing as thin sculpture. The world of most drawings is a flat one, but within that flatness there is a lot going on. Materials are moved around, the paper itself is a complex amalgam of cellulose layers and all sorts of forces are at work between the atomic surfaces of the various elements at play. This is very unlike the flat world of geometry, not at all the sort of place where a line is simply the shortest distance between two points.
It's becoming obvious that I don't know how to be clear and simple about what I believe drawing is, but never mind perhaps that's the point. I think I also need to consider the fact that photons exist in wave form and that materials are composed of quarks, electrons, neutrons and protons and why ideas such as these, ideas virtually outside the field of visual experience, might be important to the way a drawing is made and why diffraction patterns are a more realistic concept around which to frame existence than fixed viewpoints.
Young's diffraction diagram made in 1800, is a diagram that I love and one that also has straight lines in it but these are indicated by repetitive patterns occurring between moving circles, i.e. indications of relationships rather than fixed links between points.
Young's diffraction diagram 1800
The diagram above suggests that our experience of the world is rather like the wave patterns on a pond made when you drop two stones into it at the same time. It is more to do with ripples of interference than solid objects. It is more to do with effect than things. This idea has allowed scientists and artists to think about all sorts of models for how the universe might be.
One definition of diffraction is the bending of light around the corners of an obstacle or aperture into the region of the obstacle's geometrical shadow. A shadow can itself be broken down into distinct parts, the umbra (which is what we would see if light only travelled in straight lines from one source), and the penumbra, areas partly lit because the light source is larger than or more than a single point source. Shadows are always interesting for a drawer because their very insubstantiality is what is used if the drawer wants to give more of a feeling of mass to the objects in a drawing. Often the parts that have been worked into in order to create the darkest elements within a drawing are where light is not found, or severely diminished. The pure untouched white of the paper surface will usually be made to stand for the highlights, for those surfaces that turn towards the light source. The way an artist develops transitions from one area of tone to another is key to the emotional register that will be developed within a drawing. See this earlier post. It is at this juncture we see that feeling and a grasp of form are intertwined in their relationships and the edges between things are vital to an understanding of this. But above all its the possibilities raised by multiple sources of energy that interest me, getting an idea across that more than one thing is going on at once and that an edge is not quite the fixed separator between things that we tend to accept it as being. I hope that having a certain approach to drawing means that you can create metaphors for the constant ongoing intermingling of everything.
A = Umbra B = Penumbra
Similar to diffraction patterns the diagram above illustrates the relationship between an umbra and two penumbras. The photograph below demonstrates how the play of light on any situation is normally a complex set of relationships that exhibit various aspects of shadow-play. Look around at the room you are in and you will probably be able to identify many possible sources of light, from both direct light sources such as the sun or light bulbs and reflected surfaces such as mirrors and shiny surfaces. As you move your head to explore these things you are of course, in comparison to the photograph, infinitely multiplying the possibilities of changing viewpoints.
We tend to forget that our everyday experience of the
world is shaped by diffraction. Light is scattered by interference which can be
caused by tiny particles that are so small that they have a similar magnitude
to the wavelength of the light passing through them. When driving in fog you
have probably noticed that the car headlights seem to be spreading their shining
out much further than normal. The colours we see when looking at the sky are a
result of light scattering as it meets the debris in the atmosphere. Water
vapour and dust provide fine particles small enough to interfere with the
light, scattering the short wavelengths to produce the blue colour we think of
as sky, and at other times diffraction produces those colours that disturb us because we are not used to them, particularly when there is a lot of
dust about.
Hold one hand in front of a strong single light source and slowly bring two fingers together while watching the light shining between them. As the fingers almost touch, you can begin to see a series of dark lines parallel to the fingers. The parallel dark lines together with the bright areas between them are actually diffraction patterns.
These are the same fingers that I use to hold my pen or pencil and as I draw my body comes into play and it quickly begins to respond to whatever materials I am drawing with. These materials on a sub-atomic level will be operating in that paradoxical world where what seems to be matter can also be seen to be an atomic dance. The way ink as a chemical liquid operates during the process of drawn marks attaching themselves to paper, or the processes involved when during a drawing one surface rubs off against another, have been chronicled in previous posts. These descriptions are there because I believe the physical nature of things, including the make up of my own body, are not thought about enough. This is part of a false divide in our society between art and science, that needs to be broken down. My fingers are far less responsive to the movements of the pen than they used to be, this is because I am getting older and I have arthritis in my fingers. All these things are in some sort of dance of relationships and it is within this dance that images emerge, they grow out of iterative doing, rather than an organised logic, they are the product of interactions rather than the products of a planned operation.
In order to articulate the above ideas I have used photographs and diagrams, the diagrams are more interesting to me because they give shape to a thought, whilst I have to anchor the meaning of the photographs by stating what they help me to think about.
So what is it that I'm doing when I'm drawing something?
Sweet potato: Pencil and oil pastel on paper
The drawing above was done perhaps ten years ago, it's not a particularly good one, but looking back it helps me to think about an experience. I was doing a series of drawings of fruit and vegetables at the time. My local corner shop had to cater for a variety of palates this being a multi-cultural area and so there was and still is a wide range of both exotic and local fruit and vegetables readily available to buy in a small shop on the corner of a street in West Yorkshire. A place that has a climate suitable for growing rhubarb and potatoes but definitely not sweet potatoes. I was very aware at the time I bought these vegetables that I had intentions about making images based on them, but no clear idea as to how any one image would finally look.
As I drew the sweet potato I become more and more aware of its weight, small hatched marks were used to feel my way over the surface and an oil pastel was used to both erase areas I had over worked and to provide a more waxy surface for the graphite to bite into, this allowing me to make darker marks than the 2B pencil would normally be able to achieve. As more and more of the yellow tinged paper was covered the vein like marks that traversed the sweet potato's surface began to feel very like my own veins and as I looked at my own hands I began to feel a close affinity between the vegetable and myself. In the image of the drawing you can just about see the way the marks feel their way across the surface and in the darker more shadowed areas the marks take more than one direction as they make their way back over each other, as if it takes the eyes much longer to explore what happens in the dark. There is a tiny shadow coming from the sweet potato's tip as it touches the surface of the table. It sits alongside other marks, ones made to establish the fact that the table is there. Somehow that touching was vital to the meaning of the drawing, the 'touch' was the moment of that sweet potato coming alive, it too could touch, I could see that and needed to make a few marks that let others know I had seen it. Marks that indicate shadow are fascinating as they depict something that has no substance, but their direction can indicate what type of surface the shadow is cast upon. I like this drawing because it feels as if the sweet potato has weight. It feels as if it presses itself down onto the table surface. Whether the shape was like this or not doesn't now interest me, the original is long gone, eaten in a soup and for a while becoming part of me. The peelings from its preparation, would have gone into the compost, which would have been dug into the garden at some point. So where does the drawing begin? At the moment I bought the sweet potato from the shop? At the moment it was shipped to England from the country it was grown in? Or did the drawing begin in the moment I was drawing flowers from a garden in Dudley back in the time of my adolescence?
Compare the drawing of the sweet potato above, to a drawing of celeriac done at another time on a different type of paper, one much more cooler in colour.
Celeriac: pencil and oil pastel on paper
The celeriac drawing is larger, the pencil is more like a 4B therefore I could get a much wider tonal range out of it and the surface of the celeriac had more opportunities for mark invention. At some point before I had bought it, it had been brutally cut away from its roots, foliage and stems, reduced to a decapitated head. I can still remember feeling as if I was drawing a brain or a guillotined member of the aristocracy, small hairy bits of stray vegetation that attempted to visually pull away from the surface felt as if they were exposed veins or raw nerve endings. Both drawings of vegetables began as simple exercises in rendering, but as they evolved they became more about my own awareness of a relationship between myself and other things. We were momentarily touching, and I would in turn eat these things, making them part of myself. How much of an idea came from me, how much from the quality of paper and pencils and oil pastel? How much from the series of events that led to me being in that shop and deciding to buy a vegetable, how much from the shop being there at that point in time, the community being what it was and is now, I can't say? But what I can state is that the drawings above are part of an entanglement and if you look closely you can see my body making the marks that make up the images, my hand was able to grip those materials in a certain way, a way that it no longer can, my eyes saw things on that day that they will never see again, the light will never be the same and my eyes will never again have the same receptivity, and the news on the radio is different, the conversations I am having will have changed and I will have read more stories about how others think the world is. The drawings I make now are very different, but in many ways they are the same. They record connections between things, they touch on ideas that arrive through the making process, they are partly a reflection on what it is to experience the world and partly an idea that becomes materialised. However I am also making drawings in conjunction with other artists, I'm looking at how I can work collaboratively and as I do so I learn more about possibilities and more importantly I'm learning how to let go of my desire to control the drawings. Perhaps I'm learning to appreciate the fact that all drawings are part of a much wider process, one that slips in and out of our experiences of life, not as separate records or observations, but as inseparable conjunctions of materials and actions, as entanglements and not as some sort of analysis or understanding of the meaning of things.
And yet, drawings also operate as signs, symbols and icons. Once again by defining their use they become separate from the world they operate within. The drawing can be a sign for something, both embedded within the world and yet often used as if it can in some way reflect upon the world. This aspect of drawing is another key driver behind my thinking, which is why the opening image is of a wall drawing of mine that tries to suggest drawing's dual status as a place within which certain types of questions about drawing itself can be asked, whilst at the same time trying to think about life.
But just for now I shall stop writing and leave you with another image. One that is an attempt to depict the isolated body, the raw bare existence of an island of humanity. A drawing that is much more about what existence in a body feels like, but which was drawn during the same week as the image 'drawing as a sign'.
A part of the main: acrylic and watercolour on paper: 2017: 48 x 12 in
