Wednesday, 19 November 2014

Drawing with Light

Before photographic film was invented artists had used cameras for hundreds of years. The very word photography reflects a deep connection with drawing:

Our word 'photography' is taken directly from the French word 'Photographie'. Photo- +‎ -graphy, together meaning "drawing with light" or "writing with light". From φωτός (phōtós, “(genitive) of light”), and γράφω (gráphō, “I write”).

It’s also fascinating to consider the verbal relationship between writing and drawing, both having the same Greek root. However the English word to ‘draw’ has a different history. Back in the year 1200, we used the Old English dragan "to drag, in the sense of to draw something along the ground" which was derived from the Proto-Germanic dragan "to draw or pull" Thus the use of the word ‘drawing’ in English is more to do with dragging a pencil across paper, it is much more physical, implying the action of making a mark. However at the same time it was also used to mean "to pull out a weapon". Therefore to draw a line comes from the same etymological root as to draw a gun.

I’m meandering again but there is some point to all this, and that is that as drawing students I think you could make much more use of photography without a camera.

The most common uses of camera-less photography in the darkroom, are the photogram, the luminogram and the chemigram. Man Ray called his photograms Rayograms, but they are basically the same thing, the only difference being you often work directly with the negative rather than on the photographic paper.

The basic principle of Rayograms is very simple; an object of some sort is placed on the film, the film is then exposed to light and then developed. Where the object was on the film blocking the light, that area remains clear (or is white when projected). ‘Rayograming’ in its basic form thus leaves white silhouettes on black film. This works for both still and moving black and white film stock, therefore you can make really interesting 16mm films using this technique.

In Leeds the artist Martha Jurksaitis runs the Cherry Kino project which is focused on making camera-less films and looks at a myriad of ways to develop old film stock and how to obtain fascinating visual results by working with film developing technologies.

The image below is taken from Martha's 16mm film entitled 'Nail Art'. A film made entirely using nail art materials - nail varnishes and nail art stickers and nothing else.

Portuguese Woman Of War (Super 8 & 16mm, 2013/14, single screenfilm)

If you think of these films simply as moving drawings (basically as sophisticated flickerbooks) it can open out a whole range of alternative drawing possibilities.
At a most basic level there are those spinning two sided cards that we used to make when we were at school in the 1950s (TV was only just coming in then)

Just cut a card circle and make an image on both sides then put string through holes on the edges and twist. When you pull the string taut the card spins and you see both images at once. This is a very easy way to make one image blend with another and of course you could film the results using a digital camera, thus fusing old and new technologies.

At a more complex level these ideas can become performance or environmental based, such as artist Brion Gysin’s attempt to market flicker machines as a performative substitute for the living-room TV.

Brion Gysin’s flicker machine. A simple device which consists of holes cut into paper and hung from a light source in the same way that we use paper light shades, the difference being that these are designed to spin, the shadows will of course move around and over the whole room. I'll come back to shadows later.

Perhaps the most accessible area to get into however is photograms. We have a great black and white darkroom down in Vernon Street which is perfect for doing this sort of work. Try and do test strips under red light conditions beforehand by laying a variety of objects, papers or surfaces on unexposed photographic paper and timing your exposures before fixing.
Anne Ferran uses objects she sources from museums as well as second-hand shops and makes large scale photograms that play with invisibility and anonymity.

Anne Ferran sometimes makes large scale images from old dresses.

Henri Foucault engages with images of the body, using photograms to create complex layered works.

Henri Foucault

Chemigram has also been with us for some time. There is an interview with Pierre Cordier the supposedly ‘father’ of the chemigram here.

Chemigrams are created with the use of developer and fixer chemicals, together with other non-photographic chemicals such as oils, acids, milk, paints etc. directly onto photographic paper. The chemicals react differently each time, so it takes a while to get used to controlling them.

Judith Lyons Chemigraph

Heather Oelklaus: Chemigraph

Chemigraphs do take quite a lot of control but as you can see above you can make very different looking images and of course if you are careful you can combine techniques by masking out some areas of the photographic paper when making photograms and then working into these areas with your various chemical solutions.

Luminograms are made by directly drawing with light onto photographic paper. László Moholy-Nagy is probably the most well known exponent. Try using a small torch to draw with, again you might try mixing techniques.

László Moholy-Nagy: Luminogram

Another way to think about drawing with light is simply that it consists of the casting of shadows. We have all played children's games by making rabbits and other creatures with our hands and watching their shadows appear on the bedroom wall at night, and some artists have returned to this very basic idea to make powerful work.

The Shadows 1984: Christian Boltansky

William Kentridge

Hans-Peter Feldmann Schattenspiel 'Shadow Play'

I saw Hans-Peter Feldmann's 'Schattenspiel' or 'Shadow Play' at the Venice Biennale a few years ago. It was totally gripping, but was done using the most basic technology. He had a long series of trestle tables with a row of old turntables set out in a line. On each turntable he had placed different figures, some found and some hand made, then had simply put light sources behind them and had set the turntables to slowly turn. The resulting shadows moved in and out of focus and interacted with each other. I intend to make some work in this way myself in the near future.

Pre camera technologies.

One other area you might want to investigate is that of pre-film camera technology. For instance camera obscuras have been with us for thousands of years.

I'm not sure cave painters ever used camera obscuras in this way but hopefully the point is made.

You can turn any room into a camera obscura simply by putting sheets of black polythene over the windows and letting a pinpoint of light in. Here's how to do it. Once of course you have an image you can draw into it.

Artists have for hundreds of years used camera obscuras and other devices of a similar nature, such as the Claude Glass which was for generating certain tonal values when working from landscape or the Camera Lucida which was often used for portrait drawing.

You can still buy them. Link

And you always wondered how those old artists were able to capture a likeness.

Not only can this area be one to open out drawing practice into much richer and wider territories, it can also be a way to bring back magic into your work. In their book, 'Technologies of Magic: A Cultural Study of Ghosts, Machines and the Uncanny', Potts and Scheer point to the continuing use of optical illusions to conjure up associations with an untouchable spirit world or magic dimension.

From the sublime

To the ridiculous

In order to capture photographic images on surfaces other than paper you may want to explore the use of 'Liquid Light'. There are various Photographic Emulsion solutions available, all of which operate very like black and white paper processing when working in a darkroom. Available at the moment are Rockland Liquid Light Photo Emulsion and Fotospeed LE30 Liquid Emulsion

both can be used to sensitise surfaces so that you can project images onto them. Helen Chadwick was the first artist I came across using this technique.

Helen Chadwick: The Labours

Photographs of Chadwick’s naked body were superimposed with photographs of original objects from her past, in this case a pram. These are printed using liquid light techniques onto geometric forms that echoed the subject. The pram was meant to represent the artist at ten months old.

Have fun, this is a rich area to mine.

Coda: December 2020

2,953 arced trails of the sun as it travelled across the sky: Regina Valkenborgh

The image above is a wonderful example of drawing with light and a perfect example of an art and science crossover. Regina Valkenborgh when a Master of Fine Art student at the University of Hertfordshire fitted a beer can with photographic paper and created a low-tech pinhole camera. She then placed the can on a telescope at the university's Bayfordbury Observatory, trained the telescope at the sun and it was then left there for eight years.

Now, the resulting photograph has been rediscovered and it may be the longest-exposure photo ever taken. The photograph shows the sun's journey through the sky since 2012; 2,953 arcs of light tracing its path as the sun rose and set. It shows us how the movement of the Earth in relation to the Sun changes each arced trail a capturing of time as well as space.

Tuesday, 18 November 2014

Drawing research

Drawing as research is rapidly becoming embedded within post-graduate practices. This link is a good introduction to the way that post graduate research in drawing can be undertaken. In particular Kiera O'Toole’s work is focused on how personal experiences can shape practice-led research. She “measures and examines the mark as a form of language” and understands drawing research as both “a knowing and a making”.
Her practice is concerned with a variety of drawing processes and methodologies, which include material investigation, the physical act of drawing, the sound of drawing, drawing as sculpture and performative works.

Kiera O'Toole: Untilted: Burnt driftwood shavings on paper. 81cm x 180cm

Monday, 17 November 2014

Huge sheet of paper

On my way to work today I saw this.

The poster has fallen off a poster site on Meanwood Road, just opposite the Primrose pub. It looked like a huge body had fallen down onto the grass. If any of you are looking for a big sheet of thick paper to use, just nip down there, Meanwood Road is just about half a mile away, turn right as you leave college, go down St Mark's Road, turn left, then immediate right, at the bottom of the hill turn left, then right at the junction and Meanwood Road is at the bottom of the hill. You can see the Primrose from the bottom of Cross Chancellor Street.

Paper and Skin

A paper surface has many metaphorical possibilities but one of the most fascinating is that it can be like skin. We measure the world against ourselves and we are very aware of things bigger or smaller, harder or softer, similar or different to our own bodies. A paper surface is in many ways similar to skin. Our skin can of course be stripped off, flayed and stretched out as a flat sheet but above all it acts as a boundary for the body, a membrane that separates the inside from the outside. In my last post I was musing on the edge and the frame, and how in some ways these operated as devices to enable us to separate the image from the world, without skin our organs would be in direct contact with the world therefore we could read skin as a type of edge between the body and the world or as an interface between two milieus.

Léopold Lambert is a very interesting writer who publishes The Funambulist, an on-line blog that is endlessly fascinating, this post of his opens out the idea of the body as a topological surface: The Funambulist

He introduces a way of thinking about the body as a topology.

“The body is a continuous surface folded many times that interacts with an exterior milieu whose limits cannot be established because of the impossibility of establishing a bodily interiority. What then becomes fundamental to an understanding of the body’s topology is what Simondon calls “membrane,” that is this folded surface that separates two milieus (neither exterior, nor interior) from one another. This membrane constitutes the interface of exchanges between these two milieus and Simondon sees in these exchanges the essence of life: “all the content of the interior space is topologically in contact with the content of the exterior space on the limits of the living being; there is no distance in topology.” (Lambert, 2014)

Simondon echoes Deleuze in his topoligical approach. In 'The Fold', Deleuze explores ideas surrounding folds of space, that both represent movement and invent time. He interprets perceptual experience as that of a body of infinite folds that is woven out of threads of compressed time and space.

Once we begin to think of the skin as a folded surface, it is not a very difficult step to think of how a paper surface might substitute for skin, and that drawings might become both flat surfaces and 3D objects.

In medieval times skin colour was used as an indication of someone’s ‘complexion’ or ‘temperament’, the colours red, white, black and yellow representing the various ‘humours’ that categorised character and disposition. A balance of heat and cold, dryness and moisture was required to build an even temperament. One could be choleric, phlegmatic, melancholy or sanguine. As Wotton (in Connor, 2004) points out in reference to what painters can and can’t do, “painters cannot imitate, neyther subject vnto their pensell, the fashions, graces, maners & spiritual complexios, which either laudable or vitious do cleare or darken beautie”, i.e. that artists struggle to depict both inner temperament and outward appearance. If you want to research these things read Steven Connor’s ‘The Book of the Skin’ Available here

The point being that metaphors related to the skin's surface appearance can involve a rich and complex language and that these languages change over time. As an artist your own investigation into drawing will often touch upon how surface representation can operate metaphorically, not of course always in relation to human skin, but even when not, you might think about how background research can deepen and open out possibilities for investigation.

If paper is to be read as skin and if skin itself becomes a subject for investigation you might want to consider some of these issues.

Shape and positioning.

It is not by accident that we call the orientation of a paper rectangle portrait or landscape. We are bilaterally symmetrical and are taller than we are wide. A vertically orientated rectangular sheet of paper reflects this; therefore even without putting any marks on a sheet of paper we can create a basic metaphor. We can take this further; an A4 sheet of paper if in portrait position is a very similar shape and size to the human head. If we start putting a few horizontal lines across it we easily begin to recognise the divisions of eyes and mouth and nose.

Think about how you read someone else's face. The scanning of another human being's

bi-laterally symetrical face is very similar to scaning headlines. We design things that reflect the fact that our sensibilities are finely tuned to 'read' how other humans are reacting.

If you attach two portrait orientated A1 sheets, one above the other, you now have a rectangle very close in proportion to the standing human figure.

The total surface area taken up by an average adult human is approximately 1.8m² to 2m². You can calculate the surface area of your own skin by using this body surface area calculator. If you were developing images that were operating within a self-portrait tradition would you need to consider this? Would your drawings contain a more direct message if the paper surface was exactly the same as your own was calculated to be?

Texture and surface

The surface texture of paper is of course vital to the establishment of metaphorical possibility. If using paper it can be oiled, waxed, crumpled and creased, dipped into liquids, sanded down, polished, folded and scored, scratched into, left out in the rain, trod upon or shot through with bullet holes. Try scrunching paper over and over again until it becomes like material and then paint a layer of linseed oil over it and hang up to dry. The paper itself and the way it is treated holds tremendous opportunities for metaphorical exploration.

The more you scrunch the paper the more it will become like an old skin

Lauryn Arnott: Original skin

Lauryn Arnott's work demonstrates yet another way that the body can be thought of as an ageing skin and Alex Kanevsky's watercolours show how paper can aid watercolour's ability to suggest skin's opalescent transparency.

Alex Kanevsky

Mathilde Roussel's images work in the boundary between sculpture and drawing.

Mathilde Roussel

Mathilde Roussel's wall mounted pieces move between paper surface as skin metaphor and paper as a casting medium.

Choice of support

Brown wrapping paper comes in very large sheets, newsprint can come in huge rolls, hand-made papers come with a wide variety of surfaces, the paper that large posters are printed on is thick and robust, some papers are mixed with plastics, some plastics can be treated as flexible supports, walls and floors can be drawn on directly, Wim Delvoye works on live pigs, wallpapers not only come in long lengths but have wider domestic associations, printed ephemera carry messages of previous use, tissue papers have associations very different to tracing papers and all have the ability to be treated as a metaphor for human skin as well as being cut up using patterns and used as a second skin (clothing).

Inuits make kayaks and wetsuits from sealskin. They sew themselves into their kayaks and at one time travelled as far as the Orkney Islands. The islanders thought they were half seals and half men and called them selkies. In the stories the Orkney islanders told the selkies were shape shifters who shifted form by coming out of one skin and entering another. This passage between states could be seen as an analogy, a story that could belong to another tradition, that of artists trying to make flat representations of humans using marks on surfaces.

An Inuit sealskin suit

One very direct connection we can make with this is the use of sewing patterns. In some ways a sewing pattern can be seen as a plan for an extended second skin. Different body sizes are encoded in their production and these are also rich areas for symbolic meaning, think of the way we call ourselves size 8s or size 10s and how you worry when you have to move sizes.

Old pattern cutting paper already has a surface that looks like skin

We map our bodies in different ways and each culture has its own approach to this, for instance Chinese acupuncture diagrams allow us to think about the interconnections between the skin’s surface and what lies beneath.

Chinese acupuncture diagrammes go into extreem body detail, in particular the 'map' of the ear suggests an intense investigation of every inch of the skin's surface.

Mapping the body can be done in many ways and by using very diverse sets of information, the artist Katie Lewis has developed her whole practice around this. Link

Body maps can also be the site for narrative, in the image below two women have made body maps to describe the experience of living with HIV. Link

The combination of the image of the body as portrait and the idea of it as a map, can create a facinating fusion between two approaches.

The skin itself can be the subject of imagery, see the work of Tarryn Handcock which is a focus on the skin as a transformative boundary site.

Tarryn Handcock

You can of course turn everything around and make the surface the drawing material. In this image (below) Dragan Ilic uses pencils pushed through a surface to create a drawing tool.

You could think of these surfaces as 3D realisations of acupuncture diagrams

Which bring me to the drawing tools themselves. You can make your own tools and the way you make them can further the metaphor. Tools can scrape, scratch, puncture (the tattoo), rub, smooth or irritate the skin (paper surface).

Kate Lewis's drawings use sharp points to puncture paper surfaces.

One final word on skin. Of all the different surfaces on which you can make marks vellum is the most charged with meaning. The word itself comes from the Old French Vélin, which means "calfskin” and it is a surface made of mammal skin. In order to make it you have to kill and skin an animal, then clean the skin, bleach it, stretch it on a frame, and scrap the residue of meat and fat away. To create that lovely taut flat finish the scraping is alternated by wetting the whole skin and drying it in the sun and then finally the surface is sanded with pumice and limed. Animal vellum can be made from virtually any mammal including humans. The best quality, "uterine vellum", was made from the skins of stillborn or unborn animals, it is so thin that it is translucent, just like human skin.

Preparing human skins for display

Wim Delvoye tattooed pig

I am of course only scratching the surface of this subject and will at some point return to it.

Drawing