Process or substance ontology?

A lump of clay suggested this

I have been over time trying to write about my activities as an artist who draws and makes things under two essential headings, both of which at one time or another have been regarded as a particular nature of being, and it has always been difficult for me to reconcile the two approaches. One has been substance ontology, in which objects are the focus of philosophical interest and the materials of making become central to an understanding of possible metaphors. As a maker, I am very aware of the primacy of materials and how their physical nature shapes and affects possibilities, so I'm particularly attracted to this approach.

Cardboard, tape, a discarded child's bedroom table and a ceramic thought suggested this

The other is as a process ontology, which sees change as more fundamentally real than objects. This way of thinking seems to concur with an awareness of time and the nature of energy fields. At a deep level all is rhythm and a dance of particles and intellectually this is if I think about it probably true. So I am drawn towards any philosophy that argues this case; such as Alfred North Whitehead's as explicated in 'Process and Reality'. He believed that fundamentally, nothing exists in itself, everything is in transformation all the time. Therefore, all that really exists is the relationship between "things", such as mass and energy. This relationship can be either potential or actual. These ideas were based on his particular understanding of quantum theory, which for Whitehead was mathematical. Whitehead sought a holistic, comprehensive view of reality that provided a systematic descriptive theory of the world which could be used for 'the diverse human intuitions gained through ethical, aesthetic, religious, and scientific experiences, and not just the scientific'. A stance which of course led to his work being regarded as of great interest by artists such as myself. Intuition and aesthetics in particular holding a very important place in my own attempts to get to grip with what it is to think through the role of art as a means to come to terms with the world. Whitehead helped me to reconcile my own diverse approaches to visualising life experiences or at least to accept that I didn't have to always be clear or sorted out in my head about these things and that if I was confused, I could live with the confusion.  

Everything is in flux, but our problems seem to remain the same

Back in 1929 Whitehead stated; 'We diverge from Descartes by holding that what he has described as primary attributes of physical bodies, are really the forms of internal relationships between actual occasions. Such a change of thought is the shift from materialism to organic realism, as a basic idea of physical science'.

Whitehead: Process and Reality, 1929, p. 471

Seen that way, the important elements that make up a drawing are not the material things that it is composed of but rather the processes that come together in its becoming and these things are always shifting. However the material reality of the process is fundamental to how that process will operate. 

The peristaltic wave 

Trying to claim either one aspect or another as being fundamental to the make up of a drawing is perhaps a not very useful activity. My attempts to visualise inner body experiences have tended to be done by fixing certain visualised moments within a wider awareness of ongoing processes. Whitehead would though I think if he looked at this work, suggest that I have a problem with constant flux or change. 

The body as a moving inside/outside mass of energy

Perhaps all I'm looking for is a way of visualising moments of stability within the chaos of being and that death is just the dissolving away of one particular process that was stable for a time.

However the ultimate abstract principle of existence for Whitehead is creativity. Existence itself is for Whitehead a process of becoming, and “'becoming' is a creative act. This helps and reinforces my belief that every drawing or made image is also a metaphor for life itself. 

We experience this 'becoming', according to Whitehead as 'occasions' and these he states come in four types or grades. 

The first is a fundamental underlying force, like those interacting with a Higgs field, such as the propagation of an electromagnetic wave or gravitational influence across empty space. The second are occasions of experience that involve inanimate matter, something that I personally read as an opening for an animist reading of Whitehead's ideas. The third being an involvement with living organisms, a hierarchy which reminded me of Raymond Lull's ascending ladders and  the fourth, which was about the experience of presentational immediacy, which means, I think, the qualia of subjective experience. This 'presentational immediacy' Whitehead suggests, occurs  only in more evolved animals, again something I'm not sure about, but I know what he means. However I can only accept this if these things are enfolded into a totality of being, a totality that acknowledges that the qualia of experience are dependent on an interaction with the Higgs force and all living matter is composed of inanimate matter, which is itself composed of fundamental forces.

The mental and the material aspects of experience or becoming can therefore for us humans be seen as verbal or visual abstractions from experience, (interpretations via various languages). The brain is part of the body, and both are abstractions of a kind referred to by Whitehead as 'persistent physical objects', or in my mind 'nouns'; neither being actual entities. All of which points to a type of understanding that again sits within a flux of becoming; a flux which means that at one moment I seem to be able to nail down a thought, but the next sees everything dissolve into the flow of being. But things are still things and as such they seem to have their own reality.

Three responses to material possibilities offered to me by collaboration

These three responses to what others had done, were all made as part of a 'vitrine' project, 'Regenerative Things' and were done in relation to a 'Thing Power' research group. I'm no longer part of this project, but it did help me to come to terms with an acceptance of change and the letting go of ownership, as whatever was done, was quickly pulled apart and dismantled by someone else, but at the same time something of the idea, or material potential would remain, as the work was reinterpreted by whoever followed me and what I was therefore providing was 'potential'; and it is perhaps this idea of 'potential' that is the most intriguing for me. 

Every art work ever made is like a battery that is charged with 'potential'. As someone looks at and considers a drawing, a painting or an object, that potential is released as a thought transfer. The materiality of the work, gives weight and externality to someone's thinking, so that it can be offered forward to another person as a materialised thing. Those that encounter the 'made thing' can then interpret it in whatever way they need to. This potential is for myself so exciting. In my mind, it sits alongside the body's interoceptive ability to predict. The main thing I have taken from my work on visualising interoception is that the body is a focus for the construction of prediction loops, whereby emotions and physical responses to stimuli are entwined together in order to respond to things before they happen. The body hosts a mass of interconnected triggers that make it do stuff in response to best guess scenarios and this system of making best predictions, is central to how we think. By inventing a new thing that is open to interpretation, others are challenged as to how to read a possibility. Some will not see any need to spend energy on this but others will and the fact that something new has been made that adds to another body's awareness of potential is a wonderful idea. 

References:

Barrett, L. F. (2017) How Emotions are Made London: Pan

Pert, C. B. (1999) Molecules of Emotion London: Simon and Schuster

See also:

Paul Klee and Markov blankets

Drawings as aesthetic transducers 

How analogue and digital thinking can support the visualisation of interoception 

Visualising energy flow

Why interoception

Drawing on experience

Crosshatching as energy carrier

William Blake after Fuseli, Head of a Damned Soul, c1789-90

When looking closely at some of the images in the 'William Blake's Universe' exhibition at the Cambridge University Fitzwilliam Museum, I was entranced by the various uses of cross hatching. In particular Blake's rendering of the image chosen for the exhibition poster, had me gazing closely at its surface and as I did my gaze became lost in the movement of one surface into the next, as the cross hatching overlapped and its curved lines not only made form but produced energy at the same time. 

Hendrick Goltzius 

Some time ago I put up a post on cross contour drawing but when I did I failed to open out how powerfully some artists had used cross hatching to energise surfaces and create energy fields. Some artists in particular, such as Hendrick Goltzius, who was the leading Dutch engraver of the early Baroque period, specialised in using these techniques. Rembrandt for instance encouraged his students to copy Goltzius engravings as a way to learn how to cross-hatch. Notice how the engraved lines both follow the form and give an indication of tone. However it is in pen and ink and chalk drawings that we see the technique used at its most subtlest.  

Rubens

Rubens: Detail

If you look at the Rubens drawing above, you can see how the pen strokes create compacted energy, their slight curvature suggesting the soft curves of the body, the depicting of the movement of light to dark necessitates points of overlap, suggesting a constant flow of one field of energy into another. 

Durer uses this technique to both suggest mass and texture. The hair texture dances to one set of rhythmic dynamics, whilst the planes of the head are suggested by another set of rhythmically set out lines. What appears at a distance to be a solidly modelled head, on closer inspection becomes a series of energy fields. 

Durer

Durer: Detail of energy movements

Jean-Baptiste Greuze's drawing, 'The Ungrateful Son', is a very good example of how planar reinforcement using hatched lines, is not just a powerful explainer of how masses work within a complex solid such as a head, but can also be a way to demonstrate how energy fields can interact and overlap.  

Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The Ungrateful Son, ca. 1777

Greuze, The Ungrateful Son: detail

Greuze has a very strong grasp of three dimensional form, each line reinforcing the head's planar structure, but we can also see that complex rhythms are made as these contour hugging lines overlap. The movement of marks as they define the brow, the eye socket, the cheek and the nose, chin and mouth, is not unlike currents or eddies in a stream flowing over rocks. These marks also link one facial form to another; if you begin by looking at the bridge of the nose, you can drop down its side and slide over the cheek, falling towards the mouth and then visually tumble down towards the chin and neck. An idea of the body as landscape emerges the closer you get to the drawing. 

The body's energy field

I have begun to think about how these various energy fields overlap. Perhaps this was triggered in my head by listening to obituaries of Professor Higgs who died last week and the various accounts of the Higgs field. This is a field of energy that is accompanied by the Higgs boson, used by the field to interact with other particles, such as electrons. This interaction gives weight to the particles and hence 'mass' comes into being as well as energy. 

Mapping the energy of a concrete block in the sea wall

Gradually my thoughts about the energy of seeing are becoming fused with the energy inside mass and how it sits within the space that surrounds it. 

Perceptual study of a toy dinosaur found in the woods

I am still working on how to visualise the inner body, so will be trying to add in these thoughts about energy mass, as I try to fuse the ageing awareness of a body into the landscapes that it remembers. But for now this is where that particular strand of thinking has settled. 

The ageing body and a memory

Aways so much to do, always so many things to reconcile, but as always so many exciting things to get involved with.  

See also:

Cross contour drawing

Visualising Energy Flow

Visualising energy flow part two

Signs of life in flowing line drawings

Quantum entanglement

Drawing the internal body

Max Brodel: The mouth

Max Brodel: The throat

There still seems to be a worry about the relationship between fine art drawing and illustration. I personally find no real difference between them, both are concerned with trying to represent and communicate visually things that we experience. The fine artist often makes very personal decisions as to what is being visualised and the illustrator is usually more directed by the role they have in solving problems set by others, but whether the problem set is a personal one or set by others, at the end of the day a piece of visual communication is made, that is either one that works well or doesn't. The history of art includes many artists working directly for clients, be these to do with the church, the ruling elites or galleries and many artists have also worked as illustrators or have had roles that didn't separate out the 'artist' from the other functions that someone was involved with. For instance a monk may have also been a fantastic image maker, but their main role as someone in the service of whatever religious order they belonged to, meant that they were never singled out as 'signature' artists; in fact most artists would as far as history is concerned, be anonymous. We can ask questions of an artwork, such as does the work enrich our understanding or awareness, does it help us to get more in touch with our feelings, does experience of it allow us to do things differently? But we can ask these questions of a fine art painting, sculpture or drawing, just as much as we can of an illustration,

I compare my own work with both fine art and illustration. For instance, my interest in interoception overlaps with medical illustration as it attempts to visualise what goes on within the body but I'm also trying to communicate feeling tone, something more akin to music perhaps and therefore closer to artists dealing with expressionist themes, so I'm also happy to look at artists such as Max Beckman or Cecily Brown, both of whom have contributed to the visualisation of the human body's expressive possibilities.

There is a history of medical illustration that is vitally important to how we think about the interior of our bodies. One artist in particular was very influential on the development of the contemporary anatomy textbook and his work is also of interest to myself in that he developed very specific techniques in order to communicate the particular qualities of our visceral  insides. Max Brodel (1870-1941), is considered to be one of the shapers of modern medical illustration. He understood that a drawing was much better than a photograph when it came to showing others what was going on and he had this to say about copying:

"Copying a medical object is not medical illustrating. The camera copies as well, and often better, than the eye and hand, in medical drawing full comprehension must precede execution."

In order to better communicate what he was seeing, Brodel devised a method of using carbon dust to create a two tone technique that could capture the sparkling highlights that characterise the wet visceral look of the interior living body. His particular use of carbon dust involved using special paper coated with white layers of chalk or clay. Carbon dust is then layered on the paper in stages to create shadow and depth. The results are incredibly rich tonal images that not only suggest wet insides but capture the nature of three dimensional form well. He also used erasers to lift out bright highlights and create further three dimensional effects. 

Max Brodel: Illustration of the musculature of bladder and urethra

It is interesting to compare his drawings with Alberto Morroco. Alberto Morrocco unlike Max Brodel was an artist better known for his landscapes. 

Alberto Morroco

Morroco produced anatomical drawings in the period following his service as a conscientious objector in the Medical Corps during WWII and never made any other anatomical drawings once he had completed his work for the anatomy textbook. However the drawings he did do are powerful examples of how to communicate complex hard to read views of the interior of the human body. 

Alberto Morroco: The eye

Alberto Morroco was making his images in the mid-twentieth century and medical textbooks were now being printed in colour. This meant that he could selectively add colour to his drawings in order to further distinguish or pick out vital aspects of the anatomy he was focusing on. His drawing technique is better at depicting the bony substrata of the body, whilst you feel that Brodel keeps you much more aware of the slimy visceral nature of the body's reality.

Both artists influenced my own ideas about how we might visualise inner body feelings. 

The pain of separation

The image above, 'The pain of separation' being an image produced after working with someone who had experienced heartache and longing for someone. This was in effect a landscape of their emotions and was as much a response to anatomical illustrations as it was to cross sections of landscape whereby the structure of rocks is revealed as a cross section. 

Geologic cross section of the Flagstaff area, northern Arizona

The one thing missing of course is annotation. Because feelings are so hard to point to, sadness, regret, longing etc. are all subjective experiences and therefore although two people might come to some sort of agreement as to what something might mean, this is far from a universal language that is useable by everyone. This is perhaps the fine art/illustration divide. An illustration will need to have an agreed communicative value, but the fine art image is open to interpretation. Hopefully though by working with someone and forging an agreed synthesis of visual/verbal responses, something gets communicated that is greater than the conversations that were had and that something more universal emerges from the conversational drawing activity, that is sensed by others when they see the final image, which is in this case a digital print. 

Reference

Cullen, Thomas A. "Max Brödel, 1870-1941, Director of the First Department of Art as Applied to Medicine in the World". Bulletin of the Medical Library Association. Vol. 33, No. 1, January 1945.

Macdonald. Joanne (2022) How can drawing support understanding in anatomy through the work of Robert Douglas Lockhart (1894-1987)? Aberdeen: Aberdeen University

See also:

Drawing and healing

Joanne Macdonald: Drawing Bodies

What lies beneath

Objects, people and stories

In his book 'The Entanglement' Alva Noë points out that the aesthetic experience is centred around the way that we engage with ourselves and the environments that we find ourselves immersed into. He suggests that the aim of this experience is to move from a position of not seeing to seeing, or from seeing to seeing differently. My recent work looking at how we materialise thought through the use of significant objects forms a parallel visual conversation with his thoughts about how we come to understand things. Evaluating and detecting things, he suggests are inseparable activities. We see the things we love differently to the things we don't care about. He states, 'Values are antecedent to the encounter with the object, because they are embedded in and find expression in the relationship that is the encounter with the object.' p112 He then goes on to say that these values are what makes the object 'present'. 

I have been sitting with people and drawing objects that they think are significant to them. In doing so I have tried to learn about how we can together come to some sort of agreement about the mutual imaging of that significance. This work is about how one person's values are gradually transferred to another person by conversation and as this process is visualised hopefully both of us can move on from 'not seeing to seeing differently' and when the work is then seen by others, perhaps it may help them see things differently too. 

I begin with making sketchbook drawings of a significant object. These drawings are made whilst making verbal conversation with the object's owner. As we converse significant ideas and thoughts begin to become apparent and they become the gateways through which the next phase of the work will be entered. 

One of the first conversational drawings

One of the first drawings done as we talk is a 'location' drawing. In this case right in the centre of the room is a small table, on which a pack of cigarettes, a bottle of whiskey and other 'being used' items surround a polished wooden carving of a baby crawling. 

Sketchbook pages made as we talk

The carving of the crawling wooden baby becomes central to our conversation. The memories associated with the sculpture begin to be related and a tale of a Thailand island and jungle wonderment begins to emerge, as the conversation opens out. Flying fish enter the story as a short sea voyage is remembered and a mystery 'shaman' type figure is introduced as a long gone supplier of Chinese heroin, in another conversation a memory of seeing fighting cocks surfaces. The baby is a carved figure from over 40 years ago, it may crawl across a table in northern England, but its dark polished rosewood surface, intimates another life, one from a time when our neighbour was a young man. Initially made as a symbol to help others see the child in all our lives, the baby was a like a narrative magnet and I begin to seek out other stories that it could be crawling into. In Thailand carvings of Baby Buddhas are common or at least were when this one was bought. A story of Buddha's birth may have been taken from a Hindu Rig Veda text, such as the birth of Indra. After Alexander the Great conquered central Asia in 334 BCE, there was a considerable intermingling of Buddhism with Hellenic art and ideas and the last echoes of that time, were now mingling with global tourism. Our neighbour in particular was trying to get off the day to day treadmill of office and factory work and was like the Beatles, looking for spiritual nourishment in the East.

Greek terracotta figure of a baby in a cradle

There an alternative origin narrative of the Buddha’s birth being pictorially re-invented after Buddhist traders returned from the Middle East with tales of churches hosting paintings and sculptures celebrating the birth of Jesus. But babies have always been potent symbols of fresh beginnings, new life, innocence and the possibilities of future lives.

Medieval icon, where the baby Jesus is depicted as a small man

Gradually this baby begins to draw around itself more and more stories. The Buddhist view of birth encompasses vast cycles of death, bardo (the state between death and rebirth), and rebirth. The experience of bardo is a result of the life or karma, of the being who enters it. Those who have recently died enter the bardo with a task of searching for the right conditions for their next rebirth, therefore the baby is also in many ways the re-entry into the world of an existing soul, so it is both old and young at the same time. Perhaps an echo of this is seen in the icon above. In Medieval art painters had to reflect the fact that the Church believed that Christ was essentially a perfectly formed and unchanging man during his entire life. I.e. Christ even when a child needed to appear in the form of an adult because he was not supposed to change with age. 

After talking to the crawling baby's owner about some of the possibilities for narratives, I take the sketchbook drawings away in order to work from them. Over the next week or so I begin developing them as images that are made to enhance or develop any narratives that were beginning to emerge during our initial conversations. 

The idea of the baby in the jungle begins to emerge as a story is written. The point is not to write a novel or a short story, but to see if some sort of narrative coherence can be drawn from the fragments of memory that my neighbour has held in his head for all these many years. This is how the first draft of a story was put down and it was decided that this would be a 'once upon a time' story, as for both of us, the tale seemed very like a fairy story, the jungle being a setting like a 'Just So' story or the forest of 'Little Red Riding Hood'. 

'Once upon a time in Thailand there was made a baby. It was a beautiful baby, lovingly carved from the wood of a rosewood tree. This wonderful baby’s name was Phayung, and he learnt to crawl almost as soon as he was made. Because he was so beautiful everyone wanted him and he was soon bought by a rich and kindly young foreigner who had heard of the magical nature of this wooden child. The baby was much more than a baby, and it could never really be owned by anyone. Within a day, his new owner on picking it up had gently brushed his forehead against that of the wooden baby's and was astonished to hear a voice in his head. He was soon listening carefully to a constant babble of baby thoughts, thoughts that seemed at times very wise and which spoke of vast long ages of wisdom, but which were also silly thoughts, naive ideas about the world and at times totally incomprehensible jibber jabber. The young foreigner soon realised that the baby was someone very special and he was sure that a new life beckoned, especially once he had begun to understand what the baby was trying to tell him. 

Because the baby was a wooden boy, he yearned to be with the type of tree from which he had been carved. As well as having all sorts of insights into the new world he was experiencing, he had feeling that came from his past life as a growing tree. Eventually he asked the young man if he could be sent back into the jungles out of which he came. But the young man was from somewhere else and had just been passing through, he didn't know one jungle from the next and of course didn't want to let such a special wooden baby go. But the baby persisted, it now spoke of little else and the man began to become irritated and more importantly very aware that his special find would be of little use if all it could ever do was go on and on about returning to the jungle.  Gradually he made up his mind to follow any instructions the baby might give him about returning to the jungle and so began to ask questions about the nature of the place the baby had come from. It was, said the baby a place surrounded by water, his log had been floated down a river and then carried across a salty sea. There had been a tree that had grown from a seed, that had itself been grown from the seed of a tree, that had been grown from the seed of a tree, that had been grown from the seed of a tree under which in its shade the Buddha had once sat, and during that time had achieved his enlightenment. Each of these trees had lived to be many hundreds of years old and every one had held within the possibilities of its heartwood a new life. 

The man grew frightened of what he was now hearing. He realised that not only was this baby special, it may have had a deeply spiritual message to transmit, one that he was not in any way worthy of. He looked around and decided that where they were was as good a place as any for the baby to find its family. All these trees looked similar to a man who had grown up in a city far away and it was clear now that the baby had its own mind and that a wooden mind could never in reality be used to help his own fleshy one accomplish anything. After wishing him good luck, the man put the baby onto the ground and watched as it began to crawl off into the thick, dense jungle that surrounded them. As it did a haze began to settle over the man's eyes and he fell asleep. On waking he couldn't quite believe in the baby's existence, but began to trace his way back and to think of all those reasons why he ought to travel back to his former life. 

The baby quickly disappeared into the undergrowth. For what seemed like many years he crawled through the dense undergrowth, his lovingly polished dark brown skin glistening in the dampness of early mornings. His tautly curved but very solid back, at odd times emerging like a stone tortoise, pushing itself up and out of the dense leaf compost of the forest floor and when it did other creatures might find the time to gaze in its direction and wonder what it was. Gradually over time the jungle creatures accepted the baby as their companion and after even more time they forgot to even remember he existed.

Then one day the baby found another very like himself. As he crawled into a sheltered jungle glade he came across a seated figure. It was, like the baby, made of rosewood, but it was not crawling. It did move, but only by swaying very slightly, as if surrounded by invisible breezes. It had one hand resting on its right leg, the hand’s fingers pointing downwards, its third finger just touching the ground. The other hand rested on its lap, its palm facing the sky. Its calm eyes were nearly closed, with pupils looking down towards the jungle floor, upon which the baby now crawled to a halt.  The rosewood baby gazed back up into the figure’s eyes and as he did he realised that at last he had found what he had been looking for.

The figure he had found seemed familiar, it had a skin of warm polished wood that was exactly the same as the baby’s. It also had a voice, an inner sound, not one like the other creatures of the jungle, not a voice of shriek, or gibber or squawk, this was a voice of singing and of chanting and it called to the baby. It had been calling for a long time, calling the baby to witness; calling it to re-find it's body, to re-vive itself in a new form as an earth-touching element. The wooden carving told the baby a story of its own enlightenment, of how once like the baby it had crawled on wooden hands and knees for many years through the jungle looking for answers, until one day after meditating on its life, it had realised that all was illusion and that all it had to do was to accept this and desire would disappear and he could at last be at one with the rest of the jungle. Therefore he now longer had to crawl, but could sit still and as he did he became a centre around which all things could be entangled, a centre around which spokes could radiate out and connect with all the illusions of reality but not be affected by them. 

How long the baby stayed there in the shadowy jungle glade is not known, but when finally he crawled away and back into the jungle, the baby knew that its time as a jungle baby was coming to an end and he needed to make his way back to the place from where he started. 

After what seemed many years the baby saw a thinning of the trees and shafts of light breaking through in such a way that he knew he had reached the jungle’s edgelands and that soon he would be able to make his way out and back into the place of his making. As he finally crawled out of the jungle, he passed a small still puddle of dark water and looking down into it he saw his reflection for the first time since the start of his journey and staring back was no longer the face of a baby but the face of an old man, and no longer did the jungle surround him, it fell away and as he looked to see where he was, he thought he recognised the form of the young man who had once owned him, but no, it was only an old man sat on a couch, an old man staring past the baby with eyes that were now finding it hard to see the things of this world, but which were beginning to peer gradually into the next.'

 

The story is now became central to how the visual work was evolving. 

A new series of drawings and collages were then made, but this time they were designed to be made into prints, so that the ideas emerging could be solidified and firmed up, thus giving the emerging narrative more traction. 

The baby crawls into the jungle

Baby enters the jungle

The baby in the jungle

The baby spots something in the distance

The baby meets his former self

The baby in the night jungle

The baby returns to the world as an old man

Other memories are also drawn, flying fish and fighting cocks seemed particularly important to my neighbour and images of men and babies, all of which didn't go any further but which helped with the growing dialogue around which the central story grew. 

We talked about the fact that everyone's life has stories entangled into it and that all it took to unpick those stories was often a conversation or a chance meeting that could trigger a memory or an association. We also talked about the nature of images as memories, such as my neighbour's old fading photographs and how they were very different to the new images that were emerging from the story. I some ways they are both illusions, but both contain within them certain truths about how we experience the world through the stories we tell. 

 So as this process was visualised did we move on from 'not seeing to seeing differently'? I certainly had a very different idea of what the wooden baby in my neighbour's front room was about. My neighbour had confronted something in his past that now meant that he saw it much more mythically and that what was for him a fading memory, was now something not just shared but which was a kernel around which new stories could be grown. Above all we had a shared experience, memorised in the form of drawings and prints, each one of which could be re-visited and could become a trigger or starting point for yet another elaboration of a constantly growing tale of a wooden baby learning from its journey through an imagined world. 

As the baby story began to evolve it reminded me of 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' by Oscar Wilde. The fictional artist Basil Hallward, was infatuated with Dorian's beauty and somehow managed to create some sort of magical fetish in the form of Dorian's portrait, an object that would soak up the visual impact of all the evil deeds that Gray would in his life go on to perpetrate. Ivan Albright would be chosen to paint the final look of this painting for the 1945 film, an image that could be seen as the dimetric opposite of the carved baby. In the one instance the baby is frozen in its cherubic form, the art form of carving operating to trap its shape forever within a block of rosewood. However the painting made of Dorian Gray is constantly changing; each evil deed undertaken by Gray, is etched into the painting's surface, until an image begins to emerge of an ageing, dissolute man, who has finally realised that his time on this Earth is up.

See also:

The narrative tradition in drawing

Why it matters (Conversations) 

Drawing and printmaking

The weaving of grids (stories of life)

What is a portrait?