12. Let your demon speak
Art (1)
I keep coming back to life drawing being SUCH A WEIRD ACTIVITY. Here’s a snippet by Russell Lumb (see his pics in Suki’s Gallery 2010-12) taken from the 21 June 2012 Redbrick Mill blog:
‘At the 6.30pm whistle, I am alone with the model and my materials… the banter […] replaced by the delicious, familiar fear of the life room’ (my emphasis). It’s like Chris Murray speaking of ‘terror’. WEIRD.
Can someone tell me what life-drawing is like in China? Or in Africa, or elsewhere? Or is life-drawing – this eccentric, obsessive activity – primarily to be found in Great Britain? Is this intense anxiety about drawing the human form peculiarly British?
Life (1)
Let the ‘demon’ or the ‘other voice’ inside you have legitimacy: let it manifest as a character on the stage of your life. Let it speak. Have that conversation – that argument – between your self and your other self in front of an audience. Let your psychosis become a piece of theatre. That way it will be watched and understood by others and will be seen for what it is, rather than being something that its witnesses would otherwise fear.
The above is a rough paraphrase of what writer, director, artist, drama therapist and multi-media creator Douglas Thompson said in a conversation we had about an inspiring international mental health movement, Soteria, after my modelling session at Bradford’s Delius Arts Centre…
Art (2)
When I turn up at the Delius Arts Centre for my two-hour life-modelling booking, Doug says – we’ve decided we want you to respond to Jarman‘s final movie, ‘Blue‘, tonight. Do us a series of short poses. You decide. Do what you feel.
‘Blue’ is already being projected onto a screen in the main hall. A horseshoe of half a dozen people, sans easels, sans art materials, are staring at it (the whole movie is just a blue screen with a voice-over of Jarman’s terminal thoughts). Are they artists? Are they students? Are they shoppers?
It is 6.30pm. I must begin. I must earn my pay. In the centre of the horseshoe I pull off my frock. I turn blue from the projection onto the screen, which now has my shadow on it. I strike poses according to what I hear. The words are poetic and, as I move through poses for the first hour, increasingly harrowing. More people wander in. Some draw me.
I am good at being still but I am rubbish at acting. I may or may not be managing to express increasing physical and emotional ravagement. I am Suki the Life Model trying to look like Derek Jarman dying of AIDS.
Have other life models ever been put on the spot like this?
Life (2)
If I go mad, the ‘Soteria way’ is how I want to be looked after, ok?
In the UK the Soteria movement stems from a speaking tour eight years ago by California-based psychiatrist the late Loren Mosher, who advocated more humane, non-coercive mental health services, minimal use of anti-psychotic drugs, and therapeutic living environments for people with experience of psychosis. ‘We believe that people can and do recover from difficulties which tend to be categorised under the term psychosis. This recovery can be with, without and sometimes despite psychiatric intervention’.
Are there any ‘recoverers’ reading this prepared to say how you ‘recovered’? Did you get ‘Soteria’-style support?
Or was it just sheer inner strength?
Does recovery depend on having the personality/ will-power to press on and come out the other side?
The Soteria baton here in the north of England is being carried by clinical psychologist Rufus May . The Bradford group is fund-raising to set up a household where adults with a schizophrenia diagnosis may live in a ‘surrogate family’ environment. Employed workers will be non-intrusive and non-controlling but rather, in an actively empathetic relationship with the psychotic person, will facilitate his/her maximum autonomy. It is said that workers are likely to be better at this job if they don’t have a mental health training at all and don’t carry the learned baggage of institutionalizing methods. Workers need to simply ‘be with’ – to the fullest degree possible – the person they are supporting. Email info@bradfordsoteria.org
Art (3)
See below the aforementioned dynamo, Mr Douglas Thompson. As manifested at my birthday party.
*God’s Own Country
Life (3)
Mindriddles is the name of an award-winning UK blog journal by the father of a son diagnosed with schizophrenia. Subtitled ‘Schizophrenia – a carer’s journal’, it details seven years of this adult child’s life – and obliquely, the lives of the caring, care-worn parents. It is repetitive. It has to be. It illustrates an unending cycle, in this young man’s case, of crises, changes in treatment (read ‘drugs’), changes in accommodation (more secure, less secure, a higher fence, a lower fence then back to a higher fence), changes of doctors and professionals… It is wearying and tragic to read. It is also a brilliant read – though you have to skip through fast, because of the fact of the repeated cycles… more of the same, more of the same. The boy does not get better. The journal ends mid-story. Seven years in. It must be ongoing.
Love
Secret Lover is currently unavailable.
But part-time is actually good. Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder. No, really. It’s really good.
Living alone
Frankly I cannot imagine I’ll ever experience psychosis. My affliction is depression.
Isn’t that everybody’s affliction?
I get depressed because of loneliness; also because of lack of success and therefore lack of self-worth and of course in the end because of the pointlessness of everything.
I am a pleb. My experience of depression represents that of millions.
I always thought, if I had my own children’s mouths to feed, that would be an indisputable ‘point’, a raison d’etre… But then Sylvia Plath still topped herself.
Do creative people have more reason to get depressed?
Is this another can of worms?
This week’s pic: Roger Hitchin
OLD COMMENTS
These were the 20 Responses from the original blog. They have been copied here to the newly revised website. It is possible to add further comments below
Hi
I am one of those who do life-drawing. I have never known why I do it but am interested in what people say about ‘why,’ and then seeing if it rings true.
What do others say about why they do it?
Words like weird, obsessive, eccentric, anxiety, fear; also making funny noises (I suspect I sigh, though like snoring I am not aware of it)… what can this tell us?
Lots more to say.
Any ideas?
Pat
I like drawing people, particularly life-drawing, because the practice converts interaction with people at its usual break-neck pace, replete with difficult interactions or their tedious narratives, into something more manageable for my senses. I’ve found I’ve always liked people more if I’ve drawn them: I begin to understand them more than listening to and piecing together their statements about themselves, their opinions, etc.
In terms of art, people are wonderful as objects; in terms of anthropology, people are wonderful as subjects.
I like drawing models, because if I draw intensely, fuelled by the ‘terror’ of the studio, I tend to go into a mild trance; and I go to a mental space which is definitely my own. With other people, you cannot relax your mind about keeping them focussed, at least until they’ve relaxed into the pose.
I think if you have friends who are willing to sit for you, you are mightily blessed. All the more so if you have artist friends who can understand the concentration involved. For goblins without either, I find ‘Google’ ‘images’ ‘similar’ sort of finds me an ersatz model.
If things are going badly, and if I feel negative vibes from the tutor if partaking in a class, I tend to grin fixedly, and make small snorty noises. When things are going well, my sense of sound seems to diminish considerably, neither making noise or hearing much around me.
Those are my feelings and thoughts.
Art for a long time has reflected the stressful environments in which it has been conceived…
Thanks Pat and Nic for your responses. I wonder, Pat, whether Nic’s behaviour in the life room, varying from trance-like state to snorty noises to deaf-muteness, rings any bells for you?
As to the link between your illustration, Nic, and my ongoing bee-in-bonnet about artiness and madness… This imagining of wild mythical creatures is perhaps you ‘letting your inner demon speak’…? Or do you have little demons running around under your feet…?
And that elephant is definitely on neuroleptic drugs.
How to kill a joke: I just thought that there must have been occasions in times immemorial when kids around the place drove the adults mad… In this case, scribbling three-legged pink mammoths below the family’s best cave paintings… Inspired by a youngster’s TPM seen this morning in Wandsworth Museum. They’re not my inner daemons – they’re currently being placated with rich tea biscuits and a mug of coffee.
Apologies, I wrote in haste:
“They’re not my inner daemons – they’re currently being placated with rich tea biscuits and a mug of coffee.” Meaning, the cave painting animals (including the TPM) are not my inner daemons. My actual inner daemons are currently being placated with rich tea biscuits and coffee.
Yes , I am just trying to explain why I/other people do life drawing. At the moment I am reading stuff about Lacan and his theories of lack, the other and always trying to obtain the unobtainable. Some of what Lacan says would explain the psychic energy involved in terror and trance.
It also explains loneliness by the way.
Just trying to find the ideas and the words and willing to risk being incoherent on the way!!
Inconsistency and incoherence are my fortes, Pat.
re artiness and madness. There is a cultural link I believe between artiness and madness especially with male artists – it comes out in the ‘genius artist’ figure. Van Gogh is the prime example. This link may well be cultural and motivated.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbW8faVPHAI
Griselda Pollock talks about Van Gogh.
Just to make the joke clear. I see it as a scene of parental exasperation. If others wish to see it as narrow-minded patriarchy attacking the creativity of the young female artist, so be it…
Thanks Pat and Nic for these responses. Pat – I clicked on your link to Griselda Pollock talking about Van Gogh but it made my PC crash – TWICE. I so wanted to see what Griselda looks like now. She was teaching Art at Leeds Uni when I was studying theology there. I guess she is about 115.
I need a new PC. I need a deus ex machina to step in and just give me one. But that only happens in Shakespeare’s plays.
Nah, Grizzy’s only 63. I attach a photo culled from google (the one on the right – “when shall we three meet again”). The clip is from her 1990 documentary on VG – the clips are enormously large, so it would have been a herculean task for an ordinary pc anyway.
I have been to a life drawing class in Japan, if that’s any help. It was on the top floor of a department store in Nagasaki. It was also remarkably similar to any class here. The other students were initially slightly surprised that a big bald gaijin had come along to draw too, but would probably have been even more surprised if I’d been the model. Or maybe not – I usually get asked if I’m the model on joining a new class for some reason. I must just not look like an artist ;(
But all the familiar elements were there, the remarkably serene model, a teacher with a beard and a beret (it’s very important to look the part in Japan, which is maybe where I’m going wrong. I always looked more like an off duty marine from the American base) and a bunch of new artists with the rabbit caught in the headlights look they get. I think it’s more fear of having to draw in public on big easels where everyone can see, rather than the ‘shock of the nude’.
It was, of course, not particularly Japanese, but rather a copy of how a life drawing class works in the West. But even here they do have a bit of an affected etiquette to them.
BEARD AND BERET! How fabby is that. Wouldn’t it be GREAT if in the life rooms of England, artists were all in artists’ costumes. Men in smocks. Women in… smocks too. Berets galore. There’d be such a sense of occasion, of theatre…
But I’d have to look like her off of Dejeuner Sur L’herbe then wouldn’t I; I couldn’t get away with being an androgynous middle-aged scrawn-bag.
The beard and beret were a nice touch, I agree. I can’t remember if he was also wearing a smock, but a bow tie seems to be forming in my memory now too. It might be an intruder, trying to exaggerate the scene.
There was definite smockage at the event however.
I think the theatre elements can be a mixed blessing for newbie artists. It does set the scene, but at the same time there’s the sense of the artists having to perform too; big public easels where everyone can see all the mistakes you’ve made, and just how much attention you’ve put into drawing that scrotum. And once you get a dress code and etiquette, it starts getting cliquey and only proper artists in smocks will be allowed.
I say, only proper artists in smocks should be allowed.
(-:
I’d wear a kilt if I could afford one!
I draw ‘Life-Models’ ’cause one day I might get it right – but because I am learning to ‘see’ and not just ‘look’, I constantly see that I’m not getting it right, well not just yet, perhaps in another ten years or so… I do, do this trance-like thingy.
Some people just get it right and then some – I saw Jenny Saville’s solo exhibition in the Modern Art Oxford Gallery last week – Her drawings! Coo, fab, inspirational (forgot to buy the catalogue – numpty). It’s on until the 16th of September and well worth the £80 in diesel to get there and back… I shall buy the catalogue online…
Doing this life-drawing lark helps me to ‘see’ even when I work digitally on my trusty mac (there, I’ve said it – DIGITAL ! ) I have no problem with working across platforms as it were – What ever hammer knocks the nail in.
Here’s one I did earlier.
Thanks for putting up your controversial-because-digital life-drawing. Use of digital media/photography/technology by artists: this is a big subject which throw up many issues. There are Luddites out there. I am going to have this as a topic later this year…
I, too, am off to see that Jenny Saville exhibition in Oxford in a few days – yey!
It’s the best exhibition I’ve seen in a long time!
Have a beer and sarnie in the Royal Blenheim, on the corner next door, its one of my favorites.
The title for the above piece is ‘Agatha & Bertie in Calculus Perpetuus’.
Blow it up really big and have a gander at the pixels. Ta.
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12. Let your demon speak — No Comments
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