Walk On, passing through an exhibition

Exhibition - Walk On: 40 years of Art Walking, Pitzhanger Manor House

The Walk Book and CD, Janet Cardiff, 2005. Walks in Paris, London, and New York.

I am sitting on a park bench in Ealing and switch on Janet Cardiff’s narrative. Instantly I am connected to her reality, she is sitting on a park bench, in the very different urban environment of Central Park, New York. She describes children on bikes passing by and exactly at the same moment children cycle past me, here in London. I listen to more descriptions but wander off in my mind as a cat has just approached and a group of people gather round to stroke it. A choir is practising: she explains’ I am very bad at linear working; I use an open ended narrative, skipping from one thing to another’. I listen to more fragments as she passes through the streets of New York and begins to distinguish memory from perception. ‘In pure memory the temporal sequence of events is shattered’. I agree with that but start to lose interest. No longer able to connect to her continuing observations, I realise that listening to this narrative is displacing me from being here, now. Police sirens pass in the distance, was it here, or there in Central Park? 

Janet Cardiff would like to ‘move a whole room like a time machine from London to New York’. I think she just moved a park.

Simon Pope, A Common Third

We meet walking artist Simon Pope, we cross the park and chat without really noticing what's around. He escorted us out of the park as his contribution in 'Walk On'. We re-enter and admire the blossom and trees on the way back. We sit at the kiosk, eat ice cream and people watch.

Drawing Without words  my  Post Graduate Forum talk

Making some recent drawings, I had to remind myself to study the object but look without recognition, to let go of any expectations of how it might look and just observe it as it really is. So to quieten the inner narrative I deliberately cut out thoughts of knowing what it is or looks like because that reading will lead the drawing and it will then look like the thing I expect to see.

 “Thought and language is not the same thing”
Professor Nancy Kanwisher.  From the Institute for Brain Research, in Massachusetts:

Kanwisher uses the metaphor of the brain as a “Swiss Army knife” containing a lot of different tools rather than a single all purpose tool.

Specialised regions for specific cognitive tasks have been discovered for the perception of faces, bodies, words and an area that specializes in processing places.

Recognition has no words it is wired straight to those brain hot spots.

Observation over a prior knowledge remains important to visual understanding and communication. A viewer will recognise an experience before being aware of what the actual event is, this instant interpretation is used continuously and reflects our inbuilt knowledge as we glimpse fragments throughout our everyday life.
 It is our brains that do the hard work to complete partial information and understand the things around us without us ever recognising this process.

Unconsciously working hard to complete the unfinished or ambiguous image, the brain is always searching for recognisable qualities. It’s how our brain sees everything, only later adding our knowledge, experience, memory and culture.

In the glimpse there is ambiguity and smudginess as opposed to the drier accuracy at the other end of the scale of the unambiguous, academic or technical drawing discipline.
The connections between seeing and drawing can become a constituent of an abstract image.

In “Great Drawings of the world “ the author, Una Johnson says:

“drawings are the result of the artists efforts to organise a vision whether it is visible or invisible to the naked eye, into a structural whole
This requires the ability to select and emphasise differing elements and eliminate inconsequential details”.

I use observation to understand visually not literally, looking for the differences between things, together with qualities like density and space that can inform an abstract drawing.

Meeting Stephen Farthing

Notes on a talk,
the italics are my thoughts

Stephen Farthing talking about his work as the CCW Research Professor in Drawing.

Starting with a small drawing of a sort of ancient fort or burial ground Farthing explained how he is trying to understand all drawing through making a map or plan about drawing itself. He initially placed fine art in a central position on the landscape and all other types spreading out, reaching towards the act of writing which is set near the horizon. He later moved fine art to the outer circle of importance.
Searching for ways to organise his ideas and locate areas of flow he developed a type of underground map to describe connections as a Taxonomy of Drawing.


He discussed drawing as 2D representation, showing an example of an aeroplanes flat, outlined shadow, that should not be classed as drawing because it is made unintentionally. However a vapour trail heart, constructed by two planes as they fly in arcs through exact planning and measurement is drawing. 

The heart image is a beautifully line, drawn in a transparent filigree the line dissolves in a fragile rhythmic pulse.


Drawings can be definitive or instructive, derived from observation, memory, mind and imagination. 

He gave an example of possibly the greatest drawing ever made, developed by a mathematician. An invented sundial that shadows the movement of planets, then translated into time using the kinetic element of a pendulum, this is made as a tonal drawing.

Sundial invention



 Originally drawings may have developed from scribbling but physical gesture is probably the real beginning.

Stephen Farthing is looking at all methods and reasons for drawing. His Taxonomy of Drawing divides into two.

Conceptual  -    Drawings that need to be read via the rule book:
Maps, football pitch, Maori tattoos, because they are complicated and need explanation to enable other cultures to decode them. Roads developing c1920 have become massive drawings when seen with a birds eye view, a highway code is required to understand them.
Where do pathways that mark out routes on the landscape fit here?

Pictorial -   Turner draws a boat on a choppy sea, the latter is signified by rhythmic marks, developed through a keen observation into his method of seeing the world.
We understand the boat as we have learnt to read edges of things, therefore the water is easily understood.

Turner's waves and boats sketch

Farthing’s map is a conceptual drawing but he also makes a pictorial version.

Two plan chests labelled Conceptual and Pictorial.
You can choose the correct chest to store any drawing in but first how do you decide if it is a drawing and to do this, is it important to know who the drawing is for?

To categorise, it is important to ask first what was the point of that drawing?

A question discussed later - Is labelling valid?

I wonder if there is a grey area between the two, in which drawer does the abstract drawing fit?