art as visual language for awareness of self

Leonardo

Art as Visual Language for Awareness of SelfAuthor(s): Crystal WoodwardSource: Leonardo, Vol. 20, No. 3 (1987), pp. 225-229Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1578163 .

Accessed: 12/06/2014 20:02

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The MIT Press and Leonardo are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toLeonardo.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.79.52 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:02:16 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1578163?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Art As Visual Language for Awareness of Self

Crystal Woodward

Abstract-The author describes her 'Art as Visual Language for Awareness of Self' method from its beginnings in 'ground-works' and a 'calligraphy' mode of notation to the development of a complex 'basic-format' or grid, which forms the basis for a series of artworks. Acknowledging the impact of her encounter with the French Provencal landscape and tradition of working the land, she indicates that her method seeks to remind us of our origins and of our relationship with the natural environment.

< bork

:$ . ,,ni

A a owst AcirSe

. - . +

. ,

w4^ t?nA*'nf

A^^ ownASirs

Fig. 1. (a-left) Items from the walk: six items are chosen, drawn, and labeled (below). Then they are conceived of as object-like so that they can be assembled into a 'cluster' (above). (b-right) Each of the six items is given a calligraphic notation (below). In the calligraphy for the path winding downstairs (lower left), small 'accent marks' around the main part of the calligraphy represent my

body movement when descending this path. The total calligraphy is depicted above.

I. THE INFLUENCE OF RURAL SOUTHERN FRANCE ON MY ART

In 1978, I developed a system of visual language which I call 'Art as Visual Language for Awareness of Self. This visual language enabled me to integrate into the practice of art a range of domains that had interested me. Central to these domains was the question of the self in art. Although I have written about this system and teach classes on it [1], the primary vehicle of my research is my own artwork.

Crystal Woodward (artist, teacher), c/o G. Adrian, Lacoste, Vaucluse 84710, France.

Received 6 May 1986.

I have been an artist ever since I was very young. When I first went to France in 1975, my encounter with the landscape of Provence and the paysan (peasant) tradition had a strong impact on my art [2]. Before coming to France, I had been interested in an art in which the artist looked both outward and inward into the self. I had appreciated the Surrealists' efforts to awaken us to areas of the unconscious through artistic research; in my art I worked more from my imagination than from realistic studies, portraying persons, often in relationship. In France, however, I became interested in the natural surroundings of the small village where I lived. I was struck by the structural and variegated nature of the landscape and by the harmonious

relationship between the cultivated fields and the natural terrain. My interest in relationships shifted onto another plane, becoming more cognitive and perceptual rather than interpersonal. I began looking at structures of mind-relationships between thoughts, feelings and ideas- rather than at dynamics between people. My art became a vehicle for registering my experience of another culture and for exploring dimensions of self, both of the people-the peasants who had fashioned this beautiful landscape-and of myself in this situation. I believe that this experience carries a message both for artists and for those who are concerned with communicating values across different cultures.

? 1987 ISAST Pergamon Journals Ltd. Printed in Great Britain. 0024-094X/87 $3.00+0.00

LEONARDO, Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 225-229, 1987

;rd song

brook

. iII? -

* .*

C lot^d

p

,.Q-..



Llak-h#n i.n th e Mnfal,

aS ^ "Idea or senscxon.

?e,, or m dmori O one's

c%ktA hooa l of see n1.

voice

Speino ColuA.,nt

thg Dep*S ol one's ks't4

fe? on~es ses x .aAie y

Fig. 2. The items of the walk are correlated with aspects of the self or one's body (top); the total calligraphy is rearranged to represent a 'self-portrait' (bottom left); then the calligraphy form of the

'self-portrait' is placed within a rectangle and the lines extended to the borders (bottom right).

II. GROUND, CALLIGRAPHIES AND GROUND-WORKS

I wanted to find a way to register moments of experience, what I called 'events-of-seeing'. As I wanted both to acknowledge the visual experience of the landscape in which these moments arose and to express the meaning such moments carried, I felt I needed a mode of notation that would be somewhere between images and words-a visual language [3].

I was able to concretize my search by sitting on the earth, thus bringing elusive questions literally 'down-to-earth'. Sitting there, I cleared a small rectangle of earth before me and called this the 'ground'. Then, as an accompaniment (not just as decoration) to a train of thought, I either placed objects from nature-a twig, leaf, pebble-on this ground or drew a line in

the ground. As a way to remember these moves, I made simple marks on paper, which I called 'calligraphies'.

In the area of Provence where I live, there is a long tradition of the peasants relating to the earth. Even pre-dating this tradition were the prehistoric cave-dwellers and those who had built the stone 'bories', or igloo-like formations. I thought of them and of how they would have expressed themselves, without pencil and paper, perhaps even without a developed language. To me, the forms and lines made by the peasants in their work on the land are also a kind of language in which the self is expressed not with words but with actions and objects. I felt this was important for an artist to understand. I thought of the words of the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty: "Our view

of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action which breaks this silence" [4]. He also wrote that science "must return to the there-is which underlies it, to the site, to the soil of the sensible and opened world such as it is in our life and for our body" [5]. I was seeking this silence, this 'site and soil' where I could set in motion some first actions from which I could proceed to an awareness and to a language-in art- that would be other than superficial.

I called these actions on the earth 'ground-works'. From them, I evolved the basic stages of my visual language. I found that the drawings and the calligraphies of the objects engendered processes of association, which catalyzed my imagination and a thinking on several levels at once. In the origins of art, such manipulation of objects and pictographic notations were functional in mediation with the unknown: I wanted my art to be animated by this dimension of a search for meaning and for my place in the world. As various linguists have remarked, our verbal habits of language condition and limit our way of seeing the world [6]. I was seeking, via art as a vehicle of research, a way to decondition these language habits.

III. A WALK IN THE LANDSCAPE: DEVELOPING A 'BASIC-FORMAT'

My next step in developing my method was to take a walk in nature. The procedure for this was similar to the one for 'ground-works' and yielded step-by- step exercises and rules.

I choose five to seven objects during one of these walks. They can be non- visual objects, such as sound, or inner objects, such as feelings; but they must be linked to and represented by items in the natural setting of the walk. I then draw the objects (Fig. la), give each a calligraphic representation (Fig. lb, bottom) and group them into a total calligraphy of the walk (Fig. lb, top). The objects are given designations (Fig. 2) which relate to aspects of the self or the body so that, once assembled, they can be regarded as a 'self-portrait'; the self-portrait is illustrated as 'object cluster' in Fig. la (top), and its calligraphy form in Fig. 2.

Figures 2, 3 and 4 help clarify subsequent steps involving another important part of my procedure, the concept of the 'gap'. The self, in its object- cluster form, is considered to 'lose' a self- or body-part; this part-one of the original items from the walk-is removed from the others, thus forming a negative

Woodward, Art As Visual Language

0

1

-11 I

1---IP7

7lia -r-.

4. 0

_ __

I - I

226



space, or gap, between the self and the lost part. By way of a colored retrieval line (colored to indicate energy), the self tries to retrieve the lost part (Fig. 3, left). The 'shape of the gap' (Fig. 3, right) is derived by imaginatively adding together the shape of the negative space between the self and the lost part and the main contours of the retrieval line. In this instance, the retrieval line zig-zags its way across the gap back to the self; there it ascends the 'spinal column' and, arriving at the 'thought', it radiates in six directions. Thus, the shape of the gap represents the sum of the experience of loss, gap and retrieval.

I then superimpose the extended self- portrait calligraphy on the shape of the gap to form the 'basic-format' (see Fig. 4). This superimposition requires interaction and mutual compromise between the background colored (shaded) areas and the foreground lines of the grid. I modify slightly both the grid lines and the colored areas to reach my desired result, in which all the colored areas are bordered by grid lines. The resulting 'basic-format' is a grid of lines invested with many levels of meaning including the walk and its objects, my self and my thoughts and body, the calligraphies and the gap.

These steps have a concrete, nearly computational quality to them; yet at the same time, they embody and allow the person carrying them out to focus on the diffuse and elusive aspects of the self's experience. The gap, for example, represents the unknown, be it another person or culture, unfamiliar territory or some previously veiled aspect of oneself. These visually enacted steps-from placing the self-part at a distance, to retrieval, to the development of the basic-format- signify not just a retrieval but the achievement of a higher level of integration; for the experience of the gap is integrated into the self, as represented by the mutual interaction seen in Fig. 4. It is

Fig. 3. The 'self-portrait' in its object form (left) is depicted as losing a part of its self or body (in this instance, the voice). A 'gap' is thus opened. The self attempts to retrieve the lost part by using a colored retrieval line (zig-zag line in the figure). As a summary of this experience of loss and retrieval, the

'shape of the gap' is drawn (right).

this higher level of integration depicted in the basic-format that then is used in a series of new contexts.

IV. A DYNAMIC VOCABULARY OF VISUAL LANGUAGE CONCEPTS

Pouring-in, Superimpositions, Intersections and Sums

To use the basic-format in new contexts, I 'pour' other concepts into it. Thus another kind of superimposition of two realities or times is enacted visually, as I take the basic-format as a receptacle-an already formulated reality-and pour into it another, subsequently found or experienced reality. For example, in 1978 I poured into this same basic-format both the landscape and the ideas engendered by a trip to Uzbekistan, in the U.S.S.R., where I was attending a scientific conference. In my drawing The Four Elements (Fig. 5), the grid lines and the enclosed spaces represent the cell membrane and cellular areas as well as scenes of the Samarkand mosques (the basic- format can be seen to suggest a minaret shape and the calligraphies to suggest the Arabic writing on the mosques). Thus is formed, within the French walk receptacle, a multiple superimposition of times and

Fig. 4. The 'shape of the gap' is placed as background to the extended calligraphy grid (left). This superimposition, with modification of the basic elements, results in the 'basic-format' (right).

realities. To me, this visually represents perceptual and emotional levels of the self interacting with neurophysiological levels.

In this drawing, I also introduced other concepts such as the 'sum of the intersection of lines' in the basic-format grid. Each line carries the meanings that were invested into it during the development of the basic-format. With a newly poured-in reality, one such line can now mean, for example, 'scattered light' and 'idea' plus the cell membrane and a light ray over the mosque. Or when a line intersects a line extended from the calligraphy for 'brook', or 'life energy', a 'summary meaning' can be imagined. In this drawing, four such 'sums' represent the four elements-air, earth, fire and water.

Matching, and Sharing of Meaning In this method, I link concepts with

visual maneuvers, setting forth a basic vocabulary. Starting with the actions on the ground, I arrive at, for example, 'object', 'line', 'accent'. The grid of the basic-format gives rise to the concepts of pouring-in, superimposition, intersection and sum; and with subsequent pourings- in, further concepts evolve and are given visual formulation. For example, I may consider that the grid, instead of being located on a planar surface, is in a volume of space, and I draw it accordingly. Then I search the landscape for a view that 'matches' this drawing and draw that view within the basic-format. This concept of 'matching' focuses my attention on correspondences between formulations in my own art and forms and structures in the landscape. When I seek to resolve an intersection of lines and its sum, or a shape or configuration in one of my drawings, I do so with an accompanying regard for my environment. Thus an amplification of the matching concept is that of the 'sharing of meaning' between self and other-than-self. Just as I was able to extend the calligraphy lines to the borders of a rectangle (see Fig. 2), so too

Woodward, Art As Visual Language 227



one's sense of self can be extended to include a sense of connection and sharing with others and with nature and the landscape.

V. SELF AS ARISING FROM THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

As I engage in these step-by-step exercises, I also consider the notion of the sense of self as arising through the evolving relationship of living creatures with nature, culminating with the relationship between humans and nature. Figure in the Landscape (Fig. 6a) illustrates how this method provides a visual forum for these ideas. In this drawing, I 'found' a man seated within the basic-format; that is, I created him by seeing whether I could 'find' his feet, hands and so on within the grid-lines (Fig. 6b). In fact, finding the various elements of this figure was one of the rules I had set for formulation of the drawing. One of his hands was 'found' within, or brought forth from, the calligraphies of the bird song (or voice), brook (or life energy) and other lines and the space created between these lines. Such an origin invests the resultant gesture of the hand with a fuller meaning,

an implication of other times and modes of relatedness contained within the present. Also I engaged here a rule whereby objects can be inserted at intersections: the original six items of this particular walk, in their object form, were inserted into the drawing's 'ground', i.e. the grid of the basic-format, transformed into the conjunction of man and landscape. Thus they serve as props, to further articulate this figure's relationship to his environment. He represents one of the paysans I know in southern France.

VI. LANDSCAPE DRAWINGS AS 'MOLECULES OF THOUGHT'

During 1978-79, as I spent more time in the countryside of Provence, I started seeing views that reminded me of molecular structures. This gave me the idea for a landscape drawing that would be a 'molecule of thought'. In 1979, I drew five 'landscapes' using this approach. First, I created five different basic- formats, one for each landscape. Then I correlated the shape of the gap, inherent to the formation of each of the five landscapes, with a body-part. Through associations suggested by the shapes of

Fig. 5. The Four Elements, colored pencils and ink on paper, 4'2 X 4/2 in, 1978. The drawing represents on one hand the cell membrane and its permeability to some but not all molecules (hence, biochemical reactions are represented by fire [left] and air bubbles [right] at the cell border) and on the other hand the nighttime view of Samarkand, with light rays projected over the mosques, as arranged by my hosts,

the Russian scientists.

the gaps, I formulated five 'landscapes' including the Landscape of the Heart, Landscape of the Hand and Landscape of the Leg Bone. As with other of my works, I inserted at various intersections in each of the five 'landscapes' the 'four elements' to represent either facets of my experience in each landscape or places in each landscape where air, earth, fire and water had some particular pertinence or poignancy-or some coincidence between the former and the latter.

Then, I took the five 'molecules of thought' in their object or body-part form-hence a recapitulation plus vari- ation of the self-portrait 'cluster' of the walk-sequence-and assembled them in two different ways, one to represent a man and the other a woman. These 'molecules' were combinations of thought, of lived experience in the landscape, of my relationship with others and of my reflection on all of these things rendered in colors, ink and visual language.

VII. FROM 'SKELETIZING OF EXPERIENCE' TO THE 'FLESH OF

SPACE'

In 1981, I started using my visual language method in oil painting. In these paintings, I sought to match a landscape view with the basic-format sufficiently so as both to effect and depict a 'pouring-in' of that view into the basic-format.

This pouring-in of new concepts into the basic-format resulted initially in a series of about 20 drawings (1978-80) which I feel embody the fundamental ideas and methodology of this approach. These plus the initial steps toward the development of the basic-format I refer to as the 'format-sequence'. When I began using oils, I made another some 20 paintings. Whereas a discipline of main- taining the basic-format had been my idea when I first developed my visual language method, I now permitted myself modifications to adapt to new experience. Thus, in the oil paintings the basic-format is often disguised or embedded in the landscape view-it is only elusively evident.

In Le Bouquet d'Arbres (Color Plate No. 3), the 'bouquet of trees' is found between the two villages depicted in the painting; it has been modified in shape to match the basic-format. One can see the resemblance to the basic-format in the forms of the trunks and branches and the shadows behind. The seated woman was derived from the shape of the bird-song (voice) calligraphy, and the serpent (center) from the path-winding-downstairs (spinal column) calligraphy. The principal per- spective of the fields and surrounding

Woodward, Art As Visual Language 228



Fig. 6. (a-left) Figure in the Landscape, colored pencils and inks on paper, 14Y2 x 132 in, 1980. (b-right) This diagram shows how I found, by surprise, that the basic-format could house this seated figure.

landscape is also derived from extensions of the basic-format lines.

In 1982, I experimented with putting the basic-format into a painting not only once but two or three times; and in 1983, I1 allowed the basic-format to 'melt' and my treatment of the forms to become more painterly.

My way of working is to spend all day in the countryside working in front of my subject. In Provence, this is possible for most of the year, once one learns how to hide from the mistral, the heat and other elements. I have worked with the same landscape since 1975, studying views from different angles and as my state of mind varies and the seasons change. The forms and configurations of this landscape seem to me like letters of an alphabet that can be forever combined into different words and sentences. This context has been the 'site and soil' of my inquiry into how I see and how I know my world. My art is the vehicle of search-through listening, exploring, responding to and creating-whereby I strive to learn what this landscape is saying.

In my approach there is a movement toward language-the 'skeletizing of experience' of which Cassirer wrote [8]- and a movement that turns that formu- lating back out on experience. Whereas my drawings are more pensive, my oils tend to be more corporeal, embodying a sense of the 'flesh of space' and, in turn, catalyzing that sense as I redirect my attention to the lived spaces of my environment. Since there are correspondences between works in a series, it is optimal to see the works together. Recently, I have used this approach while working closely with poetry and while taking other landscapes as a source for the basic-format (e.g. Greece, 1985).

VIII. CONCLUSION

This is not an easy epoch for art. The invention of photography raised the question of the purpose of painting. Now this question has become more acute with the sophistication of computers that can create synthetic, digital images. Using the 'Art as Visual Language for Awareness of Self' method in a rural, old-world setting causes one to look at values, both artistic and personal, that come to us from the past; it does so in a way that I feel helps us appreciate our origins and hence equips us better to see the present. I find that the study of images as language and the concept of visual languages are pertinent to contemporary research in such fields as linguistics and science. But in these researches, Merleau-Ponty pointed out, there may be insufficient acknowledge- ment of the basic ground from which we have arisen. Our language and our art grew out of a relatedness to the natural environment and to each other in learning to survive in that environment. As art approaches science, there is the temptation to limit one's view, for technological or conceptual efficiency; but the greater challenge is to maintain art's capacity to illuminate, where other disciplines may not, and to communicate on a level higher than the 'chatter of words'.

In 1976, when I first felt the impact of my exposure to a tradition in which peasants still felt close to the soil, I admitted to a blindness: my seeing and my art were going to have to awaken to currents of this relatedness of which I had been unaware. My formulation of the 'Art as Visual Language' method has been my response to that demand.

REFERENCES AND NOTES

1. Since 1977, I1 have been teaching a course

on "The Self in Art and Nature" as part of an American arts program in France. I formulated this course to present my visual language approach to others. In 1984, I wrote a doctoral dissertation on this subject, as well as an interdisciplinary curriculum for advanced studies on the topic.

2. The word paysan (peasant) carries a different connotation in French than in English. From the French word pays (country), if someone is du pays that can mean 'from around here' or 'from this land'. There is a certain pride in being a paysan and du pays among the persons I have met.

3. Other artists have worked with the idea of visual language. Klee and Kandinsky both wrote manuals that could be viewed as exposes of their philosophy of art as visual language; Mir6 moved from a representational style to a more calligraphic one. These artists have been an inspiration to me. However, my interest in correlating aesthetic forms with questions of self and mind and in finding a 'language' for the inarticulated meaning of the peasant/landscape reality I found in Provence has led me to a different approach, as have ideas from science, the study of language and the discipline of meditation.

4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge & Paul, 1962) p. 184.

5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind", in M. Merleau-Ponty Primacy of Per- ception, James M. Edie, ed. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1964) p. 160.

6. See for example, Benjamin Whorf and Edward Sapir, in Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, John B. Carroll, ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982) p. 134.

7. Through my work in visual language, I developed a mode of research on the creative process not only in art but in science and thus wrote a study (1983) on "Aesthetics and Self in the Work of a Scientist", concerning my father, an organic chemist.

8. Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth (New York: Dover, 1953) p. 98.

Woodward, Art As Visual Language

e..;

229



No. 1. Top left. Gloria DeFilipps Brush. Untitled (2356.1), original image on Polaroid film, gelatin silver print with handcoloring, 24 x 30 in, 1986.

No. 2. Top right. Jean Kapera. Demain temps doux et nuageux, luminous newspaper; perforated kraft paper bands, transparent plastic sheet support, colored inks, intermittent back illuminations; 1.5 X 1.35 m; 1965.

No. 3. Center left. Crystal Woodward. Le Bouquet d'Arbres, oil on board, 16 X 132 in, 1981.













No. 4. Bottom left. Samia Halaby. For Niihau from Palestine (detail), acrylics on canvas and wall, 1985. The complete work measures 14 x 18 ft.

No. 5. Bottom right. Martin Richardson. English Oak, reflection hologram, silver halide on 8 X 10 ft glass plate, 1982. (Collection of the

Museum of Holography, New York)















art as visual language for awareness of self

Documents