Walking avenue, tea pulling, trance dance, helicopter landing-pad

Sketching elements of perceptual consciousness

Abstract

The visual essay presents and discusses four sets of sketches that find commonality in the drawing-based artist’s concern with the observation of perception. All work was completed in Thailand although this is largely an incidental feature, since the sketches convey mainly generic interest in the human figure and/or the artist himself in movement. It may be said, however, that the individual nature of the situations had inspired the sketching. Concerning the first set, the artist walked the length of a beachside avenue with, in mind, the philosopher Husserl’s crossing of horizontal and transverse axes as one’s consciousness of time, piking up on instances of humans passing by and crossing his path. The second set, which is in response to Malay tea pulling, concerns more centrifugal movement, the theoretical reference in retrospect being to the philosopher Bergson’s idea of the ‘present image’. With the third set, in response to trance dancing, the artist suggests to some extent a filtering of the highly animated nature of the occasion into his own anxious attempts to make the sketches. With the fourth pair of sketches concerning his walking the length and back of a helicopter landing-pad, the artist indicates differences between perspective views as shown in snapshots of the location, and suggests how perception is both necessary to observation but is also its own subjectively constituted phenomenon. The essay ends with two larger sketches that visually demonstrate the sustaining issue of the previously referenced sketches discussed in the text.