Introducing the Culture Collective’s Drawing Anatomy Workshop

Learning @ Whitworth

The Culture Collective: Learning with Research is a collaborative series working with University of Manchester research students.  Drawing Anatomy brings together scientists and artists to explore the relationship between art and science, working together to gain a better understanding of anatomy.  For this session, Karlina Ozolina and Naomi Billingsley used their cutting edge research to bring a unique perspective to anatomy.  Karlina’s research is based around how environmental factors influence the movement of fish and Naomi’s research explores the works of artist William Blake in particular his images of Jesus Christ.

Art and Textiles students from Loreto College took part in the first session where they made several drawings from Manchester Museum’s collections in the Living Worlds and Nature’s Library galleries.  The drawings were very playful with quick sketches using limited movement and their non-dominant hands to make marks.  The students made large-scale life drawings from a model and they…

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All manner of bodies

If ever another b-word vied for dominance in my current vocabulary over the name of a certain artist, “bodies” is currently putting up a good fight.

 

As mentioned previously, I’m involved in organising a postgraduate symposium called “Untouchable Bodies?” which will explore how interact with bodies (in various senses) and the social, political, ethical, religious and other constraints and concerns which influence these encounters. The event is on Friday (at the wonderful John Rylands Library), so we’ve been finalising details like how to structure the discussions around the Special Collections items we’re using, as well as more banal logistics like catering (accommodating the various bodily needs/choices of our delegates’ diets!).

 

I’m also involved in Manchester’s strand of the Research Councils UK ‘Schools and Universities Partnership’ as a ‘PhD Demonstrator’ for the Whitworth Art Gallery. My role is to deliver workshops, together with a science PhD researcher, on “Drawing Anatomy.” This will explore anatomy from both scientific and artistic approaches, and will in part be shaped by our own research interests.

 

As the Whitworth Art Gallery is currently closed, we are using the Manchester Museum as our venue. On Monday, we had a training session to develop the workshop, working with Denise Bowler (Secondary & Post-16 Coordinator at the Whitworth) and artist Sarah Sanders. We had fun trying to identify animals from their skeletons in the museum displays, and tried out various drawing activities. We have a trial session next month to test the workshop in action. Here is a piece of quick collaborative drawing – a monkey by me, to which Denise gave a friend:

 

 

Meanwhile, at Manchester Art Gallery, Grayson Perry’s tapestries have given way to an exhibition exploring twentieth-century sculpture and last week I spent a morning exploring it as part of a training day for the gallery’s volunteer guides (of which I am one). ‘Sculptural Forms: A Century of Experiment’ explores a broad range of sculptural practices in the twentieth century through three themes: ‘The Human Condition,’ ‘Abstraction’ and ‘Transformation.’

 

‘The Human Condition’ is obviously most pertinent to my interest in bodies. I’ll limit myself to mentioning two works here to avoid an overly-long post. The earliest work is the gallery’s cast of Rodin’s iconic ‘The Age of Bronze‘; first modelled in 1876, this work sparked controversy when it first appeared for its extremely life-like appearance (people thought that it had been cast from life), not conforming to the formal, idealised types of human figures which had dominated the art of sculpture. Rodin made numerous casts of this work; Manchester Art Gallery’s was cast in 1911 and was specially commissioned by the gallery as the first sculptural work in the collection.

 

Nearby is Eric Gill’s ‘Sleeping Christ‘ (c.1924). I’m a bit of a fan of Gill’s work (in fact, I recently had an essay published on Gill’s Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral published by the Catholic Archives Society) so I was pleased to see this work on show. It also makes an interesting counterpoint to the Rodin for tour purposes – Gill championed ‘direct carving’ whereby the sculptor responds to the material s/he is working with to ‘find’ the form of the work within the material rather than first making a model (in clay, for instance) and he did not think much of Rodin. It seemed to go down quite well in my tour today.

 

Across the river in Salford, on Thursday night I went to the opening of another exhibition ‘Encountering Corpses‘ at Sacred Trinity Church which is part of a project at Manchester Metropolitan University. The exhibition features works by various artists which respond to the theme of death and the body. The launch put me in mind of Blake’s poem ‘The Little Vagabond‘ for the church was full of art, poetry, song, wine and spectacular cakes (see below). However, it was so busy that I barely managed to look at the works on display, but will be returning as part of ‘Untouchable Bodies?’ on Friday.

 

 

Finally, in thesis-land, I have been looking at Blake’s depictions of the crucifixion and therefore thinking about the ways he depicts Christ’s body on the cross and the implications this has for us as members of Christ’s corporate “Divine Body” (only accidentally well-timed for Lent). I’ll end with one example, Plate 76 of ‘Copy E’ of Jerusalem from the Yale Center for British Art (where I am excited to be going later this year):

 

 

Print made by William Blake, 1757-1827, British, Jerusalem, Plate 76, 1804 to 1820, Relief etching printed in orange with pen and black ink, watercolor, and gold on moderately thick, smooth, cream wove paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

British Drawing at the V&A

The last couple of days of my London trip included visiting the V&A. One of the significant areas of this museum’s vast collections is works on paper (indeed, a number of watercolours by Blake were among the things I went there to see). Such works are not suited to prolonged periods on display and as a result are among those which get rotated on a regular basis.

Currently showing is a display entitled “British Drawing 1600 to the Present Day” which explores various ways in which artists engage in the practice of drawing: both as process and as finished work; in different materials, and achieving different effects.

I’d clocked before my visit that there was a Blake drawing in this display, so that was a good reason to take a look. An Angel Striding among the Stars (1824-27) is an exploratory drawing for Blake’s illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy. The caption highlighted that in this drawing, Blake seems to be experimenting with the figure of the angel, stating that it “catches Blake in the act of creation.” This observation struck me as wonderfully playful; does the curator mean that this image not only is an example of Blake’s creative process but might also be a representation of the act of creation? In other words, is the angel a creator, and perhaps a kind of avatar of Blake, the creator. I might be reading too much into the caption, but the dynamic pose of the angel is precisely the kind of pose Blake associates with creative energy.

There was plenty else besides of interest in the display. There were three drawings by Samuel Palmer, one of Blake’s disciples known as the Ancients. Two pages from a sketchbook date from about 1824, roughly the time when Palmer first met Blake Landscape with a Church Spire and Sketches of woodland, trees and a hilly landscape. Another drawing depicts a Nocturnal landscape with full moon and deer (c.1829-30) is an intensely atmospheric drawing – one of many inspired by the landscape of his home in Shoreham in Kent. Palmer’s ‘visionary’ landscapes share something of Blake’s woodcuts for The Pastorals of Virgil (which I’ve written about for the John Rylands’ ‘Burning Bright‘ exhibition).

On a decidedly non-Blakean note was an Alexander Cozen’s ‘Blot’ drawing; Landscape study (ca.1750-86). Cozens created imaginary landscapes beginning with a blot which then became the basis for the scene. Blake famously denounced blots; unlike Cozens, who use blots as a stimulus to his imagination, Blake believed that blots were without form and therefore without meaning (see, for instance, his comments on the drawings of Thomas Williams Malkin).

Other figures in Blake’s circle featured include John Flaxman, Henry Fuseli and George Romney, and other Blake-inspired artists were George Frederic Watts, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Stanley Spencer, so there was plenty else to occupy a girl’s interest. If you’re in the area, I’d recommend a look (and it’s a lot quieter than much of the V&A, not to mention the nearby Science Museum and Natural History Museum).