Claude Heath

Don't Look Now

Tom Lubbock

‘The Independent’ 08/10/2002 

Claude Heath is a representational draughtsman. He draws such subjects as heads and hands, fruits, flowers and fountains. He works mainly in outline, tracing the forms of these things. Often he makes these drawings into paintings also. But a first sight of his images, for example the work now showing at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, can be baffling. What they're of, how they arrive at what they look like, is almost beyond recognition.
Heath drawings look like various things - high-density doodles, computer printouts bearing multi-dimensional information, the results of a drawing- while-taking-drugs experiment. But you don't need to look at them long to see that they are, at least, not free-form abstractions. These intense, hairball tangles of spidery lines, often in several different colours, seem to grope their way towards some kind of legibility or materialisation. They have their eye on something. Or is it their eye?

It is not. Heath draws blind. (He's not blind.) Now in his late thirties, for about a decade he has been carefully not looking at things. In many of his pictures the object being drawn is out of sight, known only by hand's touch. Heath's traceries of lines record the tactile, three-dimensional contours of the subject. And in all of them the drawing itself is made is out of sight, the image composed by the hand's spatial sense, and they generally still bear a small lump of Blu-Tak, used for keeping bearings. Object is transferred to paper without any mediation of the eye - no visual recognition, no visual observation - and sometimes in complete ignorance of what it is.

There is a series of pictures in the show called Epstein's Hand, where the subject was a cast of the hand of the sculptor Jacob Epstein, which was given to the artist unseen, a mystery object and an appropriate one obviously, a hand to be deciphered by hand. These images are, in fact, among the easiest to identify. Fingers and thumb stick out pretty clearly, and the hand is often seen, or rather not seen, but (shall we say) presented, at an angle which makes its hand-shape most plain, thumb out at one side. But then, if you wonder whether you're looking at the front or the back of the hand, you realise that, oddly, there's no way of knowing.

Drawing from touch carries a quite different body of knowledge from drawing by eye. There is no light or shade, for one thing - a big difference, because even in the most linear eye-drawing light and shade make themselves felt. And even though the object may be presented from a particular aspect, there is no angle of vision in the visual sense. An object seen always has a profile, a visible edge, the line of its shape as it stands out silhouetted against the world behind it. An object felt has any number of contours running over its surface, but none of them has the special status of this profile.

Or again, in any view of an object there is large amount of that object's surface that cannot be seen. There's its far side, its back. There's whatever of its near side is concealed behind some other part of it. Drawing by eye always deals with these restricted visibilities. But drawing from touch has no such limits. It has no prejudice in favour of near side over far side, or in front of over behind. It deals indiscriminately with the whole tangible surface. On paper, all contours superimpose in confusion.

Heath uses multicoloured lines partly to compensate for this, to distinguish sides and depths. In one picture, where the subject is an early, figurative Anthony Caro sculpture, the contours of the near side are marked in yellow and those of the far side in red (and yellow clearly overlaps red, so here back and front can be distinguished). In other pieces, different line colours stand for the tactile sounding of different levels of an object - at least, I think that's what is going on, though it doesn't seem to work quite like the heights-above-sea-level contours of a map.

But equally, there are many images where the lines are all one colour, and you must attempt your own discriminations. Sometimes, as in an image of vertebrae, the contours are economical enough to provide a pretty legible lobster-pot diagram. Elsewhere, as in images of a head - a live head? I'm not sure - there's such a dense cloud of overlaid multiple readings that, while you know that there's knowledge in there, it's almost impossible to disentangle. And that is where the force and fascination of these pictures lies, the way a pursuit of patient exploration hits the limit of what you can get your head round.

Heath's basic procedures are in some ways staples of traditional art education. It's normal enough for students in a drawing class to be asked to trace to contours while not looking at the paper, or to draw something from touch unseen. Indeed, a kind of recipe for Heath's touch images can even be found in William Hogarth's book The Analysis of Beauty, written 250 years ago. To get a solid sense of things, Hogarth recommends that we imagine them scooped out hollow, so that "nothing is left but a thin shell, exactly corresponding both in its inner and outer surface to the shape of the object itself; and let us likewise suppose this shell to be made up of very fine threads". The object is reduced to a web of lines corresponding to its surface. A sensible tip for 3D imagining.

But Heath's work resists clear sense. It never fully translates. It seems to carry with it the groping darkness in which it was made, as if what was intelligible there can never emerge into the light of visibility. But really, it isn't literal darkness or blindness that they convey, so much as the incapacity of the mind truly to grasp things solid in space, to know its way around the world with the constant anchor of a point of view. The knowledge embodied in these images is knowledge that we're just not up to using.

Recent Heath pieces have made other forays into unusable knowledge. Leaving behind the relatively compact solid objects that his earlier work was based on, his new subjects are models of complexity and fluidity. He has, for example, drawn plants while looking at them, but used both hands simultaneously to draw them from two different angles on two different surfaces, so that each hand was at any moment drawing the same part of the plant. The drawings in question are displayed at right angles to one another, corresponding to their angle on the plant. But to try to interleave them into their single absent subject...

And he has drawn a small fountain by putting a finely gridded wire mesh through the spouting water at various levels, and noting by touch which squares of the grid have water passing through them and which don't, and recording this on a piece of graph paper, to produce a series of fountain sections, where - if you check the notation - you'll find different marks to represent where the water is spurting up through the grid and where it's falling back down. The most normal pleasure, a hand held in a playing fountain, is translated into a map whose information is almost beyond processing. These images don't just show the world from some kind of unusual angle. They show the human mind, its limits, and its weird ability to outstretch itself.

 

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