Claude Heath

Claude Heath interviewed by William Furlong , 2003.

William Furlong: Was there a particular project that you had in mind before you started to make these drawings?

Claude Heath: Having worked on a water fountain as a way of tackling an open form, a natural thing was to consider these very delicate, very complex objects - ordinary house plants - which I bought locally, knowing that I was going to bring them to the studio and draw from them. Plants are semi-opened, semi-closed, very broken up, very complex things. So I arrived knowing that I wanted to draw the plants and to try this idea of drawing them from underneath, to draw in a tactile way, but using my eyes.

WF: You've made them by drawing on the other side of a sheet, on the side you can't see, or actually underneath the drawing table... I wondered if you could talk a little bit about what interests you in that kind of method?

CH: It's a mystery to me why I find it interesting. It's actually quite hard to talk about although I do have lots of things to say around it. But I can say that it creates a bit of a neutral space, it clears the ground as much as possible, it helps me to get rid of all the stuff that I think I want, and allows something else to happen.

WF: The Western tradition of art arises out of Renaissance concepts of looking at something, and a fixed picture plane that organises perception of the subject. You didn't actually come through art school, so you're not embroiled in that history, although obviously you know about it. You're not, therefore, recording something that you're looking at in a way that brings along the baggage of history with it, in terms of a frontal perception of that particular object.

CH: There's an interesting visual thing that happens where, if you have a lot of different perspectives or different senses working together, you get a foreshortening of all these experiences into one flat image. But they can somehow work with each other to produce an over-arching visual sensation. It is as if, while you're making the drawings, you have to drop your intellectual sensibilities. So you might have conflicting perspectives or senses in an image but you could still see that while each on their own makes a certain sense, when taken together the mind can actually interpret them in its own way.

WF: But when you're making a drawing, you can't actually make aesthetic judgements of it.

CH: Not of the drawing that I am making. But it's a step-by-step process: it might be that there is a certain point in the process where you have a very great clarity about something you want to put down. At other times, you just have to do the best you can. And it's those things that produce, all together, this conflict: there's no single point of view. It's as if the object has been conceived from many different points of view: thoughts and feelings about that object are there too. When I drew the Willendorf Venus, someone said "you couldn't possibly draw that just from touch only". Of course, that was like throwing down the gauntlet, so I had to try. But to draw it and then to turn the object became fascinating because the perspectives of this figure that was turning became very, very condensed. That also happened when I was doing a series of drawings blindfold, of objects I had never seen, and in some of the plant drawings as well, where you have a sense of looking at things through a different kind of prism. And that just interests me. It's how to arrive at a point where something like that can happen. You have to set up all these rather elaborate methodologies.

WF: It seems to me you're revealing something much more to do with an essential set of properties of the object you're working with and you're not, as has sometimes been said, at the mercy of the particular.

CH: That's true. But if you're using touch only, you're at the mercy of your fingertip which is the only thing you have in contact with the object. And the other hand is holding a pen, is making a mark. So there's not much sense of what's gone before or what's coming after. It's a lot of particularities all put in together.

WF: I think traditional representation isn't an issue for you. You practise another form of representation that has its own kind of competence. You feel, you touch the object, you process that information, and then you make a mark or you trace that sensory experience. Do you have a system, by which you then translate it into the hand that's making the mark?

CH: There's no particular logic, but before I start a drawing I know that I want to look for certain things: where the horizontal contours meet the verticals on a head, for example. So you start looking for things that might fit a category. But how you put that on to a sheet of paper, which is next to the object, is another thing. And maybe that's where the drawing arm and my attitude comes in, because I'll be looking for things already, but then selecting what to draw. So there's a filtering process: the objects are so complex that one couldn't put down everything there is to say about them.

WF: But you do actually move them round, don't you, 360 degrees?

CH: Yes, as if by drawing and turning the object while you're drawing it, you can then experience it really fully in the round. It's a way of coming to know something very well; you have to get to know it over a period of time. So, for instance, the Willendorf Venus: I drew it five times but turned it each time I drew it, and didn't look at the drawings until all were complete.

WF: In that case did you know what it was that you were drawing?

CH: I did, yes. And there is a point at which, if you draw an object for the first time, you are totally innocent about what this process is going to do for it. If you're drawing it for the second time or the third time, you're then into a different level of chance. But it's very often that first drawing - like the one of the tiger that was leaping - that contains the most possibilities. Whereas the later drawings maybe had become a bit more selective. So it's not as if I am always setting out to deal purely with raw chance. I'm actually setting myself the target of working with different kinds of chance and allowing them to interact with eachother, as you can see from the plant drawings.

WF: There's an interesting parallel with some forms of medical scanning, for instance - where you're taking a kind of a 360-degree view of an object. But it's not quite like that. Because you don't rotate objects by a mathematical set of principles: you're 'scanning' in an intuitive way, nevertheless.

CH: It's the choices that you can make beforehand, like where to start on the page; where to start on the object, too. Those are almost the mathematical, calculated part of the procedure, setting the givens for something to unfold from.

WF: How do you know when the drawing is finished or complete?

CH: "When do you stop and why?" Of course it's a good question. There's no real answer except to say that it's as if you're writing a letter and before you reread the letter you want to know if you've put everything in that you want to say to this person.

WF: But do you actually look at the drawing before you make that decision?

CH: No. Because then you'd lose your state of innocence about what you'd drawn. To then go back and add something would be a kind of tautology.

WF: But you must have a sense of time that you will spend, a kind of accumulated knowledge about approximately what will work with a particular drawing.

CH: That's a possibility, but then each time I change the parameters. So with the head, I would move the head or drop it down, change the rules so that the drawing would be passing through a different set of possibilities. I think I reached a point where I realised that; OK, the drawings are interesting, the process is interesting, but more importantly there is a way of interacting with your thoughts, with the images, the thought process behind how you choose to draw.

WF: Does the experience of the surface when you are making drawings blindfold by touch lead directly to the mark with the other hand, or is it mediated in any sense? I mean, do you pause and think "maybe I should do this or do that?"

CH: No. It's a bit like juggling: if you stop and think about it, you just wouldn't be able to do it. So, when I was drawing the plants, I noticed - because I decided to draw in two planes, underneath the table and on an upright surface next to it, but simultaneously - that I'm drawing a plant leaf that's shaped as if seen from above: underneath I'm drawing it in that projection, while on the side I'm drawing it as a sort of a narrow surface as if it's seen from the side. There's no time to actually consider all this when you're doing it. Which could be described as another strategy to pull the rug from under myself a bit, but not so much that I wouldn't be able to function.

WF: Are you always looking for strategies to do that?

CH: The thing that interests me is what happens when something's just slightly out of your reach, slightly beyond your control. It's interesting how an image can then by chance enter into another significance which one hadn't quite foreseen. That's certainly the case for me with some of the plant drawings that I've made here

WF: But you set up conditions to make the drawings, you set up procedures and you set up physical kinds of circumstances that, as you say, often pull the rug from beneath your feet so that you don't become repetitive. But what are the processes that you then apply when you see the drawing?

CH: If you've removed your critical sense from the process of making, then you have to let the critical sense, when looking at the results, stay in abeyance. So it's as if all the drawings are equally correct or incorrect. They each have equal status. But it's then interesting, going back to what we were saying about how you analyse a drawing, what you can then do with it. And it's the drawings that suggest other spatial possibilities to me which I will then choose to develop into other works. When I go back to my studio, I'm going to look at which of the drawings suggest the particular spatial conundrums that need to be unravelled, and at which drawings contain most of those kind of possibilities, that will in turn will suggest new ideas for drawing.

WF: There's something about them which is not, necessarily, to do with the trajectory that you draw from touch, but with the intersections of the lines, which could in a sense create the drawing. It reminds me of some of the diagrams that scientists create, which are often to do with intersections of lines, when they try and visually describe brain functions or principles of natural science.

CH: One recent painting looks a bit like one of those chambers where they shoot atoms through gas clouds, and you see the trails: you don't actually see the object, the atom itself, but you see where it's been. As if a drawing had passed through itself. It's quite extraordinary.

WF: Are you interested in the science/art analogy and the crossovers in relation to what you're doing?

CH: I am. I even talked recently about doing a collaboration with a scientist who researches eye movements: the idea was to use just my eyes to make drawings, so that there would be no intermediary. It was a nice thing to think about and it was almost like that was enough. Actually I've taken some of those ideas and put them into these drawings of plants because a lot of lines represent the movements of my eyes tracing these complex shapes... it's been very demanding to see if my hands can keep up. Because my eyes have been tracing contours like my fingers used to. It's interesting to think about scientific analogies, but the outcomes are not science, but something that has its own mode of knowledge. That is where what I do it fits in.

WF: Thinking about your work, artists who come to my mind are: Mondrian...

CH: Ah!

WF:... in terms of linear structures and intersections and so on. Giacometti, of course. And analytical cubism, which attempted to see in four dimensions, in the way your works are made in time. How do you relate to those references? Do they have any resonance?

CH: They certainly do. Giacometti is of course a fantastic draughtsman. And the thought process behind it was just as interesting: the way his sitters would always have to be a certain distance from him and they would have to be frontal, which was quite unlike his process making the sculpture in the round. It's also significant the way he connected with someone like Bacon who, again, is an early influence or point of reference, probably on a lot of us. Bacon's statement that we should work off our nervous systems, or that he would work off his nervous system... in a way I was interested to know if that could be applied literally, through working with the sense of touch. And you could say that the same applies to eye movements as well: it's an extension of our nervous system. I think a lot of the work that I'm making does have a sort of a nervous quality to it. There's a lot of movement and a lot of force being packed into the drawings, whereas the paintings try to slow things down a bit. Another hero of mine would be de Kooning: the way he thinks and uses gesture, especially in the late works, which I know that some people aren't into that much. I find them very interesting and it's an ambition of mine to work on a three-dimensional equivalent - a drawing equivalent - of that kind of gesture in space.

WF: I wondered if you could talk about how you think drawing - the state of drawing - 'is' and what its importance is, because drawing is used, as we know, in many different ways by artists, and more often than not it's a kind of preparatory process, or an analytical process.

CH: It's my personal view that there's a big gap that's opened up between drawing something, representing it, and the fact that you have all these other technologies which are burning the trail ahead of us - digital cameras, 3D technology and so on - that are capable of rendering something in a completely determined way. I'm talking about being able to think conceptually about an object, and to draw it as if you were a computer, but without the mathematics. It's a very rich area that drawing just needs to be pushed into and not be embarrassed about trying to represent something and in the process represent yourself too. It seems to me that's a way I see that drawing can go. Take Toy Story, for instance: it's pure drawing. It just lacks the handmade quality, or is completely pinned down, you could say; and more importantly it's not so much interested in a 'crisis of representation' itself; it's telling a story. I just like the idea of drawing being able to tell a story through itself, by itself.

Comment from the audience: I do think the analogy of the atom is really appropriate, because in your work there is always a space between the object and the drawing, and the two cannot coexist at the same time visually. When you see the drawings of the plants - and I did recognise one of the plants - I had a feeling that it was the trace of something that had been there, but that wasn't anymore. The presence of something is really vibrant.

CH: That's true. Though the presence belongs to the drawing. It doesn't necessarily interest me whether a plant that I've drawn corresponds really closely with the drawing. I think with the cross-shaped drawing that folds into itself, it's a good example of how you get a sense that a drawing surface has been dropped into a situation and a feeling of having taken away a record of something. Because of the way that they're made, it's as if you're projecting an image of this object onto the surface and, again, the question is "how much can you put in to an image?" Before you've looked at the drawing it feels as if there might be everything in the world possible to say about this object in the drawing. And then you look at it and you realise that it's actually saying something else. There's always a shortfall between what you think and what you get: you're not having it all on a plate, and that is positive.

From'What is Drawing?' published by Black Dog Publishing (www.blackdogonline.com)

 

 

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