"Vegetables Are All Your Body Needs", advertisement for the International Vegetarian Union

Most figurative artists spend some time studying human anatomy – basic musculoskeletal structure, often just enough that your Spider-Man doesn’t come out looking like Popeye.  But of course the study of anatomy is a vast edifice, with wings and annexes, great halls and obscure corridors, constructed by physicians and yogis, gymnasts and psychiatrists, animators and masseurs, mystics and coroners.  Let’s call this imposing monument the Anatomium.

For an artist, the body is more than just a physical structure.  It is an instrument for experiencing and portraying realities beyond the physical plane:  emotions, energy, spirituality.  We need to understand structure, but we also need to go beyond structure.  Your teacher may have urged you to spend most of your time studying in the great hall of bones and the gallery of muscles, but there is much to discover in the more obscure rooms of the Anatomium.  Let’s look at some curious specimens found in many different parts of the labyrinthine palace, from the viewpoint of the artist.  (All of these images were found on the web, and clicking on an image will take you to the page where I found it, and where, usually, more pictures and information will be found.)

The brilliant ad that leads this post tells us that if we are what we eat, we can construct a healthy body from a vegetable diet.  In folk wisdom, it’s often been thought that various plants and other substances support the functioning of the body parts they resemble, so for instance walnuts are supposed to be good for the brain, and tomatoes for the heart.  This way of seeing the anatomy arises from a metaphorical understanding of the body as a garden or landscape, a popular image since the time of Arcimboldo, at least.  Here’s Aurel Schmidt’s beautiful contemporary rendition of body as garden, a teeming but unsettling garden full of insects, snakes, birds, and cigarette butts.

Super Natural, 2006, mixed media on paper by Aurel Schmidt

Since the industrial revolution, the metaphor of the body as a factory or machine has been common in the culture.  A lot of medical practice, especially orthopedics, is essentially based in this mechanical metaphor.  Perhaps the ultimate realization of the industrial view of the body is Woody Allen’s depiction of the internal sexual functions as a military-industrial deployment in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask.

Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as Industrial Palace), 1926, by Fritz Kahn

The technology of the industrial and digital era has given us countlesss new ways of seeing and studying the human body.  X-rays, MRIs, and endoscopes have become essential tools in medicine.  The National Institutes of Health and the National Medical Library collaborated on the “Visible Human Project”, high-resolution 3D scans of real bodies for anatomical study.  The bodies were sliced in razor-thin layers and scanned, the data assembled into a 3D image that can be viewed in any cross-section or in the round, or even “flown through” in a digital animation.

Coronal cross-section from the Visible Human Project of the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health

Controversial physician and showman Dr. Gunther von Hagens invented a technique for preserving human tissue by replacing the water  with plastics, which enabled him to prepare real cadavers for public display in his “Body Worlds” exhibits.  Von Hagens’ figures follow the renaissance convention in anatomical illustrations of posing flayed figures as though alive and active.  These exhibits are educational, fascinating, and more than a little creepy.

The Walker, plastinated from Body Worlds exhibit, from Gunther von Hagens' Institute for Plastination

Therapists, athletes, dancers, and others who study movement, posture, and fitnesss experiment with the living body, which can reveal dynamic aspects of the structure that may be missed when you’re cutting up cadavers.  This illustration from Thomas Myers’ Anatomy Trains, a study of the fascia and connective tissue in bodily movement, looks like a bit of couture in the outré style of an Alexander McQueen.

The Back Functional Line, illustration from "Anatomy Trains", by Thomas W. Myers

The illustration below shows the dermatomes.  Most of the nerves of the body are wired to the spinal cord, and the dermatomes are the areas of the skin divided according to the particular vertebra where each area has its nerve connection to the spinal cord.  The different areas of the spine are color-coded, cervical (neck) nerves in white, thoracic in yellow/black, lumbar in blue/black, and sacral nerves in red/black.  This too looks like a bit of latex fetishwear or a high-tech superhero costume.

Dermatomes (Spinal Innervation Map), artist unknown, from the website of New York School of Regional Anesthesia

Within the field of anatomical studies, there are many ways of dividing the body into regions.  Here’s a diagram for doctors with named regions on the surface of the body, for the purposes of clinical description.

Anatomical Regions of the Body, illustration from David Darling's online "Encyclopedia of Science"

“Surface Anatomy” is an interesting field for the artist who works with live models, as it’s all about learning to identify underlying structures based on what can be seen or felt at the level of the skin.

Surface Anatomy of the Abdomen, from "The Anatomy Lesson", a website by Wesley Norman, PhD, DSc, professor at Georgetown University

Seeing beneath the surface shows that the beautiful reality of the body conceals even more beautiful hidden realities.

Pregnant Anatomy, illustration found on Ed Merritt's Flickr photostream (may not be original source)

These back muscles look like the head of a goat – cool.

The Back,iIllustration by Phrenzy84

The illustration below shows a method of analyzing the structure of the face by geometrical analysis of a series of identifiable points.  This kind of analysis was invented for forensic use, but it’s also the basis of computer face recognition and other forms of digital biometrics.

Illustration from "Geometric Morphometric Analyses of Facial Shape in Twins", a paper by Demayo, et al.

This kind of geometrical analysis of faces and bodies is also important to artists working with digitally generated 3D graphics.  Some of the most interesting anatomy illustrations, from an artist’s point of view, are found in CGI tutorials.

Illustration from Phung Dinh Dzung's "Realistic Human Face Modeling", a guide for 3D computer graphic artists

Here’s a look at the different typical patterns of fat distribution on the male and female body.  It’s a fine illustration, although that male figure looks disconcertingly like me!  These sketches derive from works by Prud’hon and Rubens.

Fat Distribution in Women and Men, illustration from an online anatomy and figure drawing tutorial by Nocte

This one compares the basic skeletal structure of a person with that of a four-legged animal such as a dog.  I think the best way to grasp anatomical realities is to see how the same basic structure manifests with variations in different individuals and even different species.  You can learn a lot about anatomy just petting an animal!

Comparison of Human and Quadruped Skeletons, source unknown

In this illustration, an artist shows how different arrangements of the shoulder girdle express different emotions.

Shoulder Movements of Psychological Description, source unknown

The brain contains its own models of the body.  The sensory cortex and the motor cortex are bands of the human brain devoted to the senses and to movment, respectively.  When the image of the body is projected to correspond with the appropriate parts of the brain, the resulting distorted figure is called a “homunculus” (latin for “little human”).  The homunculus, the body in the brain, has huge lips and hands, since those areas are so important for sensation and action.  Note that the hand area is right next to the eye area – perhaps this facilitates the connections a visual artist makes.  And the genitalia area is right next to the feet – an explanation for foot fetishism?

Somatosensory Homunculus, artist unknown

Many forms of traditional therapy use this kind of mapping of the whole body onto a part of the body.  Auricular acupuncture, for example, is a form of acupuncture in which the ear stands in for the whole body, and practitioners believe that any part of the body can be treated by needling the corresponding parts of the ear.  Reflexology massage of the feet and hands is another treatment that uses similar charts.

Indian Hand Reflexology Illustration, original source unknown

Of course these aren’t anatomical studies in the scientific sense, but the ancient energy arts, including qigong and tantric yoga and many kinds of martial and healing arts, are based on extensive experiential study of energy flow in the body.  Understanding the immaterial but dynamic aspects of the body should interest any artist who strives to capture the feeling of aliveness.  Here’s an unknown artist’s attempt to represent the human aura, the field of energy clairvoyants say they can perceive around the body.

Human Aura, artist unknown

Chinese Traditional Medicine, martial arts and practices of “internal alchemy” aimed at physical or spiritual self-transformation, use a highly developed system of subtle anatomy to understand the movement of many different kinds of energy within and around the body.  For a visual artist, but even more for a performing artist, this way of visualizing and projecting emotions and forces can be a powerful tool.

Psycho-Emotional Aspects of the Liver Channel, from a website on the energy channels of acupuncture theory, by Lieske

Going back to scientific medical imaging, but keeping the emphasis on energy flow, we have thermographic imaging, which shows patterns of heat radiating from the body.   (Check out a brief excerpt from a dance film made with high-resolution thermographic cameras.)

Thermogram of the Breast, original source unknown

For an artist, the most subtle part of the human form, the most difficult thing to capture, is the spark, the life force, the flow of energy.  It’s important to understand structure, but it’s also important to see the dynamism and tension within that structure.  Anatomical studies of all kinds can open our eyes to the amazing tornado of different forces that is the human body.

I’ll conclude this post with a traditional medical anatomical illustration, but one of great beauty.   This is an abstraction, not a visual transcription of reality.  Of course the veins aren’t really blue and the arteries red and the nerves yellow – this is just a convention to aid in a functional understanding of what is going on.  But the life force in all its explosivenesss expresses itself here.

Thoracic Anatomy, 2006, illustration by Patrick J. Lynch

In researching on the web and my own archives for this post, I found such a wealth of incredible anatomical images that I think there will be many posts to come on the general subject of human anatomy.

Nearly all of these images link back, if you click on them, to where I found them on the web.  If any of my readers has further information about the sources or artists behind these images, please let me know.  It is often frustrating to me that so many great images on the web are published without attribution.

Fohoco, 2011, photo by Dan Fen

One of the gifts I received this holiday season was a collection of hundreds (thousands, actually!) of digital photographs by my youngest brother, Dan.  Dan lives in the Mojave Desert area, and regularly goes hiking in the canyons, hills, and valleys of Nevada, Utah, Arizona and California, with his partner Jill, their dogs, and his camera.  All of the photos seen here were taken within 90 minutes drive from his house.  Dan has a great eye for the abstract patterns of nature.  I’m devoting this last post of 2011 to sharing Dan’s vision with the readers of Drawing Life.  The vortex of color below is a close-up detail of a living tree.

Votr, 2011, photo by Dan Fen

Dan rarely prints his photos, and prefers that they be viewed as digital slide shows, full screen on a large monitor in a dark room, as sequences.  The more abstract series are quite hypnotic seen in that way, and I hope Dan will soon put some of his photos on line for full-screen slide show viewing.  For the format of this blog, I’ve selected a few of my favorites, reduced them in size, and mixed them up.  (Apologies, Dan!)  The originals have extremely fine textural details that are lost in the smaller images here, but the smaller size seems to emphasize the compositional qualities of the images.

Sheep Mountains, 2011, photo by Dan Fen

Some of these close-up studies of rocks, trees and metal remind me of some of the images of the planet Mars that we have seen recently from the HiRISE camera launched by NASA and the University of Arizona.

Fohoco, 2011, photo by Dan Fen

You can also look at these pictures as though they were abstract expressionist paintings.  To my eye, the subtlety of the colors and the variety and complexity of the patterns surpass the masters of the New York School.

Sheep Mountains, 2011, photo by Dan Fen

The desert mountains and canyons are famous for their grand vistas, but Dan looks closely at details one might easily overlook, seeing the beauty of all phases of the cycles of nature, including erosion and decay.

Tree, 2011, photo by Dan Fen

These markings remind me of petroglyphs.  This is another close textural examination of a tree.

Noba, 2011, photo by Dan Fen

The landscape in Dan’s area is arid and much of it is dominated by bare stone.  That doesn’t mean it isn’t wildly colorful.  Look at these rocks streaked in white and red.

Buffington Pockets, 2011, photo by Dan Fen

In the picture below, the sun shines through the grass from behind, making the clumps shine like Fourth of July sparklers all around the jagged branches of a dead tree.

Sheep Mountains, 2011, photo by Dan Fen

This is another detail of the tree seen in the second picture in this post.  I wonder how it gets all these colors!

Votr, 2011, photo by Dan Fen

The landscape in wet places tends to have a lot of soft shapes and vivid greens.  The landscape in the desert leans more towards the spiky and the reddish.

Buffington Pockets, 2011, photo by Dan Fen

Time is an artist!

Fohoco, 2011, photo by Dan Fen

Sometimes the long view is just as much an abstract pattern as the close view.

Spring Mountains, 2011, photo by Dan Fen

Organic growth, the cycles of the seasons, and the ravages of time all go into creating these expressions of vitality and struggle.  Dan’s art is to find and isolate them, and to share them with those who can’t be there, or wouldn’t notice these details if they were.

Cluptr, 2011, photo by Dan Fen

Who says death is not a creative force?

Buffington Pockets, 2011, photo by Dan Fen

Growth and destruction, all of it is part of the eternal process of change, and it all coexists as layers settle upon layers and surfaces scratch and peel.

Sheep Mountains, 2011, photo by Dan Fen

Noba, 2011, photo by Dan Fen

Fohoco, 2011, photo by Dan Fen

No architect’s dream of clean lines and noble geometry can compare to the fractal magic of living chaos!

Spring Mountains, 2011, photo by Dan Fen

Thanks, Dan, for sharing your photos with me and for allowing me to share them with my readers.

Claudia, the Museworthy blogger, has posted “The Museworthy Art Show”, a collection of artwork by her regular readers and commenters.  One of my large-scale multi-figure drawings is included, a piece that hasn’t yet been seen on Drawing Life.

This is a kind of group show I like.  The artists are diverse in media, style, approach, and level of training.  Simple sketches appear alongside elaborate compositions.  The virtues of spontaneity and simplicity shine, as do the accomplishments of refined craft.  And Claudia has fostered a feeling of community among her far-flung readers, since now we’ve all been in a group show together.  Museworthy tribe, represent!

Click to visit The Museworthy Art Show.

Mixed Grass, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Drawing landscapes and plants is not my strong suit.  I love wildernesses and gardens, but I feel overwhelmed trying to capture their forms in drawing or painting.  They present a bewildering chaos of detail, a vast, borderless scale, and a range of color and tone that makes my palette look paltry.  My urge to draw operates comfortably at the scale of the human body, a form and an expressive range I know intimately from inside and out.  But the body is a product of Earth, an efflorescence of organic forms that reflect evolutionary history and evoke the forms of the land and its creatures.  A hip is a hill, an ear a shell, an elbow a crooked branch.  Even if the body is my primary subject, I need to understand it as a microcosm by looking to the macrocosm.  And purely from the standpoint of practice, I can only benefit by straying outside my comfort zone, trying to draw what I am incompetent to draw.  In this post I’ll present some of my awkward stabs at landscape.  I’ll immediately make them look worse by setting them in the context of some real masters!

The sketch of my own I’ve chosen to head this post was made while looking at a field of mixed short grasses and weeds in a rural field.  I was struck by the variety of different leaf shapes all jumbled together.  What seems at first glance a tranquil and plush tapestry of green becomes on close inspection a dense jungle, and that is surely how it would appear if you could shrink to the size of an ant to make your way through it.

Below is Albrecht Dürer’s astonishingly realistic watercolor portrayal of a similar patch of sod, known as the “Great Piece of Turf”  (Go to this link to see it in a much larger size).  Botanists can clearly identify at least nine species of herbs in this drawing.  The production of this painting was an act of profound and sustained meditation on the reality of nature, made at a time when nature in art was usually idealized and symbolic, a mere setting for human and spiritual subjects.  The artist’s intensity of attention, directed at something that most would see as utterly inconsequential, has preserved a bit of nature over the centuries like a specimen in amber.  Dürer has captured the chaotic quality of wild plant life, but has somehow given it a kind of clarity that even photography couldn’t provide.  This painting sets a standard that every great naturalist illustrator can only hope to approach.

The Great Piece of Turf, 1503, by Albrecht Dürer

Even if the detail of photography rarely achieves the clarity of Dürer’s vision, by the late nineteenth century many painters had ceded this kind of hard physical detail to the new light-capturing technology and tried instead to depict the wild energy of the natural world with brushy, gestural strokes of color that give a sense of leaves fluttering in a breeze and rays of light dancing over and through shimmery water and misty air.  Claude Monet painted the same scenes over and over again, at different seasons and times of day, striving to capture the mercurial subtleties of luminosity and atmosphere.

Rainy Morning on the Seine, 1890's (?), by Claude Monet

Charles Burchfield is a magical realist, seeing the natural world as a physical manifestation of different qualities of spiritual energy.  The forms of land and sky and plants are abstracted slightly to more closely resemble the Platonic archetypes of these forces.  The chaos is there, but it is unified within a greater spirit of pure Nature.

Dawn of Spring, 1960's (?), by Charles E. Burchfield

I have usually avoided drawing and painting the landscape, but I’ve frequently tried to capture it with photography.  I’ve always felt especially drawn to the raw and ragged forms of uncultivated plant life.  Thick thatches of foliage are challenging subjects even for photography, as the transition from three dimensions to two reduces the bursting and branching shapes to a flat patchwork like a camouflage pattern.  Stereo photography can better portray the complexity.  If you look at the picture below (previously posted here) with red/cyan 3D glasses you’ll see what I mean.  If you look at it without glasses, it’s pure abstract field.

Sprouting Hedge, 2010, stereo photo by Fred Hatt

But now let’s take a look at some of my recent fumbling attempts to draw complex, chaotic plant forms.  Just today I took a sketchbook and a camera to my neighborhood park.  Here’s a snapshot of a particularly plush evergreen tree, and below it, my scribbly marker sketch, drawn from direct observation of the tree without any reference to the photo.

Evergreen, 2011, photo by Fred Hatt

Evergreen, 2011, sketch by Fred Hatt

The drawing doesn’t get much of the texture or spatial form of the tree, but it has, perhaps, something of its energy.  Another day I made a sketch of the plants growing in a window box, with these ornate curly leaves in front of a stand of long spear-like leaves.  This is a smaller subject, a closer focus, and a more careful hand with the drawing.

Leaves, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Here’s a sketch of a flowering plant with trumpet-shaped flowers (some kind of orchid?) drooping thickly around a central stalk.  (If anyone recognizes any of the species depicted in these drawings, let me know – my botanical taxonomical knowledge is practically nonexistent.)

Flowers, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Last month I spent a week teaching workshops and attending the festival at the Brushwood Folklore Center in Western New York State.  I spent some of my spare time making crayon sketches.  Here you see the fire-builders’ woodpile in the foreground, the Roundhouse (a sort of ritual structure for drum circles) and bonfire stack in the middle ground, and the trees of the forest in the background.

Roundhouse and Bonfire Stack, 2011, by Fred Hatt

The sky was clear, deep and luminous, with the great zaftig white bodies of cumulus clouds lazing across the heavens like manatees in a warm current.

Clouds, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Near my campsite was this traditional Plains Indian tepee.

Tepee, 2011, by Fred Hatt

This last Brushwood landscape was drawn a couple of years ago.  This is a clump of plants in the hollow under a big tree where the henna artists and body painters decorate people.

Under the Henna Tree, 2009, by Fred Hatt

I still always feel completely unequal to the task when I try to make a drawing from a landscape, but I try to open myself to the chaos and let some attenuated remnant of that vast current flow through me and into my sketch.  I may feel like a mouse trying to sing opera, but sometimes it is better to squeak than to be silent.

Drawings on black paper are 9″ x 12″, medium is aquarelle crayon.  Drawings on white paper are 11″ x 14″ or smaller, medium is brush-tip marker.  The images of pieces by other artists were found on the web; clicking on a picture links to source.

Dear readers, I’ll have another post for you here some time this week, but in the meantime check out my “guest post” on Daniel Maidman’s blog.  Daniel’s a figurative painter, of a more classical bent than me, and he’s also a stimulating writer, often considering artistic issues in the light of scientific and philosophical ideas.  I wrote a rather extensive comment on Daniel’s recent post, “The Integrated Visual Field”, going into what I’ve learned about the science of human visual perception as it pertains to observational drawing.  Daniel invited me to expand on that response, and then he combined my comments with those of Stephen Wright, another really interesting figurative artist, and made the whole thing into this guest post.  I hope some of you will appreciate being turned on to Maidman’s blog.