Wednesday 3 January 2024

Thresholds of The Body Image/Body Boundary

Outpost 291223


Drawing/Dwelling.

Thresholds of The Body Image/Body Boundary.










Drawings and their haptic experiences which include the entire body give fundamental meanings to visual experiences. The extra-personal space of drawing, haptically and psychically touching the space occupied with others. The body is the source of a 'personal world' which generates many of the meanings by which we experience the whole world. When we consciously stare at an object, the body boundary 'hardens' and there is a heightened sense of separation, whereas a casual viewing weakens the sense of separation and encourages instead a psychic fusion with the object.


Seated Woman with bent knee.

Her haptic experiences of space, the push and pull of gravity on her sense 'inside' of a centred body.

The Artist's Wife.

Egon Schiele. 1917



Readings beyond the success and failure of Life Drawing.

Art/Effrontery-Affect/Attraction/The Abject 


Drawing/Feeling through the framework of the body


Bachelard, on images, of pulling away from framing concepts.


The Drawing/Physical Self, with others in the  life class/in solitude in the studio.


Drawings/Graphic Correspondences, represent time spent searching the figure, finding its form.

Drawings present ways of/responses to seeing feelings.


Working From Corporeality.

Skin/Sensuality/Tensioned/Compressed Flesh.


The Situation/Observation and Criteria of Drawing from The Body.

Drawing on the hapticity of the living/sensing body.


Drawing from/present with the Body of Others.

Drawing from/working from the Images of Others.


Departures/Innovations/Differences from 'institutional drawing' situations and their outcomes.


The Figure/Human Form scrutinized/represented via the framing nature/device of the picture frame and its sensing gathering surface.


Painting/Drawings, mark making through abstraction and figuration.

Drawing intimacy/closeness with the drawn images, sensing self from their physical presence.



Life Drawing Re-Imagined.

Drawing from the Human Form.


The Nude in Art.

The Naked Human Form in Contemporary Art.



Drawing Bodily Transactions.

Private and Social Properties.


Egon Schiele.

Eros and Passion.

Klaus Albrecht Schroder.


In Schiele, the artist is always there, similarly in the drawings the exaggerated perspective, the striking angle of sight which situates every viewer of a Schiele drawing in a specific location of observation which defines the active relationship between artist and model. Schiele makes the process of observation his theme by giving thematic status to the observer.


Schiele's nudes are unsanctioned by any artistic genre, in his art  aesthetics disowns itself and art disowns its tradition.


Squatting Couple. 1918

Egon Schiele.

This painting appeared in the 1918 Secession catalogue as Squatting Couple, but after the death of Schiele and his wife it was retitled The Family.


Body-Fragmented-Modernity.

The Body of the individual in terms of isolation and alienation.

Fractured figures, bodies made from parts/areas of bounded/blemished flesh.


Schiele's fractured 'figure types' make visible the conflict, archetypal of its period between the whole and its parts. The points, areas of fracture, the angularities of their crooked members show each part independent of the others.


Drawings made of parts, areas constructed by components resulting in bodies being isolated from a somatic whole. Balanced though Schiele's compositions are in physical terms via his sureness of hand, the figures themselves have no core, the mobility of their limbs does not derive from any psycho-physical centre.



Looking Into Other Criteria.

Drawings Unpacking 1997-2017.

Expressive Content/The Body Exposed.


Selected From Living Bodies.


Selected From Other Images.








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