Summary of comments on drawing as metaphor

Maynard
Already quoted 119 re "face in the clouds", which needs elaboration regarding
EHG's "Incompatibility principle"
there are others 129 restates the "metaphoric ability to recruit a 'wrong' category to the
perceptual experience" wrt decorative depiction
194-197
194 quotes Rawson, Drawing, p26, saying that this passage "likens meaning in
drawing to meaning in verbal metaphor"
195 on Poussin is focused on physiological participation - ie, image-schematic
transference
197 begins with a section on "metaphor and caricature"
"One common type of caricature, when effective, combines immediate
recognisability of the subject and an independently strong sense of wilful marks,
lines and facture (not of things) - giving the impression of a whimsical disparity
between the two, and of the unlikelihood that the latter could produce the
former."
226 Overall the main point made is still the one he takes from Rawson, but it is
notable that the term metaphor most frequently comes up when he is discussing
cartoons. Nice quote on 225 "Cartooning is, after all, a kind of depiction, not a
kind of depicted subject matter" (and because comics alweays emphasise the
"secondary forms" (Rawson) through their narrative structure, this points to how
we can describe all drawing in comics as cartooning, even if it is not caricature.
we can "see people as comic, through metaphorical transfer of perceptual
categories for all manner of other things"
Wolheim
The word metaphor is not used, but A&IO p16 refs Leonardos stained walls as a
means to quicken the invention. The passages following this include a
refutation of Resemblance Theory; also note that seeing-in is not developed
yet, he is using seeing-as
Gombrich
A&I
p89 on Picasso's baboon/car sculpture - other examples are "textual" metaphors
on Picasso, 89 " And do not language and metaphor testify that the class of
things which subjectively

cluster round the ideas of eye, mouth, or face is much wider than the anatomist's
concept? To our emotion, a window can be an eye and a jug can have a mouth; it
is reason which insists on the difference between the narrower class of the real
and the wider class of the metaphorical, the barrier between image and reality.
The headlights of a car may look to us like a pair of glowing eyes,
and we may even call them so. The artist may use this similarity to work his
magic of transformation. Picasso did precisely that when he created his
wonderful bronze baboon with its young [74]. He took a toy car, perhaps from
the nursery of his children, and turned it into a baboon's face. He could see the
hood and windshield of the car as a face, and this fresh act of classification
inspired him to put his find to the test. Here, as so often, the artist's discovery of
an unexpected use for the car has a twofold effect on us. We follow him not only
in seeing a particular car as a baboon's head but learn in the process a new way
of articulating the world, a new metaphor, and when we are in the mood we may
suddenly find the cars that block our way looking at us with that apish grin that
is
due to Picasso's classification."
More generally, 264 " Long before painting achieved the means of illusion, man
was aware of ambiguities in the visual field and had learned to describe them in
language. Similes, metaphors, the stuff of poetry no less than of myth, testify to
the powers of the creative mind to create
and dissolve new classifications. It is the unpractical man, the dreamer whose
response may be less rigid and less sure than that of his more efficient fellow,
who taught us the possibility of seeing a rock as a bull and perhaps a bull as a
rock. An artist of our own day, Georges Braque, has
recently spoken of the thrill and awe with which he discovered the fluidity of our
categories, the ease with which a file can become a shoehorn, a bucket a brazier.
We have seen that this faculty for finding and making underlies the child's
discoveries no less than the artist's. Finding, indeed,
even precedes making,"
Walton
Pictures and Make-Believe 293-4 on the difference between make-believe and
fictional truths. Also 299 "music is not metaphorically anguished, but rather
make-believedly so". Also what is the difference between "make-believe" and
"imaginary" here? It seems to be the fact that make-believe truths depend on
props: ""truths about picture-objects are make-believe rather than imaginary;
they are fictionally true in virtue of configurations of paint on canvas" (300)
Serig 2006: 230, more generally on the cognitive processes involved in art
practice " Making meaning through the interplay of emotions, reason, and
context seems to describe the types of relationships existing within art practices.
If the cognitive view of metaphor relies on the blending of concepts, and
concepts derive
from the play of the affective with the intellectual, then this appears to set art
practices as an arena for the study of metaphor."
.Some researchers include in their efforts attempts to define visual
metaphor (Aldrich, 1968, 1971; Carroll, 1994; Hausman, 1989;
Kennedy. 1982). Others interpret works of art as visual metaphors
(Anderson, 1989; Feinstein, 1985; Green, 1985).

Aldrich 1971: 222 " thanks to visual metaphor, the paint-patch (A) is made to
'body forth' (embody) the roof-image (B); since this drives home the sense of
interanimation or of A and B 'coming alive' in the content (C) of the work of art."
Green 1985 (directly inspired by Aldrich, 61) 65 " Mov- ing from simile to
metaphor to symbol creates an ever tighter connection between the things
compared, until the distinctions are liquidated in symbol. The special evocative
power of visual metaphor, however, derives from the tensions created by
retaining an awareness of the contradiction between A and B as well as their
fusion in C.
67 " Its [the light at the top of GUernica) elliptical shape "echoes" the projectile
shape of a bomb inserted into the gaping mouth of the horse, a symbol of the
people, Picasso tells us.2 1 As contiguous, par- allel ellipses, the two forms
"inform" of a significant, though paradoxical, metaphorical connection: the
technological sources of beneficent power also contain the seeds of violent
destruction, both ends achieved with equal efficiency.
Lots of potentially usable stuff in there, esp. on metaphor being concerned with
an uncertainty between reality and illusion (use for metafictional panels?)
Feinstein 1985: 29 " respond to works of art metaphor- ically. Indeed, if art is
not interpreted metaphorically, it can be reduced to vacuous decorations that
give rise to jargon spoken at cocktail parties. If art is interpreted metaphorically,
it becomes a significant area of study, inquiry into complex symbolic activity.
Such inquiry i"
Willats
Rawson yes - use p.26 quote highlighted by Maynard
26 "The marks made by the point in any drawing he looks at become part of tjhe
spectator's world of phenomena. His analogising faculty sets to work upon the
marks, their patterns and arrangement. They evoke analogous forms from his
unconscious fund. Certain groups of marks will constitute references t everyday
objects of use, ie. will be representational. Others will serve structural functions
according to the artist's usual principles. But the main bulk of the marks will not
just refer directly to everyday objects but will 'qualify' them by investing thm
with analogous forms from quite other fields of experience. The represented
objects of the tenor, serving as one term to the bridge of metaphor, will thus be
endowed with a kind of metaphorical radiance shed on them by the erxperiences
analogy associates with them from those other fields."
Also 29, an echo of grounding in embodiment: "artistic forms, including graphic
forms, made with such a metaphorical intent, may be understood to depend for
their meaning upon the linked chains pf emotive affect they arouse; that is, upon
their content. And this content belongs to the category of concrete, immediate
experiences, associated by memory with emotions and sensation."
Flint Schier Deeper into pictures 171: "there is no sense in which there is a
prearranged 'vocabulary' of pictorial representation. Pictorial interpretation is

more like getting at the figurative sense behind the literal nonsense of a
metaphor than like getting at the literal sense of a sentence."
KvL
Visual grammar
p7
" We would like to begin with an example of what we understand by signmaking. The drawing in figure 0.1 was made by a three-year-old boy. Sitting on
his fathers lap, he talked about the drawing as he was doing it: Do you want to
watch me? Ill make a car . . . got two wheels . . . and two wheels at the back . . .
and two wheels here . . . thats a funny wheel. . . . When he had finished, he
said, This is a car. This was the first time he had named a drawing, and at first
the name was puzzling. How was this a car? Of course he had provided the key
himself: Heres a wheel. A car, for him, was defined by the criterial
characteristic of having wheels, and his representation focused on this aspect.
What he represented was, in fact, wheelness. Wheels are a plausible criterion to
choose for threeyear- olds, and the wheels action, on toy cars as on real cars, is
a readily noticed and describable feature. In other words, this three-year-olds
interest in cars was, for him, most plausibly condensed into and expressed as an
interest in wheels. Wheels, in turn, are most plausibly represented by circles,
both because of their visual appearance and because of the circular motion of
the hand in drawing/representing the wheels action of going round and round.
To gather this up for a moment, we see representation as a process in which the
makers of signs, whether child or adult, seek to make a representation of some
object or entity, whether physical or semiotic, and in which their interest in the
object, at the point of making the representation, is a complex one, arising out of
the cultural, social and psychological history of the sign-maker, and focused by
the specific context in which the signmaker produces the sign. That interest is
the source of the selection of what is seen as the criterial aspect of the object,
and this criterial aspect is then regarded as adequately representative of the
object in a given context. In other words, it is never the whole object but only
ever its criterial aspects which are represented.
These criterial aspects are represented in what seems to the sign-maker, at the
moment of sign-making, the most apt and plausible fashion, and the most apt
and plausible representational mode (e.g. drawing, Lego blocks, painting,
speech). Sign-makers thus have a
[p8]
meaning, the signified, which they wish to express, and then express it through
the semiotic mode(s) that make(s) available the subjectively felt, most plausible,
most apt form, as the signifier. This means that in social semiotics the sign is not
the pre-existing conjunction of a signifier and a signified, a ready-made sign to
be recognized, chosen and used as it is, in the way that signs are usually thought
to be available for use in semiology. Rather we focus on the process of sign-

making, in which the signifier (the form) and the signified (the meaning) are
relatively independent of each other until they are brought together by the signmaker in a newly made sign. To put it in a different way, using the example just
above, the process of sign-making is the process of the constitution of a
sign/metaphor in two steps: a car is (most like) wheels and wheels are (most
like) circles.
Putting it in our terms: the sign-makers interest at this moment of sign-making
has settled on wheelness as the criterial feature of car. He constructs, by a
process of analogy, two metaphors/signs: first, the signified wheel is aptly
represented by the signifier circle to make the motivated sign wheel; second,
the signified car is aptly represented by the signifier many wheels to make the
motivated sign car. The resulting sign, the drawing glossed this is a car, is thus
a motivated sign in that each conjunction of signifier and signified is an apt,
motivated conjunction of the form which best represents that which is to be
meant. This sign is thus the result of a double metaphoric process in which
analogy is the constitutive principle. Analogy, in turn, is a process of
classification: x is like y (in criterial ways). Which metaphors (and, behind the
metaphors, which classifications) carry the day and pass into the semiotic
system as conventional, and then as naturalized, and then as natural, neutral
classifications, is governed by social relations of power. Like adults, children are
engaged in the construction of metaphors. Unlike adults, they are, on the one
hand, less constricted by culture and its already-existing and usually invisible
metaphors, but, on the other hand, usually in a position of less power, so that
their metaphors are less likely to carry the day."
p36
" New ways of thinking are needed in this field. Here we use, once more,
childrens representation as a metaphor to suggest some directions. The
drawings reproduced in figure 1.8 were made by a five-year-old boy. On a
summer Sunday afternoon, while his parents were entertaining friends, the child
took a small, square notepad from near the telephone and drew a picture on
each of six pages. His father had not noticed this until he came across him in the
hall of their house, where the child was putting the cards in order, as shown in
figure 1.8. Asked what he was doing, the childs account was as follows: for
pictures 1 and 2 together Me and the dog are in life, so theyre in the correct
order; on pictures 3 and 4 The flying bomb is in the air and the plane is in the
air, so theyre in the correct order; and on 5 and 6 The patterns are in the
correct order.
The whole process, involving sign-making, representation and classification, had
proceeded through the visual medium. It was only when the parent came along
with his question that the child was forced to use words. The metaphoric
processes of sign-making, the acts of representation and classification, each
involving quite complex analogies, took place in the visual mode. Language, as
speech, entered when communication with the parent became necessary.

Speech was the mode used for ratifying and for describing what had taken
place without it.
Some two weeks later, at the end of the summer term of his primary school, the
child brought home some of his exercise books. Among these was the page
shown in figure 1.9. Clearly, here the task was one of classification, and it had
been undertaken at school, prior to the making and ordering of the drawings in
figure 1.8, at home. A whole sequence of
[p37]
semiotic activities is thus involved, a sequence of production, transformation and
development, moving from the initial task of joining images of the same objects
a classificatory, cognitive, conceptual, semiotic and manual task to that of
producing complex and dissimilar images, and finding likeness in them (or
imposing likeness on them) through an intermediary task of abstraction and
generalization. If we think about this period of two weeks, the childs production
of signs involved a series of distinct semiotic modes, and of translations between
such modes. First the teacher spoke with the children about the task (mode:
language as speech); then she introduced the book and showed them what was
at issue (mode: 3D physical object, and visual mode); then the children used
their pencils to draw the connecting lines (mode: manual action and visual mode
of drawing); then the teacher engaged the children in spoken discussion, and
made evaluative comments on their
[38]
work. This was followed by a long period of silence, a fortnight or so when
nothing was seen or heard, but when, we assume, the series of transformative
acts of the child continued internally, mentally. Finally the internal activity
became visible, literally, through the childs unprompted production of the
drawings, his unprompted classificatory activity (spatially shown) and his spoken
commentary in response to his fathers question."

van Sommers