Patty,
The attached drawing was done in 1956. I was in the U.S. army posted
at the field hospital on Koje island that served the UN POW Camp #1.
My job was the night shift A&D clerk/offficer. The Chinese prisoner on
crutches was simply waiting to be admitted to hospital. I drew him
out of interest, as a kind of documentation. I think his emotional
state was one of numb resignation, almost neutral perhaps. He was
young as was I. I remember no heightened emotion... but is interest
in noting, denoting, delineating not an implicit entering into a
shared reality? My attitude was to be honest in what I saw-and was a
part of. My feelings were not anger, not judgement, not consciously
stressed, down or up-but simply involved in a task of noting a human
condition and recognizing a fellow human being. We were all numbed
by our (shared) imprisonment; jailers spend time in jail also...
I think one may be, paradoxically, on some sort of emotional high,
emotional involvement AND, necessarily, emotionally detached in order
to draw at all. Perhaps when in the grip of extreme emotion (fear,
panic, anger, boredom) one can't draw at all; it takes a degree of
detachment and/or total immersion, the Zen state of 'knowing/not
knowing' to execute in a way that is somehow true to the felt
(emotion) subject or object of concern. And I don't think the
"emotion" is one felt by the artist and then "expressed" but is
integral to the total situation. What might be the emotions felt by a
first time student in a life class-and how might that effect the first
attempts at drawing? -and in a class of others, mostly unknown to the
student?
I taught drawing for some 30 plus years and know some models who had
emotions about it too-often resigned contempt and/or possibly pleasure
of the exhibitionist sort. And we all, of course, tried to keep it on
the high plane of disinterested aesthetic research-a quasi scientific
attitude (emotion?). At best, our emotions are complex, often not even
registered consciously and are part of the enabling or inhibiting
energy driving the drawing process.
In the case of this drawing, thoughts and memories mix with the
feelings of my total involvement. It stuck with me. Some 60 years
later I re-purposed the drawing by digitizing it and combining it with
some photographs I took at the same time in the embattled (June 1952)
POW camp. This resulted in the second image, "...AND SO WE LEFT THEM"
realized last year in a solar print. The fotos are of the US halftrack
armored vehicles, the guard towers and ROK horse mounted guards
arranged as right and left borders. So, feeling, memory, thought-all
components of "emotion"-lasted a very long time.
Your subject of emotion and drawing is a very large and complex one! I
hope this little sharing helps to illuminate that larger terrain.
Best Regards,
Mel Strawn
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