I am finding it difficult to colour-in at the moment. That is to say that when I'm drawing I cannot accurately judge what is inside and what is outside a line. Also if I draw a line I cannot return to it and extend it with any precision to avoid overlaps or gaps. I'm sure I could do this just a few months ago when I finished my last drawing that required such care to detail.
Since 2023, I've been on a quest to refill two boxes that used to contain glass lantern slides with new reimagined versions of the originals. The sides belonged to the London Metropolitan Water Board and date from 1893 to 1914. I'm creating the majority of the new slides with no reference to the originals, which still exist in storage at the London Archives, but for a few I have viewed the originals and I am making pencil drawn reproductions.
The slides that I am treating this way are all images of bacteria which have descriptions on the boxes' index cards such as Spores, Bacillus subtilis, Anthrax and Proteus in effluent. Some of the images just appear as a few random clusters of lines or dark spots others reveal intricate swirling patterns.
I'd settled on the idea of drawing them in pencil as that was making something new and drawing felt like the most straightforward medium for capturing detail with a lineage back to the earliest botanical studies. I'd also thought that some of the patterns would produce an interesting animation and that I could capture this while drawing, or create it digitally with scanned versions of the completed drawings.
I was not planning on drawing at the scale of the original slides, 3.5 x 3.5 inches, as this was too small to achieve the detail I wanted. It is possible that at some point in future the slides will be projected so the more detail I could manage, the better. My process was to draw on a larger scale and then reduce and print onto acetate and sandwich the acetate between glass to create the slide. I had already created a few slides from photographs using this approach. I settled on using A2 paper size for the drawings as this is the largest size I can comfortably work with in my limited studio space at home.
I started with a very simple slide, 360 B. mycoides, which shows 3 fanning out lines of bacterial cells. From this I moved on to 359 Fever 1, Strepto 3 looking like draped strings of beads and then the swirling art nouveau like forms of 363 Anthrax.
I first heard the word anthrax when I was in my early teens and holidaying with my parents at Aultbea, a very small fishing village in the north west Highlands of Scotland. The next bay round from Aultbea, about 5 km away is Gruinard bay where Gruinard Island, at its closest point, sits just over a kilometre from the mainland. It was on Gruinard Island that the UK had experimented with anthrax as a biological weapon in 1941 to 1943. At the time we were staying just a few kilometres away, 37 years later the Island was still quarantined. This was pretty concerning, but it was just one more thing on top of the threat of nuclear war, the presence of US submarine bases further south on the west coast and the proposed internment of spent nuclear fuel in the hills south of Loch Doon near my home town that kept me in a state of existential fear in the late 1970s and early 1980s... ah simple times.
I have no idea why anthrax should be among the bacteria documented within the Metropolitan Water Board archive. The other bacteria while not as immediately alarming are also pathogenic, B. Mycoides can cause disease in some fish and strepto is a reference to Streptococcus bacteria, some variants of which are responsible for, among other things, meningitis, bacterial pneumonia and streptococcal pharyngitis.
These three drawings all followed the same principle. The original slide images were microscope images at 500 to 1000 times magnification showing individual cells and I was just reproducing the cell shapes and the patterns they formed and shading them in. Slow, intricate and quite boring work really. But easy enough and I had no real difficulty, other than general clumsiness, in drawing or shading-in the shapes.
Next in line was 73. Spores. The original slide shows a complete petri dish with spores of bacteria (I think B. Mycoides) growing. This is a more complex image with many different tones. It is also primarily light on a dark background, unlike the others which are all on a light background. It was going to be difficult the draw this just by shading in the negative space so I inverted the original and worked from that and then re-inverted my drawing to emulate the original image
Making this drawing took several weeks and while in the previous drawings I was trying to emulate the images cell-by-cell this one is more impressionistic. The drawing was taking so long to make that I took a break to draw another couple of the simpler images 70 Filtered effluent bacteria and 86 Bacillus subtillis.
With these six drawings and the images I'd captured on photography trips for my reimagined slides, I had enough to create an initial set of slides. I wanted my reproduction slides made from my drawings to be as faithful as possible to the originals. So this meant also recreating any borders and annotations. The slides that I had viewed at the London Archives usually had some handwritten notes about the subject, the level of magnification, and in some cases a signature.
The writing is in a lovely fluid cursive script very similar to my dad's. He was secretary at a working mens social club, and a clerk for the National Coal Board when he was young and writing by hand was a large part of what he did. I looked out some letters and postcards he wrote me over the years and his could very easily been the hand that wrote these annotations even though they originated a couple of generations before him. If only he were still alive I'd have been able ask him to write them out for me. Instead, I dug out a fountain pen from my only posh pen set and started to use it generally and then to try and write cursively in my dad's style.
In total, I created 30 new slides and displayed 24 of them in my first exhibition of the work at the Fankle Collectives's Unspun show at Willesden Gallery in July 2024. I also exhibited a giclée print of the final form of my 73. Spores drawing.
I did not attempt any new drawings for a while and concentrated on creating animations from the ones I already had. Also, it was summer and my 60th birthday was approaching to be followed by a trip around Germany for most of September.
In October, when I got back from Germany, I went for an eye test. I'd been putting off an eye examination for years, but I was increasingly aware that my current reading glasses were not up to the job. Particularly when I was spending so much time drawing, or in front of a screen working on animations. At this time I'd started another bacteria drawing, 361 Proteus from effluent. This was one of the more difficult ones, but one that I'd been looking forward to completing as I thought it would work well in an animation. The pattern created by the cells are reminiscent of a finger print and was comprised of lots of concentric curves and negative space that formed a maze to the centre of the image. My new lens prescription was great and I was able to complete the new drawing in time to make a new slide to include in a second showing on my work in a follow-up Fankle exhibition at the Durning Library in Kennington.
During the dark months of winter I did not attempt any more drawing as I found,, even with my new glasses working in low or artificial light very difficult. Instead I worked on animating my last drawing using photoshop to digitally erase the drawing cell by cell, to create 717 individual frames. I combined these with the frames I'd made for all my other drawings to put together a demonstration video showing how the animations would work in a proposed video installation.
As the light began to improve in February, it was time to pick up my pencils again and try and finish the remaining bacteria drawings. I started as I had in all my previous drawings by drawing a 40cm diameter circle and creating a grid as a guideline for laying out cells. However as I started to draw the cells I could not accurately determine where the tip of me pencil was and when I tried to shade in the cells, it felt like guesswork to keep the shading within the marks I had previously made. Thinking I may just be tired or that the light was poor, I gave up and tried again a few days later with the same result.
This did not seem right. My last visit to an optician had been only 3 or 4 months ago, but I was starting to feel that even when not doing close work and just walking around that somehow my vision was unbalanced. I started covering one eye and then the other. I found I could see perfectly clearly out of my left eye, but whatever distance I looked with just my right eye everything was cloudy and blurred.
I made another optician appointment and after getting over the, but we've only just seen you bit, I was seen by an optician who identified that something was clearly wrong that could not be corrected with a new lens prescription. She told me I had a cataract in my right eye which must have developed very quickly and she referred me to an eye hospital.
I've just had my initial appointment there and it appears I have a posterior subscapular cataract. They explained it is tiny bubbles coalescing at the back of the lens and likened it to trying to look through frogspawn in an otherwise clear pond. I'm booked in for surgery in a few weeks time. I should add, all of this is through our wonderful NHS.
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