This image is an etching of the arteries of the arm by Charles Bell illustrated in 1824. It is included in the publication Engravings of the arteries…, which was both written and illustrated by Bell. It is very likely that this image was intended to be read in conjunction with his text, The anatomy of the human body (Vol. II Heart and Arteries). This text seemed to have been intended for students who were studying anatomy, physiology, pathology, and surgery during his lectures. His etchings also seem to provide a guide not only for learning anatomy in a classroom setting but also carrying out a dissection. Bell was a surgeon, anatomist, and artist who established and taught at a private surgery school. His training as a watercolor artist is reflected in his illustrations, which are highly detailed and intricate. According to Clarke and Ambrosio’s “The Nervous System and the Art of Expression”, Bell advocated for more than just copying from a dissection when representing anatomy (117). Art and anatomy went hand in hand, as Bell argued that artists must have strong foundations in anatomy, and especially the anatomy of expression, to make an effective and aesthetically pleasing piece of work (Clarke and Ambrosio, 124-125).
Originally, this image was etched onto a metal plate, likely with an engraver pen. Because I have no access to a metal plate or an engraver pen, I will complete three separate reconstructions: a digital illustration, an etching on a wooden servery plate, and an illustration on tracing paper. With these three separate processes, I hope to capture three different approaches that could have contributed to the process of creating the original image. In the first reconstruction, I will translate an image that I saw to lines on a “paper” freehandedly. In the second, I hope to try etching into a surface similarly to how the original etching was created. Finally, I will trace an outline from an image that has already been created. For freehand drawing, I could have used pencil and paper, but I don’t have any colored pencils that could have been used to add pigment to the arteries. Therefore, I will use my iPad and the app Notability to replicate the image freehanded. For the servery plate etching, I have a few blades I can work with, including scissors and a screwdriver. Finally, for the tracing paper reconstruction, I am planning on tracing from a copy of the image printed onto paper. If not, I can try using my iPad to provide the image to be traced. However, because I plan to hold the tracing paper up to a naturally lit window or door so I can trace over a printed image, the iPad may be a bit difficult to work with. A digital image could be considered “stable”, as it will lose any pigment or line clarity over time. I can also access it on multiple devices since I can save it to a cloud server. I could also most likely store the wooden plate and tracing paper in my apartment without deterioration. However, it is possible that the etching lines on the plate may fade over time.
Today, we can take pictures of the phenomena and objects we see around us and refer to them for later use. We can zoom into these images, and if we really want to, we can edit them, change the background and lighting, the shadows, and highlights. Editing an image must not be as feasible when using an etching pen and a copper plate. I think that with technology’s ability to zoom in on small details and fix any mistakes we deem should not be there, we may lack an appreciation for the skill and effort it took to etch into a copper plate to recreate an image like Bell’s with such intricate detail. With today’s cameras (and even our phones), we could not only save a picture of our references for later use but we can also zoom in to see details that we could not see without the camera. An image created from an observation of dissection, where one would probably have to sit and observe the body part at the same time they are creating an illustration, would likely not capture as much detail as an image that was created by referencing a digital photo where one could zoom in and out.
FIELD NOTE 1 OF 3
Date: February 5, 2022
People Involved: myself
Location: floor of my apartment living room
Reconstruction conditions: I felt slightly chilly, as I forgot to turn on the heat in my apartment after I came back from my shift volunteering at the hospital. I also just bought a drink from a shop across the street from my apartment, which almost gave me a “sugar rush” during the middle of my reconstruction process and made my hands a bit jittery. The sun was just beginning to set, so I turned on the light in my living room about half an hour after I started the reconstruction process.
Time and duration of reconstruction:
5:35-7:15 pm, 1 hour and 50 minutes
Equipment and tools used:
iPad and Apple Pencil, Notability app, laptop
Subjective factors, e.g., how things smelled/looked/felt:
The floor of my apartment is a taupe, faded brown wood while the sunlight pouring in through the windows was almost orange in color. When the sun had set, I turned on the light in my living room, which is a bit dim and yellow-tinted compared to the desk lamp I usually use when studying. The surface of my iPad is covered with a screen protector that aims to replicate the feeling of paper, and it’s smooth and slightly grainy compared to the slickness of glass. The Apple pencil was smooth and slightly slippery in my hand, and the tip was slightly blunt. Because it is flat on one side (to charge on the side of the iPad), I held the Apple pencil more like I would a pencil when I write than a charcoal pencil I would use for sketching.
As a reference, I used a copy of the image provided on the Rare Books and Manuscripts blog by the University of Adelaide, which I pulled up on my laptop screen. To look closely at how Bell used hatched lines in different directions and spacings to create a sense of depth and shadow, I zoomed into the image with my mouse. When I did this, the resolution of the image reduced, but not to the point where I wasn’t able to see how the lines etched for shading were spaced or in what direction they were going.
It was a bit frustrating at first trying to replicate the image I saw on my computer screen to the iPad since I was freehand drawing the image. The proportions of the image and my iPad were not the same, with the original image having a larger length to width ratio than my iPad. I first started drawing the top left corner as a basic outline of the shape that was present in the image, but when I measured the length of the arm in comparison to the size of the bony protrusion in the upper left, I realized I had started drawing the elements of the image too large. If I had kept up that sizing, I would not even be able to fit the arm into the page. I was able to start again and resize my drawing to fit the length of the iPad by using the lasso tool in the Notability app to shrink what I had already begun to draw.
As I continued to shade the rest of the image after drawing an initial outline, I changed the thickness of the lines, thin for shading areas that were more light and thicker for areas that were darker and had more shadows. I also had to zoom in on my drawing to be able to draw lines very closely together, and that put a bit of strain on my shoulders and neck, as I was initially sitting up with my iPad in my lap and my laptop in front of me. I kept changing positions between sitting and lying on my stomach on the floor with my iPad in front of me to put less strain on my neck.
Prior knowledge that you have:
I have some background in drawing and sketching, which I believe helped me in drawing this image freehand instead of tracing by just referencing it on a screen. I was able to look at the image on the screen and draw it on a paper while mostly maintaining the proportions that were present in Bell’s image. This is because I was trained to mark out position and size before drawing any lines or shapes. However, I’ve never sketched on an iPad before. The only app I have on my iPad that allows me to draw or annotate is Notability, which is mostly for annotating PDFs and writing notes in class, not drawing or digital art. I struggled in the beginning not having the tools that I would usually have with a pencil and eraser, like changing the opacity of the lines, smudging, and sketching in faint lines first before drawing darker lines for outlines of major shapes.
From Clarke and Ambrosia’s “The Nervous System and the Anatomy of Expression”, I also have some background knowledge on Bell himself. Bell was very interested in the nervous system, and as an extension of that, emotional human expression. To Bell, representation of anatomy and physiology could not be adequately completed by just copying from dissection. Similarly, to him, artists cannot just copy from a static object they see in front of them but instead must understand the neurological and biological basis of emotional and bodily expression to make an aesthetically pleasing and convincing work. The intertwining of anatomy and aesthetic, artistic value can be seen in his etching, with the arm held in an outstretched position as if laying relaxed on a surface compared to the two-dimensional representation of a static arm in the frontal plane we may see in a textbook. However, this reading did not dive much into Bell’s representations or philosophies about the cardiovascular system, which is what is being represented in this etching.
Reflection on your practice:
I was able to use the lasso tool on my iPad to resize things that were too big and the eraser and undo tools to eliminate any lines that I did not like or did not accurately replicate the image. These tools would not have been available to me if I were engraving the image onto a metal plate like Bell had. I realize that I did have some flexibility in that sense; if I was tired or just didn’t want to fix a mistake anymore, I could simply erase it or undo it, or if the proportions were incorrect, I could just select a shape and make it smaller or bigger. However, I do have a greater appreciation for Bell, who would have had to etch this while most likely looking at an actual dissected arm. I was drawing freehand looking at an image, which has already simplified some aspects of reality to be able to be imprinted on a piece of paper, and I already found that difficult to do because I had to judge proportions, sizes, and angles on my own. Bell, most likely, would have had to judge what aspects of the arm could (and should) be included in his etching, another process of judgment on top of what I had done.
I haven’t sketched or drawn in a while despite having taken art classes for ten years in the past, so it was nice to be able to sit down and enjoy the process again. The sense of accomplishment and pride I had when looking at my final piece was very rewarding and reminded me of why I enjoyed art when I was younger, looking at a piece I was able to create just by looking at something else and somehow translating this onto a piece of paper. I spent the most time on shading the left side of the image, mostly because I was trying to figure out how to convey depth with just hatched lines; as I progressed from left to right, I spent less time on shading each section since I began to grasp how to convey a sense of depth and shadow without coloring anything in but just by altering the thickness, density, and direction of lines.
Photos/video documenting process:
Questions that arise:
If I were to pull up a textbook today that illustrated the arteries of the arm, how would it compare to this image? In the context of medical education today, would the original image be considered as having too much “artistic liberty”? Does this artistic liberty make a representation inaccurate? According to Ambrosio and Clarke, Bell certainly did not think so; to him, illustrating from a static reference could not truly capture the dynamics or expression of the subject. How did Bell decide what aspects of the arm to “keep” in his representation and what to sacrifice? Because etching can only capture the arm in one moment in time, and because it is possible that environmental factors could have changed what the arm looked like between the time Bell began to observe it and etch and after he finished, how did he prioritize one aspect or trait about his subject over another? Is there any evidence of this type of change over time in this representation? Did Bell sit in one place, observing the arm, to etch the image? Or did he draw from his memory to complete some of this etching? If so, can one’s memory of a subject be accurate enough to illustrate it? Did Bell position the arm in this way to make it more “aesthetically pleasing” when illustrating it, or was this how it looked when it was first presented to him?
Bell has previously documented why he felt it was important to study the nervous system: its ties to emotional and complex expression, which he believed separated humans from more primitive animals (Ambrosio and Clarke, 122). What conclusions could he draw about the importance of studying the arteries, and by extension, the cardiovascular system? Did any other human systems grant them qualities that he would deem superior to other species? How do scientists’ own philosophies and views reflect in their own representations and diagrams? Does the inclusion of these perspectives make their representations any less viable? While Daston and Galison write in Objectivity that scientists and artists began to pursue mechanical objectivity to restrict the intrusions of their own perspectives, this objectivity can never truly be realized. From what Bell argues, that there is no such thing as an unbiased observation, regardless of how much we strive to push aside our own biases and philosophies, they will be reflected in what we produce. For Bell, due to his belief that the complexity of the nervous system and its contributions to emotional expression, much of his work is focused on representing the brain and nerves. In terms of science today, while authors will often claim that they have no conflicts of interest to declare, their choice of what to research, as well as governments and private organizations choosing to fund certain areas of research, still reflect our values on what diseases, conditions, or natural phenomena we deem most important. In my microbiology lab, my professor will often look at cells on a plate and claim that they look “beautiful”. When I work in my research lab, certain graphs are tweaked to look more “presentable”. When taking Bell’s philosophies into account, as well as Daston and Galiston’s concession that perfect objectivity is unattainable, modern scientific practices today still reflect the pursuit for a “true to nature” representation while allowing for scientists and other organizations to make valued appraisals and judgments about what they choose to represent and how they represent them.
FIELD NOTE 2 OF 3
Date: February 10. 2022
People Involved: Myself
Location: Desk in my apartment
Reconstruction conditions: I just finished eating dinner and sitting around my kitchen counter, so I felt rather full and warm. I am also tired and sleepy; I didn’t sleep much the previous night, and I took a mock MCAT exam during the day for about 6 hours. I tried to take a nap and rest in the afternoon but wasn’t able to fall asleep despite how tired I was. It’s night time, so the light illuminating my work space is all artificial, my living room light and my desk lamp. My desk is very long but very cluttered, and it is a bit cramped since I have Post-It notes, my keys, my water bottle, and magazines from my internship sitting on my desk as well.
Time and duration of reconstruction: 9:35-10:30, around 1 hour
Equipment and tools used:
Wooden plate from the servery, screwdriver, scissors, pen
Subjective factors, e.g., how things smelled/looked/felt:
The lighting in my apartment is not very bright and has a yellowish hue, and my desk lamp is almost too bright, such that when I’m trying to look at the lines I am etching into the plate, they’re a little difficult to see. The sound of the screwdriver on the plate is not unpleasant and sounds much more like a light scratch than an aggressive dig. There are grooves on the plate (with the orientation I have the plate in, these grooves are vertical), and when I’m trying to etch lines that are vertical or close to vertical, it’s really difficult for me to etch them, as I’m just dragging the screwdriver along the groove. When I press harder to try and get some lines in, the screwdriver ends up making a dent into the plate; there is one portion of the plate where the top layer peeled off slightly. The plate is grainy and not completely smooth, as there is texture from the closely spaced vertical grooves.
Prior knowledge that you have:
I have never etched anything before. I was contemplating using scissors but soon found that the blades were difficult to control and the marks were not showing up on the plate as well as the screwdriver. I didn’t know how to correct for any potential mistakes either. I realized that I drew the arm too large for the hand to be included on the plate in the correct proportion, so that was a mistake I didn’t know how to navigate except for etching other lines more deeply so that they would stand out when compared to my mistakes.
Reflection on your practice:
The image created this time consisted of white lines and hatch marks, unlike the digital image I had illustrated that used dark gray as the main color for outlining and shading. It was interesting to see that even though the colors of the lines were opposite of what I had drawn initially and what was in the original image, I was still able to convey some semblance of shadow and depth with just white; similarly to the digital illustration, the thicker and denser the lines, the more it seemed to convey that this was an area that was dark or in the shadows. When looking at the original image, it seemed that the red pigment of the arteries was painted or inked on after the blood vessels were initially outlined, so I decided to use a red pen to try and mimic how pigment was added after the initial etching. Using a pen on the plate was difficult, and the ink would not come out clearly onto the plate. I wasn’t able to make lines precisely, since I had to sketch the lines out and draw them over and over on top of each other just so that the color would show.
As mentioned earlier, I also made a mistake of etching the initial outline of the arm such that the arm was too short to include the hand on the plate in a way that maintained the same proportions in the image. The hand is etched roughly at the edge of the plate, but given the size and length of the rest of the arm, the hand shouldn’t even have been able to fit on the plate if I were to have kept the original proportions of the image. I wasn’t able to rectify this mistake either, as I wasn’t able to erase the etched lines. Sometimes, when I tried to etch in the same direction as the grooves of the fibers of the plate, no etched lines would be clearly visible to me. When I exerted a bit more force, two areas of the place peeled off and left small “holes”, which I had to avoid when etching any more lines.
Photos/video documenting process:
Questions that arise:
For artists that pursue the etching method to produce images and representations of the body, how are mistakes corrected? What constitutes a mistake? Is it when it doesn’t resemble the stimulus, or is it when the representation no longer looks “realistic” or “accurate”? In the case of my attempt at etching, I considered the hand placement a mistake since it didn’t accurately capture the proportions of the arm depicted in the original image. Inside, I thought, “This doesn’t look like it could be real. The arm is too short. Anatomically, this wouldn’t make sense.” I feel like it may be an easy line to draw what is considered a mistake in anatomy; if one labeled the heart as the brain, it is easy to point out that as a mistake. In my case, one could potentially argue that it is very rare for a person’s bone and muscle structure to result in such a short forearm and wrist given the size and structure of their upper arm. At the same time, this has me thinking about disability, especially from Harriet McBryde Johnson’s “Unspeakable Conversations”. Johnson writes that in many arguments for access to abortion or euthanasia, philosophers and activists use disability as a justification for abortion or assisted suicide, as having a disability is viewed as so undesirable that death would (and should be) preferred (12-13). What if there did exist a case where somebody had a condition that resulted in the shortening of their forearms and wrists? Would their “condition” be simply waved off as a mistake, a justification to end their life? If we declared that as a “mistake” and that it shouldn’t exist, like how a brain in the place of a heart shouldn’t exist, are we negating the validity of those who are disabled? Should we even be trying to correct a condition like this, as if it were inherently wrong?
How do our senses inform our understanding of what is “wrong” or a mistake? Sometimes, we look at something and think, “Well, that doesn’t look right.” Or we will taste something and think, “Hm, that doesn’t taste right.” How are we making these appraisals? What informs our senses about what is right or wrong? Is it something innate, or do we learn this through acquired interactions with our environment? From Ann-Sophie Barwich’s “A Sense So Rare”, it seems that the verbal labels that we attribute to certain objects directly affects our appraisal of smells (262). Since language is acquired from our environments and cultures, it is possible that at least part of what contributes to our appraisals of the phenomena around us can be attributed to our interactions with our environment.
FIELD NOTE 3 OF 3
Date: February 11, 2022
People Involved: Myself
Location: My apartment floor and balcony window and door
Reconstruction conditions: It’s a bit warm in our living room today. The sun is still out, and it casts a bright white glow through the apartment windows. I just got up from bed after not feeling well earlier this afternoon. For once, I didn’t have to complete my reconstruction using artificial light from my desk lamp or the living room overhead lights.
Time and duration of reconstruction: 4:35-5:00 pm, approximately 25 minutes
Equipment and tools used:
Mechanical pencil, eraser, tracing paper, iPad
Subjective factors, e.g., how things smelled/looked/felt:
The tracing paper feels almost like the tissue paper used to stuff presents and wrap gifts. I tried to print out a copy of the original image to use as the guide from which I would be tracing, but my printer is a black and white printer, and the outline of the image was not clear enough to be used for tracing. Instead, I used my iPad to pull up a copy of the image and turned up the brightness of my screen so that the outlines would be more easily visible through the tracing paper. Similarly to the first reconstruction with the iPad, I was on the floor of my apartment mostly, and I would alternate between sitting on the floor or laying on my stomach. Despite the brightness of the screen, it was still difficult to see the lines on the original image to trace, especially the lines used for shading. Lines did not appear sharp under the tracing paper but more blurry and fuzzy.
Prior knowledge that you have:
I have never used tracing paper before for any assignments or art projects, but I have experience with sketching and drawing.
Reflection on your practice:
It was difficult to trace on an iPad. The image kept shifting when I pressed on the paper with my hand and kept zooming in and out, which made it difficult for me to keep the image in place where I had already started tracing. The task was much more mindless than the other previous reconstructions, since I was tracing the outline that was already prepared for me. However, it was frustrating to keep adjusting the image on my iPad screen to keep it aligned with the tracing I had already completed. The tracing paper also muted any shading details and the directions of the hatched lines used to convey shadow and depth. Therefore, the final product was a lot less refined and detailed than my first reconstruction. I wasn’t able to shade the entirety of the image because the thickness, density, and direction of the lines used for shading were not clearly visible under the tracing paper. Therefore, while I was able to capture the overall outline of the original image better than I had with the plate and the freehand digital drawing, I wasn’t able to convey shadow or depth as well, especially when compared to the digital drawing. Because I didn’t have any colored pencils, I couldn’t add any color to differentiate between the arteries and the rest of the image. The arteries, although they are the focus of the image, are much less obvious and visible than they were in the previous two reconstructions, where I had materials to use color and draw attention to them. In addition, due to some trouble I had with having the image stay stationary without zooming in or moving, the image I ended up tracing was zoomed in to the point that the hand was not fully visible. Some of the fingers were outside of the frame of the screen, so I wasn’t able to capture them in my illustration.
Photos/video documenting process:
Questions that arise:
During class, we discussed how many thinkers classified vision as the most noble of senses. Despite this reconstruction attempt being the most mindless since I could rely directly on the original image to trace instead of just relying on freehand illustration, I don’t find that this image is more “true to the source” than my first reconstruction. Is this because of the limitation of my materials (the tracing paper and the image on my iPad), or is it because my sense of vision wasn’t strong enough to discern the more minute details? On the other hand, when I was doing freehand illustration, is my representation inherently more inaccurate because I relied on my own sensation, which can have its own limitations, instead of tracing directly from something where my senses didn’t have to make as many judgments? Would tracing have been easier had I had a clear printed image? In Objectivity, the authors discuss the concept of mechanical objectivity, where machines and technology are introduced to repress the interventions of artists and scientists to let “nature speak for itself” and avoid any temptations of aesthetics (Daston and Galison, 120-121). Does technology make it more difficult for us to accurately capture what we see even though it tries to “fix” the problems that our senses have that may prevent us from perceiving or sensing reality the way it actually is? Or does it, by trying to correct the limitations of our senses, create a sense of reality that is warped and incorrect? Daston and Galison do concede that mechanical objectivity could never be realized and was used mostly as a guiding point, so perhaps technology is only an aspiration to this goal, and the reality (or one aspect of reality) that we are able to see through technology is just an unintended consequence of this aspiration.