Not so long ago I came across the term 'figurative reconfiguring', and immediately saw that this very well described what I had been doing for quite some time. But I had been referring to this aspect of my life-drawing process as 'anagramatic', a term which I had adopted after reading an interview with Hans Bellmer. He talked of the body being comparable to a sentence that invites us to disarticulate it, so that, through a series of endless anagrams, its true contents may be recomposed. Following from this I then take the view that what then appears as a drawing is more of an expression of the feelings, the perceptions, the insights, the mind, and the emotions of the artist which are all part of the dialogue, and the symbiotic relationship the artist has with the human body, rather than a representational reproduction of the model as object.
My mentor, Paul Fowler, one day recognised that within my anagramic compositions there was often a space created. Yet this is a phenomena I was not initially conscious of creating, and certainly not recognising. The parts of the pose which I had selected, for various reasons, to explore and include in the drawing tended to surround and help focus upon a space which consequentially had depth. He addressed this space as a 'counterbalance', and it become an element of a drawing which is an essential counterbalance and an essential complement to the anatomical gymnastics and complexity surrounding it. Paul frequently refers to these compositions of mine as 'being very 'spatial'. I agree with him and can now recognise both the space within, i.e. the counterbalance, and the space beyond I.e. the depth both within and beyond the edges of the paper which I enter into when engaging the human body. The third drawing contains a double counterbalance.
