Configurations from a woodcut

It so happened that the day after I posted reference 1, I happened to look at a woodcut of foxgloves by the late Monica Poole, one of a number of her studies using foxgloves as a starting point. Snapped above using my telephone: not bad, but a little dark.

It struck me that that sort of coincidences needed for some of the configurations of reference 1 were commoner here than they are in real life, so I thought a closer look was called for. With the results that follow. With the catalogue of configurations included above, for convenience. For present purposes we are interested in 02 (L) thru 09 (asterisk), the configurations involving just the one junction. I have tried to centre the marking circles on the junction in question in the snaps which follow.

A 06 (K), formed by the hatching coming to a point at a leaf.

Ignoring the hatching to the leaves above, another 06 (K) right, formed by the hatching coming to a point at a flower.

And if we use the hatching, we have another middle, formed by the hatching coming to a point at the sepals to that same flower.

But what about left? Do we score 02 (L) without the hatching or 05 (Y) with? Do we disregard hatching altogether, in much the same way as one might (try to) disregard shadows on a photograph?

In all three cases, we have the hatching aligned with the edges and junctions of the foreground picture – the sort of thing that would be improbable in a photograph.

A 04 (X) formed by the cross of area of hatching.

Left, another 04 (X) of the same sort. While right, an alignment of the hatching gives us a 05 (Y).

A 04 (X) involving a flower foreground line and a hatching background line.

A 06 (K), formed by the crossing of two seed cases coinciding with a stem.

Another 06 (K), this one formed by break in a flower tube coinciding with the edge of a leaf.

A 07 (Ψ), formed by the meeting of two sepals coinciding with the flower tube.

Another 07 (Ψ), formed in much the same way, but rather more ragged.

With this 07 (Ψ) left being clear enough, but depending on the alignment of the background hatching.

While right, the alignment of the background hatching, the leaf and the stem giving us a 05 (Y), arrowhead variety.

Another 04 (Y) formed by a stigma. One of a number of such on this woodcut, some clearer than others.

Two 03 (T)’s formed by splits in the flower tube, aka corolla. One might argue for a 04 (Y) for the upper one. In any event, there are lots of 03 (T)’s elsewhere.

A selection of 03 (T)’s.

A bit of a stretch, but if we regard the leaf and the stalk as edges, taken with the edge of the hatching we get a 09 (asterisk).

Again a bit of a stretch, but one could argue here for a 08 (man), more prominent than the alternative interpretation of 09 (asterisk).

And lastly, if we treat the white shoot as an edge, another 08 (man). 

Curiously, it has taken all this for me to properly notice that the central, flowering shoots are black, while the blank shoots to the sides are white.

A snap of some real foxgloves, turned up by Google. I don’t think that they have blank shoots at all and all the serious leaves are at the base of the flower shoots. A bit of artistic creation here?

Conclusions

The conversion of a more or less natural scene to a woodcut produces plenty of well-formed configurations. Particularly a woodcut in this style, with lots of straight edges and lots of geometric hatching.

It also seems to produce a larger number of the more complicated configurations, some of them depending on the way that the hatching has been ‘snapped to grid’, producing lots of alignments which would be rarer in a natural scene, in a photograph. There seem, for example, to be lots of 06 (K)’s. At a stretch one finds a couple of 08 (man)’s and a 09 (asterisk), neither of which turned up in natural scenes.

An affinity of both artist and viewer for these configurations? Evidence of their being agreeable, in some sense, to the human brain?

There is also a sense that one might do better here to analyse shapes rather than junctions, that the various small shapes are visually more interesting and more prominent than the junctions.

So right in the snap, we have a simple triangle, with another, smaller, triangle to its right, across the stem. Centre, we have a black seed case, repeated through the woodcut with variations. And left we have the rather more complicated flower, also repeated through the woodcut with variations.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/09/configurations-from-nature.html. 

Reference 2: The Structures of Letters and Symbols throughout Human History Are Selected to Match Those Found in Objects in Natural Scenes - Mark A. Changizi, Qiong Zhang, Hao Ye, Shinsuke Shimojo – 2006. The source of the catalogue snapped near the top.