The Seeing of Clouds – Visus Signatus Drawings 2018–2022

Modern image technology from photography to electronic rendering withdraws the hand from the process of picture recording. Yet in his Zeichnen des Sehens der Wolke (Drawing the process of seeing a cloud) Gerhard Lang relies on the hand as the motive agent of his imaging. This offers a protocol of the process of seeing the cloud, but without this being controlled by the eye during transcription. The eye does not intervene: culturally biased interference, as happens when switching focus between the motif and the drawing, is precluded.* […]

What is the hand, this experienced puppet of the eye, doing when it is drawing the act of seeing the cloud? It does not reproduce the motif instantaneously as does each camera obscura, even that of the eye, but it processes it. As it draws the picture its time is elapsing, as too is the cloud’s. This gives rise to a twice-processed image: through the movement of the hand and that of the cloud. Even in superlative weather, three hours for clouds is no trifle. […]

Gerhard Lang’s drawing of the process of seeing the cloud is regulated by eye and hand as “nervous encompassing organs” (Aby Warburg). Even by keeping the gaze riveted to the cloud formation the outcome is a psychic-electric rendering of the process of seeing into an image that is blindly executed by the hand as a kind of organic Geiger counter.

Ursula Panhans-Bühler, from “In the darkroom of seeing clouds”, first published in Nubi Tempora. Cloud Landscapes, Deutscher Wetterdienst (German Meteorological Service), Offenbach am Main, 2017. Translated by Matthew Partridge.

* This drawing method is generally called blind drawing. In the work of Gerhard Lang it is referred to as Visus Signatus (the drawn seeing).

Ursula Panhans-Bühler is emeritus professor of the history of modern art at the School of Arts and Design at the University of Kassel, Germany. She was one of the founding members of the Society of the Shadow Accelerators.