26 November 03
Honoring the Dead
Butuki posted a beautiful scratchboard drawing of a raccoon skull. I was trying to find a sketch I once did of a female scarlet tanager that had hit the glass door of my office building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just moments before I walked in; it was still warm. I can’t find the sketch just now—I’ll add it if it turns up later. What I remember, though, was sketching quickly to somehow capture the essence of what remained of the bird’s life, of its vitality. This was nothing like the careful, ponderous, holy drawing Butuki did, a raccoon he had killed in mercy and returned a year later to honor in this way; my sketch was a scramble. I also wrote a poem from the bird’s point of view. It was something along the lines of “Who Killed Cock Robin.”
It reminds me that I have not been making time for drawing. It is when I am at my most meditative. It’s a good form of prayer, and I’m grateful to be reminded of this.
Previous: Charting The Rocks Next: Back From Spain
I agree with you about drawing; and I haven’t done enough of it in a long time. There is something about drawing that allows you to “enter” the subject. It is as if you become one with it and can sense what it is like to be something other than yourself. Drawing urges you to really look and see; you can’t draw something, at least not well, if you can’t see it, and it has something fundamentally to do with the human hand-eye coordination.
Photography just can’t do this, no matter how carefully you compose and try to empathize with the subject. I love both mediums, but after traveling, during which I have both done drawings and taken photographs (note the difference in verbs) it is inevitably the drawing which evoke the stronger emotional responses. I’m not sure exactly why, since the photographs reflect much clearer views of the remembered places and people.
Too often i hurry my drawings and maybe that is why I don’t draw as much as I used to. My short weekend hikes don’t allow me much time to pause and really see things. I must return to that way of seeing things; it will enrich the experience of the trips.
I don’t know that I can add much to this—both of you have summed it up so beautifully!—it does seem to me that drawing is so much more about learning to perceive as well as see, to get a sense of the essence and form of a thing (or creature) by patiently observing it without prejudice over time.
This said, I do remember some sketches (which I mean to post, someday, when I have scanning time and online space—sigh) that I drew hastily and often just after the fact, in large part because I was unable to take pictures of something I was actively involved in (like lining boats down a river). There’s always that bit of distance with the camera (though I’ve finally found one that takes pictures in the same scale as I seem to compose them, which helps a bit) while sketching is much more intimate—for me at least.