21 January 04

Peace Through Drawing

Butuki was kind enough to comment on my sketches of the scissor-tailed flycatcher and wondered what my field notebooks looked like… alas, I have none. I should, I think.

Or at the very least I should draw birds more often.

I once took an illustration class where one of the assignments was to illustrate a collective noun (pride of lions, murder of crows, etc.). I chose skein of snow geese, and spent the next three weeks seeking out reference material from which to draw these beautiful birds. Photos. Bird videos I stuck on “pause.” Stuffed specimens in the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. No live birds, sadly; this would be an easy task in Davis in the winter, but not in Cambridge. Yet there was plenty of material from which to draw.

I will never, now, misidentify a Ross’s goose for a snow goose. Why? Because I learned that bird, inhaled it, almost, by drawing it. It doesn’t matter that the sketches, most of them, weren’t very good; it’s the act of seeing that makes the difference. Looking as hard as that at the scissor-tailed flycatcher has made me commune with it in a different way than looking at it through binoculars, and certainly with photographing it. It was like a meditation.

The best part? Since that time on Monday morning I’ve been on a kind of high. I think I should listen to this voice that speaks of the healing power of being with birds long enough to do, say, thirty sketches. They don’t have to be large, they don’t have to be finished, and they certainly don’t have to be any good. I just have to show up with a pencil and sketchbook.

Posted by at 08:06 PM in Design Arts | Link |
  1. When I was in architecture school I had to both spend every day going out and sketching surroundings and details and teach drawing to incoming students. Both activities taught me just how much drawing does to helping you to understand things. There is a fundamental connection between your hand and the brain and the eyes that allows you to put things together in your mind that no other method of concentration can match. It is like a marriage between analysis and synthesis, and together they bring out a whole. Photography just can’t do it, because it is something outside your body and mind. After drawing the entire structure, every concrete slab, every joint, every connection, and all the colors, I have a comprehension of the Sydney Opera House that no amount of magazine viewing will ever compare to. At the same time, these quick sketches have a way of instilling the essence of a creature or an object that helps you understand more than just the physical creature itself. You know who and why it is, too, in a way words and photographs can never portray.

    Have you looked at this site: Wild West Yorkshire nature diary (http://www.wildyorkshire.co.uk/naturediary/index.html) His drawings are delightful.

    — butuki    21. January 2004, 21:17    Link
  2. So true! Thanks to both of you for the reminder of how this works. It’s been such a long time . . .

    — dave    22. January 2004, 04:49    Link
  3. There is all this, and there is something else too. When I’m drawing, nothing else is taking up space in my head. I give ALL of it to the sketching. This is very useful, for instance, when you are preoccupied with a dangerous, conceited zealot who’s about to propound his ideas for what should be happening with the world a few hours later.

    I do know Richard Bell’s Wild West Yorkshire Diary. I love his willingness to put all of it out on the web. It’s so generous, as is his discussion of how and why he did certain things (a warm wash for a sky was a particularly interesting entry, I think).


    — Pica    22. January 2004, 04:50    Link
  4. This reminds me of Annie Dillard’s chapter on “Seeing” in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She says something to the effect that “the lover can see, and the knowledgeable.” Then she talks about visiting a quarter horse ranch where everyone in the family, including a 5-year-old child, can draw a realistic horse. Dillard’s sketch, she laments, looked like an emaciated bag of bones.

    Not having “inhaled” horses in the way that this family had, she couldn’t draw a horse to save her life. But she could, she explained, draw a pretty good goldfish after having one as a pet for a while.

    — Lorianne    22. January 2004, 11:34    Link

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