Last term before Christmas I did a lot of teaching, too much really, and part of this was the design of a new course called The Artist’s Eye: Drawing from Natural History. It takes so much time to work through these sessions, and it was a large group of students. Each day had a different theme such as drawing fossils, marine invertebrate, insects, funghi etc. The funghi session was a favourite. Beginning with the work of Beatrix Potter we moved onto the drawings of amazing mycologists like M.F Lewis, who worked across England and Wales for forty-two years, filling three volumes with watercolours titled a Fungi Collected in Shropshire and Other Neighbourhoods (1860–1902), or Minakata Kumagusu, (drawings shown below) a of researcher of slime moulds and cryptogamous plants, also known for work in anthropology and folklore studies
One student in this course was a kind of benevolent naysayer, as in, she was dissatisfied by either the course or her own work and had a habit of calling out whatever she didn’t like. On one particular day after asking students to draw an object in front of them, she said, “I really don’t get what it is we’re supposed to be doing here”. I replied something along the lines of it being about drawing the plant/mushroom to learn through observation. See how long the stem of the weed that stretches towards the light or how tight the gills of the mushroom are before they open up and spread out, or how the light falls on a smooth rock? Something like that. ‘Oh, okay’ she said, ‘so it’s just about drawing the thing, but is that all? Isn’t that just copying?’
I was frustrated but also couldn’t get the thought out my head. These comments are so helpful in identifying areas to build on and this just kept niggling at me. Yes of course it’s copying, but not to arrive at the same thing! To arrive somewhere else. Anthropologist Michael Taussig, talking about drawing in fieldwork notebooks says the ‘struggle [is] worth it because I looked at colour and I looked at the night and the river like I never had before and saw what I take so for granted with new eyes. Is there any activity that so rewards failure? These are toads that become flowers’.[1]
Or flowers, once drawn, become something else – teachers bringing new ideas. I have the notion this year is that among the artists I have been working with in London that a lot have been preoccupied with learning self-portraits, imagination, and narrative drawing told through the lens of their own identities. I understand in a way that for that one student drawing a mushroom wasn’t enough. I tried to think this through in the context of the drawing workshops in Tiquié last year. I have the notion that the Indigenous artists were more engaged with observational drawing, and there was also less of a divide between drawing from observation and drawing from imagination – the pictures inhabited the same world. I was able to help someone improve a drawing of a fruit on the table in front of them through amending the outline of helping to match the colour in paint, but I struggled to improve the drawing of the vessel someone was drawing from their imagination, and they didn’t seem sure why I couldn’t do that in the same way.
This is a huge generalisation at this stage and I can’t draw any conclusions from that short drawing workshop, but it could be something to think about in the future. Can I use is that it to actually ask, what is it that happens when you draw the object that sits in front of you?
[1] Taussig, Michael T. 2011. I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.