drawing is one of the most powerful
tools of human expression it’s not only
an aid to help us think but perhaps the
most direct way of manifesting a thought
of getting something out of our heads
and onto a surface so that it can be
recorded about ten years ago
I began working on a book about how and
why we named an order nature about why
and how language has failed me the basic
thesis is that nature is an
interconnected and constantly changing
system but in order to communicate that
interconnected system through language
we have to language being possibly the
most powerful tool humans have ever
invented we have to take that holistic
system and chop it up and label the
pieces and soon the holistic world
becomes fragmented into a series of
units that fit into boxes and boundaries
are placed between ourselves and things
in nature it took me a while to realize
but it’s actually the failure of words
and language that helped bring richness
and purpose to my life
that helped spark the urge to be
creative to find a way to fill the
spaces in-between where words couldn’t
go and it was in part knowledge of an
older form of communication that I’d
been doing since childhood that brought
this inquiry about in my head a form of
communication that could be considered
almost a window into a more elemental
human self and that’s drawing I’d like
to start with this image it’s possibly
the most iconic image ever drawn by a
scientist if not the most important
it’s Darwin’s drawing the first drawing
he ever made of the evolutionary tree of
life he just returned from a five-year
trip around the world on the boat known
as the
egle and he sat down at his desk and he
was trying to synthesize his thoughts
about this big idea evolution that all
animals in all life on Earth was
descended from common ancestry on a
great evolutionary timeline it looks
kind of like a stick figure gone wrong
but it’s it’s actually such a simple but
such an important idea perhaps that
simplicity is what makes it so beautiful
it turned all ideas about why we are
here and how we got here on our heads
and he did it through a drawing he may
as well have said in a version of de
cartes I think therefore I am I think
therefore I draw if you can see he wrote
I think up there or I draw therefore I
think or I can’t think unless I draw or
maybe I draw therefore I am which I
think will be a theme of this talk going
forward the idea that the first time
humans make mark made marks consciously
was the first time that they became or
help them become sentient self-aware
animals I thought about calling this
talk why we draw but then I realized
that not everybody does draw although
most of us start drawing his children
and then stop and I’d like to explore
that a little bit later then I thought
maybe I would call it why I draw as
there’s nothing I’ve been doing longer
in my life and drawing I drew before I
could write my own name and before I
could form complete sentences but then I
what I really wanted to be about was
more about why I think we should draw
drawing as a tool for helping us develop
ideas for helping us internalize our
environments helping us slow down and
pay attention almost like a form of
meditation in this hyper technological
age that we live in to slow down to help
us observe our surroundings I grew up in
southwestern Connecticut not far from
here and I was introduced to nature
through my father
love of birds I began drawing birds as a
child copying the works of John James
Audubon and Louis Agassiz suertes and
Roger Tory Peterson so I was drawing
from nature already processed by other
individuals through through the through
their minds but then I also had access
to raw nature itself in this case a
magnolia Warbler that had flown into the
window of our home and died and my
father wasn’t afraid to pick it up and
put in my hand and you know that was a
very formative moment for me holding
this beautiful unfortunately dead thing
in my hand but it filled me with a sense
of wonder
this is an early drawing of a Warbler
soon after that my around the age of
nine my drawings morphed from birds into
fish when I fell in love with fishing
and in particular a beautiful fish of
cold water streams called the trout in
particular even more so the brook trout
which is the native trout of Connecticut
that has lived in our streams since the
last glaciation they’re some of the most
beautiful creatures in my opinion that
I’ve certainly ever seen and I wanted to
capture them through drawing because
that’s what I did my passion for trout
was so intense it’s hard for me to
describe it resulted in two books of
paintings of trout of North America and
Europe Asia North Africa I spent at
seven years traveling around the world
looking for native trout that was much
later but typically what I would do in
any spare moment was go out on the
stream near my home catch a fish make
sketches of the fish and usually take
photographs too because I like to let
the fish go alive and the colors fade
very quickly after you take the fish out
of the water so because I wanted to draw
them these were very good aides to me
for looking at the colors then I’d go
back to my home and I typically sit at
the desk in my bedroom I draw the
outline of the fish and graphite and
then start filling it in with
watercolors and at that point I realized
something strange started to happen I
again to have these almost visions like
lucid dreaming where I was reliving a
moment on the stream even though I
wasn’t there that somehow drawing had
had brought about this resurrection of a
very vivid memory I could feel the the
warmth of the Sun I could see the the
stream going by feel the or hear the
buzz of a fly by my face smell the
flowers in the air and I began to think
about why this happened because I also
would write about my experiences in my
journal since I was 11 years old I was
so intensely into fishing that on days I
didn’t go fishing I wrote no fishing
there were more days that I fished and
didn’t fish but in any case when I wrote
in my journal about the experiences the
same thing didn’t happen so it was
something unique to drawing and then
when I went back out on the stream I
felt like the experience of drawing the
trout had made me more efficient at
catching them a more efficient predator
so to speak even though I didn’t kill
the fish but that that somehow drawing
the trout had made it exist in my body
and my brain had integrated myself with
the environment in a way that was almost
kind of magical and then when I first
encountered these drawings of animals on
cave walls I don’t know in some
publications somewhere and read how old
they were and France and Spain at sites
like Glasgow and Cha they made they
think 40,000 years ago I felt like I had
some idea we have no idea why they were
made of course because the people have
been long dead many many people have
speculated but I felt like I had some
idea about why perhaps they were drawn
and why perhaps people still drew
because if I’d had this experience where
I was drawing the animal I was pursuing
and it had such a profound effect on me
and it made me a better observer of my
surroundings had helped hone my skills
of observation that maybe drawing was a
tool that
these people get to know their
surroundings better and then once they
made a drawing of the creature even if
you weren’t the person who made the
drawing it gave a a platform for other
people to communicate that thing when it
wasn’t even in the room think about how
powerful that is if you have a drawing
of a cow or something like these or
whatever kind of cow like creature they
they were made possibly extinct
creatures now if you have a drawing you
have a platform through which you can
communicate that thing a drawing in this
sense is almost like a word and and
because drawing predates written
language drawing is the ancient ancestor
of written language written language
came out of drawing and drawing possibly
even predates complex spoken language
then drawing may have been the first
word essentially the first way to
communicate it’s it’s like saying the
word cow if I say the word cow you can
all close your eyes and conjure up a cow
and your heads and that’s a pretty
pretty powerful thing it’s almost like
sorcery you can bring the animal into
the context of the room without it even
being there or some imaginary semblance
of it so I felt like you know the
drawing was this perhaps first most
powerful way of communication and then
that way maybe the writers of the Bible
had it wrong in the beginning wasn’t the
word I think in the context of human
evolution and the beginning was the
drawing I’ve seen some of these rock
drawings in person this is in Zimbabwe
people were very resourceful in how they
were made we were told that these were
made by using sometimes antelope blood
or semen or the urine as a binder of the
pigment the ochre pigments or the urine
of a ancestor of an elephant called the
hyrax but they’re extremely beautiful
these giraffe drawings in Zimbabwe this
is a drawing from Thermopolis Wyoming
where they used a rock to pack out the
drawing on the rock with another two
rocks and these are thought to be
thousands of years old
going to these sites and standing in
front of them has filled me with great
wonder like like you do standing in
front of a great work of art like a van
Gogh or a DaVinci because I believe that
that when you stand in front of a work
of art you are that the energy of the
person who made it is still sort of part
of that work and when you stand in front
of it even thousands of years later
you’re engaged in a kind of time machine
of the mind and this led me to think
about or to ask what were the first
marks that we made consciously as humans
and why and and I thought what we must
have definitely taken our cues from
nature perhaps what inspired us to draw
originally were the footprints of
animals in the snow like these Fox
prints in my backyard or the lines drawn
by blade of grass as the wind blows it
over a dune and the sand and Cape Cod or
maybe it was the afterimage of the Sun
when you gaze at that the Sun which you
shouldn’t do for too long ago burn your
eyeballs and then you close your eyes
and you have that beautiful after image
of the Sun on your eyes perhaps that
gave us some indication of you know
making a mark or maybe it was the power
of a reflection on a lake because we
don’t think about how amazing and unique
an idea that is or a thing that nature
does it takes a three-dimensional world
and it converts it to a two-dimensional
surface for you which is what artists
try to do they take they take the
three-dimensional world and they convert
it to a two-dimensional surface whether
it’s a piece of paper or canvas or a
piece of rock another reflection on the
pond across the street from my home or
maybe it was some other mark made by
animals in nature they’re certainly
abundant these are eggs laid by
different sea birds and other kinds of
birds when an egg starts in the body of
a female bird it’s white and then as it
passes out of the oviduct of the bird
little essentially inkjet printers in
the oviduct make these little marks on
the eggs and they’re beautiful there’s
some speckled and
you know squiggly ones and you could or
I at least think they’re quite
remarkable and beautiful and I consider
them a kind of drawing if you do then
you would say that these eggs were drawn
on by a female grackle the bird that
laid them and these in particular bear a
remarkable resemblance to the work of a
little-known artist named Jackson
Pollock and you wonder you know Pollock
lived in eastern Long Island near the
beach he undoubtedly took a lot of walks
along the beach and he probably saw the
the eggs of different sea birds so you
know whether it may be coincidence this
resemblance but whether Pollock was
inspired by the bird or the bird was
inspired by Pollock I’m not so sure but
I’d venture to say that if I had to
guess which came first Pollock or the
egg that it was the bird so nature we
can be pretty sure was the first scribe
so what first humanoid was it that first
saw the power realized the power and
imitating these things that happen in
nature whether it was the courtship of
birds that we mimicked in our dances or
birdsong in our speech when we had first
made a mark as a human on a wall or
wherever we had not only sorted we
weren’t just copying a gesture made by
Nature we discovered a method and this
method was a revelatory method it’s so
simple but I think it was one of the
biggest ideas of all time think about
what that does it’s it it’s a way of
pausing in recording time all these
gestures left behind by animals you know
Fox prints in the snow or lines in the
sand drawn by grass they’re ephemeral
they’re slippery just like thoughts and
memories they’re washed away by the rain
and the wind but if we can make a mark
that actually lasted in a place that was
protected by the elements and that that
mark could be
communicated to another human being that
was extremely powerful it was it was a
way of acknowledging our own existence
on the planet and and probably these
people liked doing that too because they
may have acknowledged that they died and
it was a way of leaving a piece of
themselves behind the first drawings I
would imagine probably looked something
like this
this is a an image of a hand on a cave
wall in Sulawesi Indonesia thought to be
about 40,000 years old made probably by
somebody taking some pigment in their
mouth and blowing it through a straw
around their hand to leave a negative
image and again this this kind of image
I find it very haunting looking but it
was it was a way of kind of saying I am
here or Here I am this is a cave in
Argentina they call the quavo de Manos I
think the cave of hands it’s it’s a it’s
a really arresting image and it’s like
they’re shouting out Here I am Here I am
I’m here I’m on the planet and it’s it’s
very much now looking back on it like
Darwin’s little simple image of the Tree
of Life an acknowledgement of where
humans came from and in this great
ancestral lineage that were part of
contemporary artists still use this
simple imagery to this day this is a
work by the British artist Richard long
handprints in a circle and this is an
image by an artist named Joel Shapiro
made by with fingerprints it almost
looks like a digital drawing this is a
close-up of that image these are the
footprints of my son four month old son
Cody minutes after he was born these
marks are sometimes called by academics
indexical marks their individual – every
human being and that’s partly what makes
a drawing powerful that it’s a mark of a
single person and even if we all you
know drew a straight line on a piece of
paper and we handed them out to
everybody you would see the differences
that’s why I kind of lament the fading
away of
cursive handwriting in other ways of
handwriting because it’s so special to
get like a letter in the mail or
something like that as opposed to a text
email which is also great and efficient
but but I lament the sort of end of
those individualistic beautiful ways of
communicating I still draw to this day
this is me in the studio I draw at home
and I draw on trips around the world in
the midst of different enquiries this is
was on a trip to CERN him as part of
this project I’m working on about naming
and ordering nature a collecting trip to
CERN him with the Peabody Museum at at
Yale this is a snake that we collected
and there’s me drawing the snake and
this is a toucan I sometimes wonder how
it is that these tools that I use to
communicate are still relevant being
that they’re so ancient and really
haven’t changed in thousands of years a
pencil with graphite something that’s
mined from the ground an animal
hairbrush with a wood handle or a piece
of charcoal from the fire pit in my
backyard can still make a very wonderful
drawing how has this technology
persisted to this day in the face of all
the alternative technologies we have
photography type written Lang Britain
language excuse me or or the you know
all the other things we have iPhones and
things I still draw because it’s a way
for me to connect with my surroundings
this drawing I made on a trip to the
Scottish Highlands and if I hadn’t sat
down in this landscape to draw this
picture if I just taken a picture with
my iPhone and walked away I wouldn’t
remember the landscape it wouldn’t be as
internalized in myself as it was because
I sat there and I can still remember
looking at this drawing the the sound of
the stream and the the trout jumping in
the stream the midges biting the crap
out of me the Sheep you know roaming by
and smelling their dung this is me at
around two years old drawing but just as
a way to sort of start wrapping up the
talk we all start drawing as children
and then we stop and I wonder why that
is is it is it because we’re told by our
teachers that a drawing has to look like
something and then if it doesn’t they
take it and tear it up and throw it away
that would be a pretty bad teacher but I
think I’m not just selling drawing here
as a means to an end as a way of having
something a result that looks like
something obviously abstract
expressionism threw out the idea that a
drawing has to resemble something in our
in our worlds I’m selling drawing more
as a process that helps us connect with
nature to slow down to pay attention as
I mentioned before as a kind of
meditation I’ve been working on a body
of work I’ll end with this image where I
do these murals of bird silhouettes on
walls and they’re kind of like the
images that the early people painted on
cave walls just silhouettes of animals
on a surface and the point of these
pieces is that the source material are
these old field guides where there’s
silhouettes of birds or animals with
numbers and the numbers match up to a
list of names to help us identify things
in the field so when I paint them I
paint the animals and the numbers but I
leave out the key so there’s no way that
people can satisfy their urge to know
what the names are and then they get
frustrated and that’s because I feel
that sometimes we live too much in the
world of language in labels and it’s
just an acknowledgement there’s other
forms of communication that can be just
you [Music]