Draw a Bird, Own a Bird
To draw something is to own it. You take home a sheet of paper with an image filtered through you, and you have an intense experience of the subject that can’t be taken away. I once sat for hours at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon with a sketchbook and made exactly two drawings. What I learned from that observation was that the canyon is a set of horizontal shapes stacked one above the other and fantastically carved by wind and water. A laminated land form. That experience was more than twenty years ago but I still can see it vividly, a side effect of looking long and carefully and transmitting that image from my eyes to my hands. Could there be there some neurological change from this sort of concentration and interpretation? I wonder.
One reason to draw a real live bird, to spend so much time with your subject, a pencil and pad, and your very own hand-eye coordination, is that when you have a drawing, the esssence of that bird is yours to keep. You have absorbed it’s every motion, nuance, feather tract and life-force and it becomes a member of the academy of brain cells and nerve fibers. If, someday, you see that species again, you have the reserves to work from, the muscle memory, and the proportions are stored where you can retrieve them again.
This kind of observation of living, moving birds gives you the same intimacy, mixed in with adrenalin and a frantic attention and sense of urgency. These are some images drawn on recent trips to Cairns, Australia and Barro Colorado Island, Panama. The Grand Canyon changes very little while you draw it, you can be sure of that. Birds live fast. They don’t hold still, at least you can’t count on them to hold a pose. How does one catch their image on the fly? More tomorrow…
