WELCOME. I was delighted to find the names of longtime friends and new colleagues on the many emails that arrived, requesting to join the conversation. This blog aims to gather together diverse voices and visions, in ways that promote environmental awareness, deepen our historical knowledge, and foster civic virtue. Mark Twain observed that
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and small-mindedness.”
During his lifetime, many travelers kept journals, often drawing and writing in them interchangeably. People often confuse drawing with art when it is a form of writing that allows us to transform knowledge and ideas into visual experiences. On the title page of his 1847 American Drawing Book, A Manual for the Amateur and Basis of Study for the Professional Artist, Adapted to the use of Public and Private Schools, as Well as Home Instruction, John Gadsby Chapman states that,
“Any one who can learn to write can learn to draw”
Because anyone can draw what they know, the goal of observational drawing is to learn what we behold. In the introduction to his 1835 Graphics, A Manual of Drawing and Writing for Schools and Families. which preceded Chapman’s book a dozen years, Rembrandt Peale reminds us that,
“Drawing is nothing else than drawing he forms of letters. Drawing is little more than writing the forms of objects. Everyone that can learn to write is capable of learning to draw; and everyone should know how to draw, that can find advantage in writing.”
Challenging a friend who never drew in their life to carry a sketchbook was met with protest. It was pointless, he claimed, because he had no artistic talent. I reminded him that he plays tennis, despite the fact that he would never compete at Wimbeldon.
Peale’s crusade to teach everyone how to draw met with considerable success, His textbook was an evergreen publication for almost a century; and then we lost our way.
Conflating drawing with art is no different than reading shopping-lists as poems. Drawing is a skill, confined not only to artistic practice, any more than one need be a poet to compose a shopping-list. Quoting Peale again,
“The advantages of speech are enjoyed by almost all mankind, of whom but a small number advance to the refinement and power of eloquence. In like manner, although only a few, peculiarly talented, may succeed in becoming proficients in the higher departments of drawing and painting, yet every one, without any genius but application, may learn the simple elements of this art in a degree sufficient for the most useful purposes; the labor of acquirement being lessened by the pleasure and evident value of the immediate results.”
In other words, there will be great benefits derived from the effort, including the pleasures of the process. Think of drawing as another language. To those readers who still feel daunted by a sharp pencil and a blank page, let me again quote Peale. On the title-page of Graphics is a single word;
“Try”
Despite the pandemic, 2021 was a very busy year that set many of us on new paths. One of the most satisfying of my experiences during this prolonged ordeal has been to deliver a series of online workshops at a number of venues, including the Albany Institute of History and Art, Crown Point State Historic Site, Greenwich Art Society, Hudson River Museum, Olana State Historic Site and Whallonsburg Grange, in Essex, New York. Through these workshops, I have been able to interact with some remarkable people, exploring how mindful visual journaling can promote environmental awareness. Radical eco-warriors might interfere with logging-crews and whaling vessels. Other forms of activism include slowing down, looking closely, and beginning to understand how human behavior has contributed to climate change, and the rise of new medical crises. Drawing and writing are not just tools for individual creative self-expression. They provide us with the means for transforming visual experience into knowledge and ideas, in ways that can lead us toward a more humane and sustainable world.
JLM. January 1, 2022
In this installment: The pleasures of visual acuity, Louis Kahn sketchbooks, subscriber art, new and notable books, updates, and exhibitions. Available only to subscribers: Subscriptions are FREE. Click below
