Hunting the Griffon

I'm doing a children's book that traces the roots of the myth of the griffon in the fossil remains of the protoceratops. With this in mind, we drew the component parts of the griffon - the eagle and the lion - as well as the many protoceratops skulls that line up along the wall on the 4th floor.

Mammoths and Mastodons and Birthdays

My birthday approaches, and I am remembering how I spent last year's happily drawing the Mammoth skeleton in the American Museum of Natural History's Paul and Irma Milstein Hall of Advanced Mammals, later joined by Caitlin, who drew wonderful, vigorous mammoths. This drawing, and day, was significant to me, and let me see if I can explain why.

There are so many sides to drawing, and like anyone I have a facility for some parts and less so for other aspects. I have from childhood understood the visual side of drawing, and even though it seems on the face of it drawing is purely visual, it encompasses much much more.

Drawing is a visual response to the world, but doesn't need to be limited to responding to the solely visual world. Obviously drawing can give form to imagined things and ideas - I think that's easily enough understood - but even when drawing observationally (sitting with your sketchbook on a bench in a museum in front of a mounted mammoth skeleton), there's so much to draw beyond shadows and highlights. That is, beyond what it looks like.

In this drawing, I got into a mental space where I felt like I was sculpting the enormous bones, roughly wrestling them into general shapes and then refining into more specific forms. I sustained the illusion in my mind for a surprisingly long time that I was actually engaging with the 5-foot-high bones of the leg rather that moving my pencil point over an 8-inch-high drawing in my sketchbook. 'This ridge turns to the left here, then flattens out there, and bends around the shaft of the femur there …" I thought to myself.

Kimon Nicolaides said you don't draw what something looks like, not even what it is, but what it is doing.

The finished drawing doesn't look especially different than my other drawings in the museum. But it took me to a tactile, elemental place that was completely absorbing - I'm not really sure how long I sat drawing, and afterwards I felt invigorated and satisfied.

Caitlin sat beside me filling the air with a cloud of graphic dust as she drew beautifully in her own tactile way. I wish every birthday was as fun for everyone.

I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products - Marcel Duchamp

This image is from last week. Chris and I went to the Natural History Museum, and were intimidated by the tide of people receding in and flowing out of the Museum. It was a lovely beginning of spring day, so we set out to the park with our flowered camp stools and planted ourselves in front of this knotted beauty.....which seemed to have inspired more then a few to declare their love.

On a Mission

Does the American Museum of Natural History have every living thing represented in it? Our second day of drawing Chris and I were resolved to draw bats. We asked the guards and volunteers and docents and were sent from floor to floor until we came upon a case in, strangely but not surprisingly, an out of the way pass-through space, where several American mammals were displayed in a rather undignified manner, their faces to the wall like they were being punished.

The taxidermy arts are practiced at such an incredibly high level at the museum that it's a good reminder that at its most basic level these are dead animals preserved and mounted. The bats we found were old and so obviously dead, their membranous wings dried, hard and translucent. We stood and drew them attentively, while groups of school kids were herded by, temporarily confused into silence by the small, dark, unimportant-looking hallway.

The delicacy of the tiny limbs, the lower legs poking out at a right angle from the torso, the mean little claws at the tops of the wings - what amazing little creatures. A skull was attached to the wall, pointedly noted as being genuine, that would easily fit inside a peanut shell.

Seeking light and openness we went to the primate hall and drew the aye-aye, trying not to lose its sleek form while drawing those long thin bones (like its awesome middle finger, which I hope it uses expressively).

Origins

Caitlin and I met at the bar where her husband Rod works and talked about drawing, which we've been talking about for years. Caitlin, a costume designer, was currently without a project, and I had just been let go from the exhibit design firm where I had worked for 4 years (my gears had not been meshing with the boss). Caitlin said she had recently decided that she liked animals more than humans, and that was just that (her husband was accepting of this reality).

We should use all our free time to draw, we agreed, and we should draw animals. I had always thought that since I lived in New York City I should draw at the American Museum of Natural History, but in 22 years of living here I had never actually just taken a day to do so. So we hashed out the plan to start a drawing group on the spot, and I believe we came up with the name of our group there and then.

For the first session we invited some friends, both costume designers, who we thought would dive into this with the same fervor, Chris and Caitlin. We did not, I promise, set out to have two Chrises (for I am named Chris) and two Caitlins - this symmetry arose naturally.

The first drawing session began with the comic scene of me arriving at the museum ten minutes late (this has become typical) and walking from floor to floor and room to room talking to Chris on my cell phone, trying to find the Asian camel she insisted she was standing right next to. That I couldn't find any camel of any description with her next to it was not surprising, for Chris had mistakenly gone to the Metropolitan Museum, on the other side of Central Park.

When Caitlin 1 arrived, we set off to draw without Chris, who decided to stay at the Met and draw said camel, a Chinese sculpture. Caitlin and I found a nice bench, suitably quiet we thought, on the Advanced Mammals gallery on the 4th floor, with a good view of the immense skeleton of a prehistoric Gaur (an immense ox). We had the first of many moments when a child came over, watched us, and then yelled as loud as he could to his parent on the other side of the gallery, "Mom! Look, they're drawing!" (We have also become used to kids screaming to their parents, "Mom! Look at these horns!")

We have come to enjoy the sound of discovery and awe as children in large groups flood into a gallery, which can be louder than a Metallica concert.

Distractions aside, Day 1 was exhilarating, a morning filled exactly as it should be. As if I had gone to the gym or done yoga or completed the Times crossword puzzle in one sitting in pen, I felt noble and accomplished the whole rest of the day.