Layer one was a cadmium orange wash. This layer was done with a mix of cadmium orange, ultramarine blue and titanium white in various combinations.

The season now is an avalanche of green, and I guess I prefer the tones of later in the year. But I much prefer real life outside in spring.

“Drawing as a Way of Knowing”
August 29 – December 8, Thursdays from 4-8 p.m.
Come draw, paint and share with colleagues. Food and Drink will be provided. For more information visit UVM Continuing Education, Fall classes, call me at 865 2329 or email me at Michael.Strauss@uvm.edu

DRAWING FROM LIFE

Sketching Nature

I spent my last summer before college, like all earlier summers, roaming the mountains and coastal shores of northern California. All through high school I’d been exploring the beaches of Half Moon Bay and Pescadero, the back country of the Sierras, as well as old mines and gold claims around Placerville, California and Virginia City, Nevada. I panned for gold near Sutter’s Fort. By the age of 16, I had a substantial collection of rocks, minerals, shells, as well as an assortment of insects in bookcases and boxes in my room. I often spent time drawing pictures of items in my collection. Using nature guidebooks I tried to identify what I drew.

In drawing a conch, for example, I’d place it on the desk next to the paper, and my eyes would shift rapidly back and forth, continually comparing the shell to the developing image as I drew. Lit from the side a conch is bright on one face and dark on the opposite side. In the drawing, shading creates the illusion of light and dark. Overlapping shapes of the shell and cast shadow create the illusion of depth. Such drawing exercises were lessons in seeing, though I didn’t think of them that way at the time. If I discovered something in my collection listed in my guidebooks, I labeled it. During this work I often discovered aspects of specimens unnoticed when I’d first found them.

My parents, while supportive of my collecting activities, were soon to pay for my college education, and made it clear it should lead to a job. As teens they had lived through the great depression. So I would not major in english, history, philosophy or any of the other humanities. There was no mention of those professions in the yellow pages of our phone book or in job listings from our local paper.

Sketching Movement

As a teen I was also preoccupied with magic shops in San Francisco where gimmicks, tricks and mechanical devices for creating illusions and “magic” were sold. The shops always had a performer working behind the counter. I was fascinated with how easy it was to visually fool someone into seeing and believing what looked impossible. I had many books on magic and practiced simple sleight of hand over and over in front of a mirror to become proficient in manipulating coins and cards. And I drew diagrams, attempts to illustrate how many of the illusions worked. These were the first drawings I ever did that showed multiple images in sequence, one slightly different than the next. It was an effort to show not just objects, but process and change of position over time. Later in life, I would make many such drawings in a small book of illustrated magic for children. The sequence drawings I did as a teen were my first attempts.

Designing Things

In our large half acre backyard there was an orchard with 17 different kinds of fruit trees. Our neighbor, a Scottish gardener who cared for them, was also an amateur magician, but of a different sort. He could graft small branches from one kind of tree to a different kind…. peach to apricot, lemon to orange, etc. So we had peaches growing on apricot trees in our yard. I was amazed!

At the east side of this orchard was a small cottage that we rented to Joe Swanson, son of the actress Gloria Swanson, who often visited Joe and his wife Susan with bags of special foods. The three of them sat out on a brick patio near the fruit trees eating her snacks. Gloria, married and divorced six times, was a macrobiotic vegetarian, very interested in both unique diets and men. She didn’t appear as I had seen her on movie screens and television. Real life and the movies produced completely different images. I much preferred the illusory, movie and TV version.

Joe, adopted by Gloria many years earlier as a companion for her daughter, was an electrical engineer with a beautiful wife and a successful career as an industrial consultant. It was Joe who finally convinced me to enter college and major in engineering. I wanted to do the kind of work and have the kind of life he did. Engineers designed and built things, and I envisioned getting to draw and design useful things I too might one day build. It would be a job I’d like, with a real paycheck. Drawing for money. What could be better? My parents agreed. Joe was a good model for my life.

Imagining the Invisible

So at age 17 I entered UC Berkeley and in my first week failed the engineering entrance exam. I never told Joe. It was a multiple-choice exam designed to test the visual sensibilities of entering engineering students. We were shown images of the front side of many different objects: interacting gears, levers, discs, and pulleys. For each of these images there was a choice of four possible backside images. Based on what we could see of the front, we had to imagine the invisible back and pick the correct choice. I tried to solve this problem by drawing the image I thought would work best and matching it to the possible answers. But there wasn’t time. The exam ended long before I completed my drawings. So I failed and wasn’t allowed to enroll in the school of engineering.

I chose chemistry instead – a subject third down on the indexed list of majors in the catalogue: Anthropology, Biology, Chemistry. It was also, in some respects, a visual science, and that interested me. Chemistry would involve lots of drawing. But the drawn objects had imaginary and invented qualities. You couldn’t put the molecules of chemisty on a table and draw them. They were invisible. Their visual properties (shapes, sizes and orientations) were determined from a set of rules derived from mathematical calculations and other more abstract ideas. I found this quite troubling and it took me a long time to get used to it.

Eventually I memorized the rules and techniques required to do these drawings and came to enjoy making them even more than the quantitative, problem solving parts of chemistry. The drawn objects were three dimensional, just like the objects in my collections. I could show depth, and shadow, and make them look quite real. I often covered my papers, reports and lab notebooks with detailed and imaginary drawings of various molecular structures I had created, giving them cartoon and human like characteristics. Several of my professors noted the content of my reports and labs might be improved dramatically if more time was spent on problem solving and less on the drawings.

An Unacceptable Drawing

My second semester at Berkeley I enrolled in a course titled The History of Science, taught by a young new professor named Thomas Kuhn. On the first day of class he “abolished” all our scientific knowledge of how the world works and asked us to explain how water freezes or ice melts. He didn’t want a description, but a written explanation – i.e., what was happening? He was relegating us back to 2000 B.C., the time of the early Greeks, wanting us to see how they might attempt to explain such phenomena. With my new knowledge from chemistry class I drew a picture of water molecules showing how they moved freely in the liquid and coalesced together into a rigid lattice in ice. But of course my drawing and accompanying explanation weren’t allowed. My recently acquired knowledge of atoms and molecules was abolished.

I was being asked to speculate based only on what I could see with my eyes. This was very difficult. I had enrolled in this class to learn and memorize the history, facts and laws of science, not reenact, explain or discover the process by which those facts and laws came to be. I knew that water molecules existed from textbooks and felt I should be able to use this knowledge. I didn’t need to know where the textbook author got his information. I dropped the class. It would have been better if I’d stayed.

Young professor Kuhn would later become a famous philosopher-physicist and write the ground breaking book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, showing that science undergoes periodic and dramatic “paradigm shifts.” He was the very first to coin this term. I would see him again many decades later at an Honors lecture at the University where I taught for over 4 decades. Kuhn argued persuasively in his book that scientists can’t separate their own subjective, personal lives from the work they do in the laboratory or the field. Those lives dramatically affect what they see or do not see, what they choose to study or not to study, and even how they interpret data. All this impacts the theories they develop. Science is not just a collection of facts and immutable laws, and the scientific method is not isolated from those who practice it.

Upon entering college I was not ready for such lofty ideas. I was much too concrete a thinker. Eventually I did graduate with honors, memorizing the facts and theories, and acquiring the laboratory skills I would need to be a chemist. There was no need or time to question where the facts and theories came from, or the processes by which they evolved. As a practitioner, I would use them without needing to know their origins. I was not an historian of science. There were jobs for chemists. There were none for historians of science.

Some years after I left college, Joe Swanson died of an internal hemorrhage in the bathroom of a hotel room in Boston while on a consulting job at MIT. He was 51 years old. My grandmother told me he committed suicide. This incident was so painful that his mother would not write about it in her memoirs. I wondered for a number of months how this could possibly have happened. Perhaps my grandmother was mistaken. Over time, I forgot about Joe, though I would later return to thinking about him again, wondering and hypothesizing about his end. His real name was Sonny Smith. Gloria had changed it to Joe after adopting him, naming him after her lover, Joe Kennedy, father of the soon to be president. I didn’t know about the early life of Sonny Smith. His world had seemed perfect to me when I saw him as a teen. But I had seen only a surface fragment. It didn’t tell me much about his inner world, how his past experience might have influenced him, and what that would mean for his future.

Designs for Flight

My first job after college was as a development chemist, formulating rocket propellant for Minuteman and Polaris missiles. It was not the kind of work I wished or envisioned for my life, but it was my first job. I couldn’t turn it down. The only other offer I’d had was from a paint company at half the salary. It was 1962, the cold war was in full bloom and missile defense was the country’s highest priority. So I rationalized and looked at the bright side. As a teenager, I’d always been intrigued by rockets. I had built models with real engines that flew off the beach at Pescadero about a half mile straight up into the sky and out over the ocean. I had many notebooks filled with drawings of rockets of various designs. These were quite detailed and, I remember, had metal floors so that with magnetic shoes the occupants wouldn’t float around and bang into the walls in the absence of gravity. All these designs were imaginary, created from what I’d learned of rockets from comic books, weekend movie serials of Buck Rogers, Robert Heinlein science fiction stories, and the model rockets I bought at the hobby store. I’d sit for hours drawing, watching my three dimensional rockets evolve on paper in ways I could not have planned in advance. Section would build upon section and then be enclosed, then revised and redrawn, until the final drawing was finished and I started another. But making real rocket propellant was dangerous, and after some terrible accidents and near misses in which I could have lost my life, and did lose some of my hearing, I left my first job and returned to school, getting a graduate degree and eventually an academic job teaching chemistry in college.

Drawing on the Blackboard

As a teacher I spent much time in the classroom drawing on the blackboard, talking about the drawings I made and answering questions about what they meant. The drawings were like the drawings I had to make in college chemistry, not of objects in the world we see, but mostly lines connected together in various shapes, like cubes or triangles or hexagons, sometimes fused together, sometimes not. Students of organic chemistry need to learn how to make such drawings to understand the subject. It’s difficult for them, just as it was for me, because there are no concrete referents.

For many students, the lack of a visible object, along with the complex rules for drawing these images, is a permanent barrier to understanding. At the time of my own difficulties with this problem, my professor told me: just memorize the rules and stop worrying so much about where they came from. Use the rules. Make the drawings. I would get the big picture later, he said. I took the advice, and it helped. It took much longer to get the big picture however. If I‘d stayed in professor Kuhn’s class, it might have come much sooner. Eventually I really did come to understand the meaning of those drawings, how they evolved, and how they relate to the real world I see and touch. In one sense, the drawings are not at all like the drawings I made of crystals, shells and insects as a youngster. In another sense, they are exactly the same.

Drawing a Line

Of all the items I collected in my youth I have very few left, and only one of the early drawings. It is a pencil sketch of the conch. Looking at the drawing I see a number of connected shapes of different sizes and value, all fused together. The shapes are made with lines. Taken as a whole they provide the illusion of a three dimensional object, the shell. Seeing an object as a collection of separate two dimensional shapes, is a helpful tool in drawing. I was just beginning to develop my shape consciousness many years ago as I drew the conch. It can be a challenging task. You have to stop naming things and look only for shapes of parts and how they fit together. The top of the shell is a small triangle. The left side of the triangle is fused to a rectangle with a curved bottom. The right side of the rectangle is shared with a trapezoidal shape. When you move your head a little, or move the object you are drawing, all the shapes composing the conch change. And there are two slightly different versions of the conch, one in each eye. What you draw on the page is a hybrid of the two. So the resulting drawing is an approximation, an image seen by a single, unmoving, frozen eye.

On my desk next to my early drawing of the conch is a binocular 3D microscope. I used this microscope many years ago to glue crystals on a mounting needle for X-ray analysis, a technique that allows the smallest particles of the crystal to be visualized, so the patterns connecting them together become apparent. It is one of many tools that generate rules for drawing shapes and patterns of “invisible” bits that compose the world. These bits are the molecules and atoms I drew on the blackboard for students during much of my professional life as a teacher.

Focusing the microscope on the old conch drawing itself, I can look in detail at the graphite lines I made so long ago. It is a useful exercise. Unmagnified, they appear simply as lines with white paper on either side. My first view under the microscope shows only the paper, a mix of intertwined and overlapping fibers. I move the paper slightly to where the hazy edge of graphite meets the white tangle of fibers. I am looking at the edge of the pencil line. It is no longer sharp or straight, but fuzzy, with small hills and valleys. Occasionally I see chunks of black-gray graphite sticking up from the paper or jammed into small crevices within the fibers. I am no longer looking my drawing of the conch. The shapes I see under the microscope could themselves be subjects for a new drawing, a landscape of form in a small world of hidden things.

Putting a tiny fragment of a graphite line from my drawing under a more powerful electron microscope the world again changes. The line becomes an array of deep chasms with sharp angular walls, with layers that abruptly end and then reform. There are cliffs with large boulder like structures upon them. A fiber of paper juts through large clumps of graphite like a giant sequoia tree. It is an alien place, and I recognize nothing like it in the patterns of my everyday world, or even in the view through the 3D microscope. Focusing on one of the layers in the wall of a graphite cliff with more magnifying power takes me to still another view, where the patterns and objects I see, are again different. Continuing this process, the physical world dissolves. The only constant is changing pattern and form. Where are the objects? They vanish into geometry.

Drawing and Seeing

I have been drawing all my life and now devote most of my time to this activity, and to painting, which for me always begins with drawing. Often my attention focuses on the process by which drawings and paintings get made. What do I see when I draw? And what happens when I see the image I have made, and then change it to create a slightly different drawing? These are questions about the process by which images on the retina of my eye come out through my hand as I draw and make repeated corrections.

Participation

When I draw, what I see is influenced by everything I have seen in the past, by what I choose to look at and not look at, and by the totality of my proclivities and predilections. This is so for everyone who looks at the world, whether they draw or not. There is a kind of trickery or illusory quality about it all that makes the very act of seeing itself suspect. Those of us who draw often change the image over and over again to find what we are looking for, to make it look right. For those who reflect on this process it can be disorienting to grasp how fluid the truth of what we see and know really is. How much of what I draw is inside my head? How much is outside? And how much of the world itself is inside my head, and how much outside? Drawings and paintings can provide partial answers to these kinds of questions. Such images are, in part, fragments of our past and momentary present, snapshots of our inner world.

The Rainbow and the Eye

This afternoon I am sitting in my backyard after a rainstorm, looking towards the Green Mountains to the east and painting an image of what I see. There is a rainbow arcing from the top of a distant ridge on my left over to a field on the right. It is a perfect half circle and the translucent haze of it overlaps a portion of the mountain behind. I try and capture in paint the diffuse nature of these colors over the landscape. Cadmium red and orange, Hansa yellow, Ultramarine blue and mixtures of these basic colors will suffice.

Reflecting upon the scene, I realize the rainbow isn’t really there. It is the net result of the rain, the sun and the lens in my eye, which diffracts the light into the arc of colors inside my head. If my eye wasn’t there, the rainbow would vanish. It will be there for anyone else’s eyes of course, for all eyes have lenses. It will even be there for the lens of a camera, or for the eyes of birds or animals that glance at it, if they notice it at all, for their eyes all have lenses as well. But without a lens it doesn’t exist. Before there were eyes in the world, there were no rainbows. Whoever looks at a rainbow, participates with the rain and the sun in creating it, like our televisions, smart phones and computers detect invisible electromagnetic radiation, and from it create images on a screen. This is so for everything we see, not just the rainbow. We participate in creating the world we look at.

The Wave and the Ear

I’ve set my easel up on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Large waves crash onto the rocks below and the roaring sound rushes up at me as water settles over the jagged shoreline. A mixture of titanium white, cerulean blue and a bit of veridian on my canvas approximates the color of seawater, with more white for the foam. I hear the shrieks of gulls circling over the shallows. As I get older, what I hear going on in the world slowly diminishes. It is being replaced by ringing tones generated in my brain, remnants of a long ago explosion, that tend to drown out the sounds of rain falling, birds singing, and waves crashing. I can increase the volume control on my hearing aids to help correct for this, but it is a solution with diminishing returns. As I get older the sounds of the world continue to diminish and the sounds inside my head keep increasing. If I go deaf, there will be no external sound. If there are no ears at all, anywhere, to hear what we call sound, then there would be none. Sound needs an ear. It is the result of events that cause air particles to compress and expand through space. Our ears detect this expansion and compression and generate what we call sound. We participate in the production of a sound filled world – event, air, and ear. Before ears, the world was silent.

The Tree and the Hand

I’m sketching a line of trees alongside a road that stretches out in front of me. They appear to diminish in size the farther down the road I look. Images from trees far away take up less space on the back of my retina, and so appear smaller. My brain corrects for this illusion. I “know” the trees are all the same size. Reproducing this size reduction in my 2 dimensional sketch of trees produces the illusion of depth.

I reach out with my hand and touch the trunk of the closest tree and feel it outside myself. This is partly an illusion, though it doesn’t feel at all that way. There is something out there of course, but it is far from what I perceive and call a tree. I am an active participant in creating the tree, by naming it, and by my past experiences with all the trees and forests I’ve seen before, sketched and read about. More importantly, I also create the tree simply by being there and sensing it. I am the fish, swimming in water, unaware of what holds me up. There is no such thing as unfelt solidity, only particles again, in the air far apart, and in the tree, close together. I reach into the world to touch and delineate where the edge of the far apart and close together meet. I see inside my head the shape of where this is and call it a tree. I hear the leaves the air has moved, and thus construct the wind. I create what I know, reaching out with eyes, ears and hands to experience myself in the world.

Essays

The essays that follow, reflect and expand upon ideas expressed in the introduction. They have all been published previously and appear here, sometimes shortened or revised, and in a few cases unaltered. The concepts of participation and the rainbow in the introduction are adapted from Owen Barfield’s “Saving the Appearances – A Study in Idolatry”, Published by Wesleyan Press/MA, 1988

Thoughts on Pattern, Form and Design, A Fantasy in Five Parts,
in ETC.: A Review of General Semantics, Vol. 54, 1997

Appearing in the Drink, Through The Rainbow-Children, Science and Literature, CESE Sourcebook VIII, 16, 1995.

The Magical Classroom: Exploring Science, Language, and Perception With Children, Heinemann, May 1997

Symbolism, Science and Developing Minds, with S.H. Levine, Journal of College Science Teaching, XV, (3), 190 (1986).

Phenomenological Grounding in the Microscopic, with S.H. Levine. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 62, 611 (1986).

Soap Films and Logic, Science and Children, with S.H. Levine and S. Mortier V.23, No. 8, (1986).

Writing to Learn in Large Lecture Classes, with T. Fulwiler, J. College Sci. Teaching, 19, 158 (1990).

What’s Pure?, ETC., A Review of General Semantics, 51, (2) 181 (1994).

A Constructivist Dialogue on Evaporation, Journal of Humanistic Education and Development., 32 (4) (1994).

Writing in Science, Writing Teacher, 8 (4) 6 (1995).

Mistaking the Map for the Territory, J. Coll. Sci. Teaching, XXI, 408 (1996).

Vermont Art Zine, Standing in the Road, Shape Consciousness and Drawing.

The rows of stalks are invented to provide some depth. The trees in back are not yet complete. There are a few too many parallel horizontal lines in this painting, and that may yet need to be addressed.

15 x 16″, Acrylic on Canvas, Finished April 21, 2011

For Tony Magistrale’s “The Red Bicycle” (Green Mountains Review – Spring 2010)

The Red Bicycle

His grandfather’s tenth

birthday present wasn’t yet

a week old when he

left it unattended

to go inside the Mobil quickmarket

and buy a grape soda.

You would think

twelve years old

ought to insulate a boy

from adult evil

but all he could do in

between sobbing heaves

was stutter I chased him

until my sides hurt

and I couldn’t run anymore

and then I watched him

take my new bike

and they both disappeared

behing the bottle factory.

I slapped him once

hard across the back of his stupid

sweating head – the sound echoed

loudly enough to silence the world

or reawaken it.

His shock registered

at a point where

I can still see that thin line of spittle

dropping down

beyond his open mouth

for what words are there ever

to adequately describe betrayal?

Something else I remember

from the awfulness of that moment

was that I never

hit that boy again

after I went out

the next day

and bought him

another red bicycle.