MD Natural History Society of Maryland: Nature Journal Workshop

 

I always tell folks who attend my nature journal workshops that I promise I won't come around and look over their shoulders - and I never do - but I do watch them, their body language, posture, concentration. This time we had a workshop at the Natural History Society of Maryland in Baltimore where twenty people had gathered to work from taxidermy mounts and specimens on this breezy, drizzly, grey day. We did our timed warm-ups and took a "nature walk" around the museum with timed stops. It's important not to dwell too long on a sketch otherwise the internal editor and critic begins to slow down the works and have you doubting your very existence. "Time to move on!" I called after ten minutes at three different stops. Here we were in a museum full of animals for whom time had ended. They make nice models but movement, change, life itself was missing from our work. So we move ourselves.

Of course, in any natural history museum, I am drawn to Arctic animals and animals of the long past tundra which once covered the whole Mid-Atlantic region. I try to ignore the Polar Bear standing on hind legs towering over me but I find myself transfixed from across the room. The skeleton of the great tusked Woolly Mammoth (my favorite animal) seems to much to resist. Instead I focus on feathers and whale vertebrae and the people looking intently at their subjects. "Draw what you see," I call. "Not what you think you see. Shut off the thinking brain." 

In the 1700s Immanuel Kant challenged the notion that what we think we see and feel and know is reality. Instead, he argued, we simply perceive a reality that is structured by how we think. Our baked-in perceptions limit us and cause us to doubt the possibilities we deny ourselves. Don't think too hard, I urge them. Don't overdo it. 

Kant argued that our perceptions of time are extremely limited, so narrow that we make it all about us. We struggle with the bounds of our own egocentrism and miss 99% of the whole show. But getting lost in the sketching, in the process and not the outcome, helps to slow us down, helps us to concentrate and swirl into life on the page with pen or pencil a whole universe of life that has travelled from mitochondria to mammoth or mollusk in thirty minutes. I call time. Our "walk" has ended. They step back from their work and gasp. "Did I just do that?!" 

I therefore had to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

Immanuel Kant