Birds on a Wire
Illustrated Journals
James R. Bagnall 1
Birds On A Wire My drawings don’t get any better than this.
Apparently someone thought you would be interested in glancing inside the illustrated journals I have been keeping for the last forty years. You are most welcome to look through them although they were never Intended to be viewed by anyone but me. It certainly was interesting for me to, in one sitting, revisit the more than 3000 experiences recorded there. To select twenty drawings for this presentation was a task of joy and unexpected difficulty. Beyond showing the drawings it seemed to me I should try to make some point. That point, it turns out, comes from a more extended project titled, ”How Sketch Books Can Save Your Life”. Having taught thousands of people to draw, and having been disappointed, not in the level of quality attained, but in the lack of the students’ motivation to continue drawing on their own. Most just stop. I decided to change my focus, for a while, from HOW to draw, the easy part, to WHY to draw. The answers to WHY are numerous and complex but an easy fit for this format dealing with memory and understanding. At a simple level, our brain sorts life experiences into long and shortterm memories. Eighty percent of our experience is relegated to shortterm memory while only twenty is retained in long term memory. Three weeks from now 90% of this evening will be gone from your memory altogether. 2
This does not mean that all the information in short term memory deserves to be stored there, with little or no access. On the contrary, much of it is valuable and pertains to current life situations. This is where the “Save Your Life,” idea first comes into play. Drawing as an aid to memory. I first thought of journal drawings as deposits in a Piggy Bank. Lately I think of the sketchbook as an external hard-drive. It is easier to organize and has easier access. Gradually your life is saved in the bank. Understanding life situations and environments, is another reward and motivator for sketchbook drawing. Drawing leads to a sharper and more thorough understanding of any subject. Milton Glazer in his book, Drawing Is Thinking, writes, “I never fully understand something until I decide to draw it.” Just the act of deciding to draw something can lead to a clearer, sharper view and better understanding. So: If I assume, for the moment, that I get 100% buy-in to my argument about the value of drawing in your life then why won’t I find all of you running home to dig out one of those unused sketch books to start adding the first drawing to that hard-drive? It is a serious question. The loudest answer will be FEAR.
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Most of us have a deep FEAR of not making a GOOD drawing. We need to get rid of that fear. To do that we need only to redefine GOOD in good drawing. Your definition probably comes from your observation of other drawings and styles. You probably should not expect to jump from here to there.
Judith Thruman, I think, makes a great effort at redefining GOOD: “Good Drawings are records of being alive, of seeing something intensely at a particular moment, and of getting some compelling image in graphic form.”
That’s a pretty low bar! Remember, you are the only one who needs to see these records. All you have to do is draw what you see intensely, and your hand/brain connections will, with practice, patience and persistence will raise the bar to where you want it to be. Chances are v place will not be where you once thought it would be.
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From the window at my desk in china I could see a long thin wire stretching down a deep canyon. The air was so thick the wire was barely visible, but the birds could find it and use it as an island upon which to land and rest. That scene is in my long-term memory and has always fascinated me. Recently I read a quote by John Adams, which may explain its fascination. He is writing to his grandsons who were departing with their father for Russia: “Remember your journals, for without them your journey will be like birds flying through the air, leaving no trace.�
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A presentation for
Pecha Kucha Night volume 18
San Luis Obispo, California 2012
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