Butterfly People

by Drew Martin

I thought it was about time to revisit this blog. In a quickening world of Insta posts, it is important to take a step back for a bit more thoughtful review after a good read.

I just finished reading Butterfly People by Columbia University professor of History, William Leach. It is a fascinating read of a bygone era, when people traveled the world to collect butterflies and moths. But it is so much more than that because it happened in the mid to late 19th Century, when industrialization and the progress of railroads brought city people closer to a kind of nature they never experienced before but which also led to its destruction.

It took me a while to get engaged with the personalities behind this phenomenon, but I really liked the bigger picture ideas Leach expressed up front, and periodically throughout. Perhaps I read too far into this thought, but it sounded like he was suggesting that Americans, who may have been reluctant to Darwin's newly proposed theory of evolution (and some still are), actually embraced it as a tool to help explain the thousands of species of butterflies brought to their attention by the collectors, especially because the study of butterflies, Lepidopterology (or as one correspondent wrote - Butterflyology) detailed everything from wing veins (wing venation) to the comparative anatomy of their genitalia. Not to mention the magical transformation of the sluggish leaf-chomping worm into a beautifully-colored fluttering insect with only a feeding tube instead of a mouth. Especially mind-boggling is the fact that the butterfly remembers its former self and lays its eggs on the very same type of leaf it previously dined as a caterpillar.

I really liked how Leach explained the parallel rise of fascination with the natural world in this part of American history along with the aesthetics of the new industrial world.

"From the 1850s on, a human-made spectrum of color appeared not only in exhibits of world's fairs but in the latest fashions worn by visitors to the fairs, as well as in machine-made goods transformed by industrial design, dead things endowed with the appeal of living forms. Whether Americans were able to reconcile these to worlds of color for themselves, or whether they even cared or thought about it, is difficult (if not impossible) to establish. Did they prefer the unexpected and perishable tints and shades of living things to the "permanent" and "fast" palette of machine-produced things, the blue in a butterfly wing to the same blue in a magazine ad? did they perceive artifactual red as more "beautiful" than organic red? Or did they view them as of equal value, together forming a whole no one had ever before experienced?"

And there is much talk of aesthetics, not only of the butterflies (and moths) but also how to record them, especially when photographic processes began to challenge the beautifully observed drawings by artists such as Mary Peart (above). I love the discussion in which Leach engages this topic.

"William Holland's photos may have attracted a new legion of amateurs, but in time, and in the manner of all such photos, they would also promote distance from butterflies and from the natural world generally by "suppressing" the handwork or the illustrating skills of individual naturalists. In contrast, by depending on their own artistic craft, both Mary Peart and Herman Strecker engaged butterflies more intimately and closely than if they had photographed them, relying on machinery devised by others. 'The correlation of nature-study and drawing is so natural and inevitable,' Anna Comstock argued in her popular Handbook of Nature Study, 'that it needs never be revealed to the pupil. When the child is interested in studying any object, he enjoys illustrating his observations with drawings; the happy absorption of children thus engaged is a delight to witness.' By enlisting the child's own ability, sketching or painting led to a level of seeing and immersion greater than any reached by those who lacked the skill or discipline to draw or paint."

While this book is primarily a reflection of all the ups and downs of obsessive collecting, the conclusive, sour note is that the interest sparked by the butterfly enthusiasts led to economic entomology, which "turned natural history into a killing machine, wrenching it away from its ecological and aesthetic-oriented roots" with "schemes to slaughter insects wholesale..."

"The growth of economic entomology and of laboratory science, and the increasing preoccupation with mere taxonomy, broke the connection between beauty and science that natural history had tied together. the result was to leave science to the professionals, and the beauty of nature to the amateurs - and to the commercial market, the bauble stores, and the spectacle theater."

Tom of Finland: They Called it Filth. It Became a Revolution.

by Drew Martin
I haven't posted in a long time. I've been inward. But I was really moved by the film Tom of Finland, which I saw yesterday - a biopic about Touko Valio Laaksonen (1920-1991).

In terms of cultural influence, I am not sure there is anyone who matches Touko because his drawings created a liberated environment for what was in his day a crime* - being gay. I doubt the LGBT community would be as advanced today without his work and I would even go so far as to say he invented gay pride. 

Touko is famous for his "stylized highly masculinized homoerotic fetish art" which is one way of saying - he drew what turned him on. And by drawing his fantasy, he presented to the world a healthy view of a taboo culture. As we see in the film, it was incredibly dangerous to be gay.** The police searches were unrelenting, the arrests were brutal, and punishment was either jail time or being put into an asylum for "treatment."

The film could have been a little less obvious in parts but it certainly shows his journey. I like how it does not focus too much on the artwork. It's not a parade of drawings but rather it shows his evolution of first creating the images for himself, then using them for hook-ups (which wasn't always a success), and finally as something he put out in the world, which changed the lives of many of his fans.  

*

**

The Secret of Drawing: Drawing by Design

by Drew Martin 

In the final installation titled Drawing by Design of the four-part series, The Secret of Drawing, BBC host Andrew Graham-Dixon takes a look at drawing’s most practical application; design. For the designer, drawing is the starting point of an idea that can be realized as a product such as a building, furniture, or fashion. And while that does indeed seem practical, we see several artists at work during this hour who have flights of fancy before directing their ideas into something that can in fact be made. 

Graham-Dixon first sits with Mark Fisher who has made a career of designing stage sets for bands such as U2, The Rolling Stones, and Pink Floyd. They are grand structures that can be set up and broken down in a matter of hours – temporary, experiential, fully-loaded architectural stages that transform sports stadiums into music venues for thousands of fans. Graham-Dixon calls Fisher a real “Renaissance man” for his range of talents, and they both acknowledge the influence of Leonardo da Vinci. 

In this show we get an introduction to the history of perspective through the work of Filippo Brunelleschi and Piero della Francesca. The latter referred to perspective as his mistress, when his wife tried to call him to bed at night, away from his studies and drawings/paintings.

This segues to an exploration of architecture with the fantastic ideas of the French architect Étienne-Louis Boullée, and the brat pack group of architects who went by the name of Archigram, which influenced the likes of Zaha Hadid, and Ron Arad. 

Arad explains how computers changed his profession.

"I always thought as an arrogant student that you can only design what you can draw. You know? If you can’t draw, how can you design? It’s different now with computers because you can design things that you couldn’t possible draw."

"In the old days there was, you know, the drawings, and then the drafting technical drawings, and then there used to be the artisans – model  makers that make the prototypes. Now with computers, and computer drawings, and with computer models, there’s no middle man."

And finally, we round off the show with a look at fashion drawings.

We see the drawings of Julie Verhoeven who is a fashion designer. I liked seeing her at work because of a unique approach whereby she spends weeks accumulating a mass of visual stimuli before she puts all her ideas together as drawings and then she barely takes the pen off the page because she says she doesn’t want to break the line of her thought.

The full documentary of this fourth and final episode can be watched here:

The Secret of Drawing: All in the Mind

by Drew Martin
The Secret of Drawing: All in the Mind is the third of a four-part series from the BBC about drawing, which I have been enjoying and writing about. In this episode the host, Andrew Graham-Dixon, takes a closer look at how the Western tradition drawing became synonymous with accurate representation and the empirical mind, followed by the reaction to move away from it. 

We visit Sarah Simblet, professor of life drawing at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford, who makes a distinction between her detailed anatomical drawings and some of her more abstract work.

"With these I suppose it's a process of looking, seeing, thinking, understanding, gaining knowledge of something that exists in the world...with these, it's really drawing an emotion...it's like an outwards breath."

One thing that Graham-Dixon pushes in this episode is which part of the human mind artists call on and how much of the inner self they reveal. He explains the efforts made by Picasso and other artists such as André Masson to undo their schooling and work in a child-like state. But first he explains how drawing has often been a kind of secret diary for many artists. A more revealing expression can sometimes be seen in the under-drawings of the more proper frescoes that hide them, like a thought being buried in the subconscious.

We hear from John Tchelenko, the head of drawing and cognition at Camberwell College of Art in London, who studies the way the eye and hand interact with the mind in order to understand how artists observe three-dimensional objects and depict them on a two-dimensional surface. And then we take another look at cave paintings and what they imply about the mind of early humans.

There is also an interesting chat with the illustrator David Shrigley. When Graham-Dixon talks about surrealist concepts of subconscious-drawing Shrigley adds that he feels like he is part of the human collective consciousness when he is drawing.

Graham-Dixon covers a lot of different ideas in this episode. He expounds upon the notion that artists are often more emotionally sensitive, and then segues to the artwork of psychiatric patients, and then, more broadly, outsider art.

Finally, we meet up with Michael Landy, who seems to be an incarnation of Graham-Dixon's kick-off thesis for the show. Landy is a conceptual artist and one of the Young British Artists. In his piece Break Down he shredded, dismantled, and crushed his earthly possessions including all of his artwork. What followed this performance was of great interest to Graham-Dixon because Landy started over again by drawing. His first drawings were of weeds. They were beautiful, like something Albrecht Dürer would have drawn 500 years ago. And then he made more intimate and emotional pieces, like a series of drawings of his father.

The full documentary of this third episode can be watched here:

The Secret of Drawing: Storylines

by Drew Martin
Pictured here is The Great Wave off Kanagawa from the early 1830s by Katsushika Hokusai who is considered to be the father of manga, which means "random sketches" and is an art form that actually can be traced back more than 700 years earlier to the Scrolls of Frolicking Animals from by Toba Sōjō, a Japanese artist-monk-astronomer.

These two artists are featured in the BBC production, The Secret of Drawing: Storylines, the second episode in a four-part series dedicated to the art of drawing. The writer and presenter of the show, Andrew Graham-Dixon starts the show off with by saying,

Human beings need stories, myths, tales, legends... And history shows that the drawing has played just as crucial a part in satisfying that basic need as the word. But there’s a big difference between what happens when you tell a story and what happens when you draw it. And I think the great French artist Henri Matisse put his finger on it when he said that whereas the writer has to use the shared language of speech, every artist uses his (and her) own self-invented visual language so every element of every story that he (or she) draws out is shot through with his (or her) own personality and idiosyncrasies.

Graham-Dixon explores the idea of drawing as storytelling through American comic book artists, British political cartoonists, Japanese manga and anime creators, a Hollywood storyboard illustrator, and an old-school French animator. He seems genuinely fascinated by the comic book culture in America and the artists who produce such a wide range of material. Surprisingly, for me, he dwells on what he sees as a dark streak throughout all the American comics, even with Peanuts, whose creator [Charles Schulz] he introduces as a depressive. 

Graham-Dixon adds to the mix some of the greatest political cartoonists from the 1700 and 1800s, including William Hogarth and James Gillray of England. Hogarth's Gin Lane is a loaded scene with layers of narrative and social commentary, such as a drunk mother dropping her baby. Gillray continued the tradition but took it to another level by perfecting the cartoon with a quick read, greatly exaggerated reality, and sharp wit, so much so that his Plum-pudding in Danger, which mocks George III and Napoleon, is considered one of the best political cartoons of all time, and has been continuously copied, and referenced every since.

Martin Rowson, a modern British political cartoonist a.k.a. visual journalist interviewed in the show offers,

We read images in an entirely different way to the way we read text. Ultimately, the most effective, quickest, sharpest instrument for getting a political point across is using a cartoon.

Graham-Dixon takes this a step further by introducing artists such as Goya and Picasso who made very politically charged works such as Goya's Disasters of War, and Picasso's cartoon-like mockery of Franco by depicting him as a penis-turd-creature, and ultimately his Guernica.

While all these styles and artists are fascinating, I feel like the part of the show that is most aligned with what I thought the entire series would be about is when he interviews the motion-picture storyboard artist, J. Todd Anderson.

"It’s my job to get what’s in a director’s head onto paper. It’s not my job to create the shots. It’s my job to interpret their language into a visual language."

"It’s very important that I get as close to the images in their brain onto paper so that everybody when they walk on the set is making the same movie. They’re not all imagining what’s going on." 

Graham-Anderson explores the early start of animated movies and then concludes with Sylvain Chomet, a French animator who expresses that animations should not always be directed for children, but rather that creative, youthful soul still inside all of us.

The full documentary of this second episode can be watched here:

The Secret of Drawing: The Line of Enquiry

by Drew Martin
The Secret of Drawing: The Line of Enquiry is the first of four episodes from 2005 by the BBC, which takes a closer look at drawing. This episode begins with the narrator and host, Andrew Graham-Dixon, saying:

Once upon a time, the ability to draw was seen as the first and most essential skill of any artist. But in the age of the unmade bed and the pickled shark, drawing is widely perceived as an old-fashioned activity. Many modern art schools don’t even teach it; preferring to arm their students with digital or video cameras. I’d like to challenge the tedious modern prejudice that it’s trendy not to draw, and that those who do draw are sad reactionaries stuck in a dead past. I think the exact opposite is true. Drawing is the single most fruitful and vital artistic skill at work in the world today.

I really like this series but Graham-Dixon's unmade bed and pickled shark comment takes a jab at Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst despite the fact that Emin always speaks very highly about life drawing and that she is quite good at it, and drawing is essential to Hirst's creative process. The drawing section of his website starts off with this passage:

Drawing has always been an essential part of Hirst’s creative process. Whilst his sculptural works are initially thought out through detailed sketches – often including precise dimensions and fabrication notes – he also draws obsessively for the sake of drawing. Numbering over 1, 500, this body of work points to Hirst’s use of the medium as a means of refining and exploring the ideas that sit at the heart of his entire artistic output. He also describes it as a good way to explore complicated ideas without incurring the costs involved in the fabrication of new works.

Otherwise, I love the insight of this BBC production, which tries to elevate the act of drawing to scientific research and a visual philosophy.

The first artist interviewed is actually one of Britain's leading heart surgeons, Francis Wells, who uses drawing to not only prepare for the details of an operation but to also explain a replay of the procedure to his team. He actually uses blood from the open chest cavity of the patient to draw on paper while he waits for the heart to stabilize.

Not surprisingly, Wells is fascinated by the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. He studies them to see what da Vinci was trying to explain through his heart studies, and even uses things he has learned from the centuries-old works for his modern surgery. 

Graham-Dixon starts to formulate a kind of da Vinci code question...Do you think these drawings contain within them other things that people haven’t quite tweaked yet? To which Wells replies:

Well I am sure there are. One has to be careful in not romancing it too much and saying that the solutions to all of our problems are here. They’re not.  But I think the essence of what we‘re seeing is someone who is absolutely, conspicuously honest. They’re searching for the truth. Nowadays, by thinking about his observations that he made and taking it seriously, it can take you down lines of thought that you might work out yourself with other information that’s available.

What follows is a look at the start of a fascinating group in 1603 Rome. The Accademia dei Lincei (The Academy of the Linxes, for its all-seeing eye) gave "new impetus to the Renaissance cross-pollination of fine art and the natural sciences." It is even credited for having established the ground rules for empirical science through the Paper Museum, a collection of thousands of drawings of natural and man-made objects. The founder of the Paper Museum, Cassiano dal Pozzo encouraged that we look at everything with the understanding that sometimes insight comes from when you focus on just one thing. Drawing it again and again to get to its very essence.

No progress can ever be made without finding out everything you can about everything there is.

And yes, that is a drawing of a man with a penis on his head. Apparently, at one time it was a sign of good luck.

The great 18^th century scientist-artist George Stubbs followed in the footsteps of da Vinci's curiosity and Cassiano's thoroughness and in turn, discovered much more by studying horses than he needed to know to paint horses. Through comparative anatomy he asked the question that Charles Darwin answered in the theory of evolution; about how humans relate to other species.

This one-hour episode covers even more ground, including John Russell who drew the moon in the 18th century through a telescope with such accuracy that his five-foot-square drawing could easily be mistaken for a photograph, and John James Audobon whose book The Birds of America is one of the most impressive (and massive) collection of drawings ever printed.

The remainder of the hour covers the drawings of J.M.W. Turner, John Constable and several other artists.

The full documentary of this first episode can be watched here: