|
|
|
It started way back when I was a kid, drawing likenesses of Charlie Brown and Snoopy, birds and puppy dogs. Our neighborhood was rich in secret places: ephemeral pools where frogs lived, mossy logs in shaded woods, and gnarled apple trees of an old orchard. These images spilled down the margins of my social studies notebook when I couldn’t be outside. Even as school demanded more of my time, my love of nature steered me towards biology, though organic chemistry and virology elbowed creativity aside for a while. I landed my first job in research, marching to the strict beat of Standard Operating Procedures and Federal regulations. Fourteen years later I changed careers and became a biology teacher and tasked with active young minds to engage, creativity crept back in. We drew a tree of life up the classroom wall, amoeba to primate, stretching its limbs to the ceiling. We wrote illustrated stories to help us learn cell parts, the process of photosynthesis, and the roles of organisms in ecosystems. We sketched the bones and muscles of our dissections. Though my students were most certainly my inspiration as a teacher, I am now free to look at nature from a different perspective, observing, absorbing, and taking classes. To me, it’s become about taking time to study the composition and light of a subject, to let ideas incubate, and to let a drawing find itself. Art is a process and I am relatively new at any formalities. Some days I struggle with where to start, how to start, and how to deal with the critic on my shoulder. But other days it just clicks and I get lost in the process. Creativity becomes effortless and nature’s appeal is transferred to the page, one stroke at a time. It requires me to become, or remember to be, a student myself once again. |
