Scott and I went for a walk to find a waterfall and found a ruin instead: brick walls giving way to vines, the ruins of a factory turned back over to nature.

This drawing is not about the building, past (19th century hat factory) or future (condos?) It’s about what the building is undergoing in the present, ravaged by fire, overtaken by vines and gravity. Processes of decay and regeneration.

Humans sometimes build with grand ambitions, to make something big happen and to leave a legacy. But however grand the ambition, it eventually meets a similar fate. And me too, I feel the effects of decay and gravity on my own body, and see it in Scott, no matter how disciplined we are about going to the gym and eating well. It comes for us all. I’m undergoing the same processes of decay and regeneration the building is. So is Scott, so is every mark I put down on the mylar. We’re not the audience for this. We’re inside it.

I finished a novel recently, McEwan’s What We Can Know, set a hundred years out, after a slow catastrophe, with a scholar trying to reconstruct a poem that’s been lost since our own time. What struck me most was how little of any present moment survives. Whatever feels urgent or precious right now, this walk, this sunlight filtering through the trees, has already vanished, as if we were never there. It’s the same way I can’t tell how the people who built this mill experienced this place.

That's what I'm trying to record when I draw. Not the mill or its history. The fact that this moment, this breath, this particular fall of light on a particular vine, this brushstroke, is happening only once, and is connected to everything happening somewhere else I can't see and don't know. There's a paradox in that: what makes something precious is its uniqueness and its fleetingness, and it's that very fleetingness that moves us. A drawing is a fixed thing, even as I try to capture what cannot be held. I don't think this drawing solves that. I work with sumi ink and a basic Chinese brush, in a tradition I've learned from that trusts the gesture you can't take back over the one you could correct, so every mark is itself the record of a small, unrepeatable event.

I’ve been reaching for this feeling for a few years now, with a brush and sumi ink, in drawings of vernal pools, quarries, creeks, always circling something I could feel but not quite capture. This one feels like I’ve turned a corner. I’m somewhere new.

The drawing is three feet tall by six feet wide, and it’s probably mostly done, which means I’m about to be done with an object whose entire subject is a process that is never over. The mill will keep crumbling into the undergrowth whether or not I keep drawing it. Scott and I will keep going for walks and enjoying the sunlight as long as we can.

David Hockney died on the eleventh of June. Since then I’ve been reading numerous appreciations and slowly coming to my own. I never quite noticed before how much Hockney has been with me my whole life. This morning I read Lawrence Weschler’s beautiful essay, “David Hockney and the Bliss of Not Standing Still” one of my favorite writers on one of my favorite artists. Weschler knew the artist personally for over forty years, and understood him and his work as well as anyone.

Weschler recounts a day in 1982: Hockney, holding a deck of Polaroids over a photo collage he was assembling, dismissing the single photograph as a way of seeing the world from the point of view of a “paralyzed Cyclops, for a split second.” The collages he was making then, built from thousands of snaps, were meant to dispute the claim that any one fixed vantage could define reality, because that is not how the world actually is. It is simply not “true to life.”

I came to Hockney in Northern California in the 1980s, fresh out of school, where I had spent my time not so much with the Western painters of the day as with Chinese literati ink scrolls, particularly late Ming and Qing “eccentric” works by Gong Xian and others. When I first stood in front of Hockney’s California landscapes, and then his photo collages, what I felt was not discovery so much as recognition of what Weschler calls “the bliss of not standing still.” I recognized it in the joyful, colorful work of an artist celebrating the California hills, not unlike the ones I was living among at the time.

In 1988 Hockney made a film with Philip Haas about a Ching dynasty seventy-two-foot Chinese scroll, The Kangxi Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour, painted before Western perspective reached China; he set it against a later scroll of the same journey, made after, in which the emperor sits frozen in a single tableau. The argument of the film is that the earlier scroll keeps you alive and moving inside it, and the later one shuts you out.

That was the thing I had learned in college. Chinese and Japanese handscrolls are composed to keep your eye and imagination on the move. I had spent my early twenties learning to read pictures that way, influenced as well by Picasso and Braque’s cubist paintings, which similarly contested a single fixed viewpoint. Weschler’s book on Hockney is called True to Life. Hockney’s verdict on the lens was that it was not true to life. And when someone asks me what I am after in my own paintings, I hear myself say I am trying to synthesize the qualities of lived experiences out of multiple points of view. The Chinese literati were not aiming at the mimetic correctness of a thing or image rendered fixed in place. I imagine they were after the trace of a moving mind, the “feeling of what happens,” the embodied qualities of life and consciousness as we live it.

I learned to see this way in the basement of the Fogg Museum at Harvard, where John Hay was my professor. It may have been only once, I don’t really remember , but I do remember a single moment it as if it were yesterday: when he unrolled a Japanese Zen painting by Sesshū Tōyō: flung ink, five hundred years before Jackson Pollock. I understood at the time that my professor was being generous. I did not understand that it was also the closest thing to an authentic experience of how these paintings were meant to be seen: not flat under glass, or worse, in a book where the page turns the wrong way.

John Hay taught me to read Chinese and Japanese landscape paintings as metaphors for the qualities and actual traces of embodied experience. He also agreed to be my undergraduate advisor, signing off on an eclectic major I designed myself, “Art and Cognition,” which to me meant almost anything I was interested in at the time. Searching for Hay’s work today, I was fascinated to find out that his scholarship was very much concerned with the body in Chinese art. My memory had been that I came to see the living body in the landscape completely on my own.

Hockney’s likened the camera to a Paralyzed Cyclops, that cannot move or breathe. His complaint was that the lens makes a dead thing, a corpse of an instant. And the opposite of a corpse is the literati landscape Hay taught me to read, which is, among other things, the traces of the gestures of a living body.

The single fixed eye was not invented with photography. Alberti’s perspective, in the fifteenth century, already posited one immobile eye at the apex of a visual pyramid, the world seen through a window from a frozen point. Hockney, in Secret Knowledge, argued that European painters had been using lenses, mirrors, and the camera obscura since around the 1420s to trace the image the outside world threw onto a wall. He described four centuries of Western art made by people tracing shadows on the wall of a cave, through a single aperture, with one eye. Around 2,400 years ago, Plato wanted us to climb out of that cave toward something fixed and eternal and bodiless. Hockney wanted us to turn around and walk back into the moving, breathing world and call that the real thing.

I have spent decades arguing that seeing is something our moving body does, not a snapshot it receives, that thinking happens in the hand, eye, mind and body as we move through the world. I thought I had assembled that conviction out of cognitive science (sharpened with the help of my doctoral mentor Barbara Tversky and her concept of “Mind in Motion”) and my own studio practice. I had not. It was handed to me in a basement decades earlier, in the language of qi and mai and gu, by a teacher unrolling silk, and I simply forgot where it came from until an artist I never met died and sent me back down the stairs.

That basement probably couldn’t happen today. The conservation regime around fragile silk has rightly tightened, and so have the demands of liability and insurance. I went back to the Harvard Museums to look for the scrolls I remembered, hoping to see one or two on display, and found that I would have to make a special request that would take weeks to be assessed, and might not be granted. The contemporary vigilance was not built for no reason. But we have lost something real in fencing it off. The mode of transmission I experienced: intimate, mobile, hand to hand, in time, has become rare and privileged, increasingly replaced by fixed images on screens.

I learned this week that Hockney was obsessed with drawing the sunrise on his phone or iPad. His friends used to wake to his emails, the same view, painted again and again as the light came up. I can relate, having been obsessed with capturing the sunrise myself from time to time, when I have the chance. But as I think about David Hockney, John Hay, Barbara Tversky and so many others who have influenced me in ways I am aware of and in ways I never noticed, it all keeps moving in my mind’s eye, the way the scrolls do, the way our thoughts and lived experiences keep shifting perspective, revealing new vistas on the past.

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I am a Nature educator, working with children across multiple schools, facilitating weekly Nature Connect sessions throughout the year.

In April, I attended a workshop at the Landscapes of Learning Festival in Bengaluru, facilitated by Andrea Kantrowitz and I absolutely loved it. I came away wanting to try the activity myself, though I was initially unsure whether I would be able to facilitate it effectively. The prompts shared during the session and the thoughtful way they were introduced at just the right moments made a profound impact on me. Long after the workshop, I found myself revisiting the experience, trying to recall the prompts and mentally rehearsing how I might hold a similar space.

Recently, I facilitated the same activity with a group of adults at Bhoomi College, Bengaluru and the response was truly wonderful. As a nature educator, the session carried an even deeper meaning for me. Nature is never built on isolation—everything exists through relationships, responsiveness, and coexistence. The activity beautifully brought this sense of interconnectedness to life. Though we began individually and in different ways, the experience gradually revealed how connected our work, our learning, and perhaps even our lives really are.

How Art Found Its Way In

In 2024, I did my Teach for Nature Fellowship at Bhoomi College and this is my third year associated with the organisation. Even before formally exploring arts-based education, my sessions with children often included creative elements such as nature journaling, storytelling, role-play, and crafting. Over time, I noticed how deeply children responded to these experiences—not only in their engagement with nature, but also in their emotional expression, confidence, and overall well-being. At the same time, I felt limited in my ability to integrate art more intentionally into my lesson design. Many of the schools I work with do not have dedicated art classes, which made me increasingly curious about how art could become more than just an activity and instead function as a way of observing, reflecting, connecting, and learning.

This curiosity led me to the EdSparks Collective Program by ArtSparks. Last year, as part of the program, I conducted an action research project with children exploring the intersections between art and learning. The experience significantly shaped my thinking and practice, and this year I will continue with another project through the EdSparks Collective.

A Series of Sessions on Birds

One example of how I integrated art into my facilitation last year was through a series of sessions on birds that unfolded across nearly eight sessions, including a bird-watching walk. Art became an essential part of the learning process as students closely observed Indian bird picture cards and sketched details such as feathers, beaks, colours, and posture. My focus was never on perfect drawings or memorising bird names, but on helping children slow down, observe carefully, and form their own interpretations through close observation.

In later sessions, I introduced folk tales and mnemonics related to bird calls, helping students understand how birds are connected to memory, language, and culture. The bird-watching walk further deepened the experience by allowing children to encounter birds in their natural surroundings. In the final session, students imagined and sketched their own birds, giving them names, calls, appearances, and stories. Across these sessions, art was not a separate subject but a way for children to observe deeply, think imaginatively, and build a more personal relationship with the natural world.

The Workshop, Adapted for Nature Educators

The workshop I facilitated, inspired by the session at the Landscapes of Learning Festival and adapted for nature educators, emerged from this larger interest in the relationship between art, observation, and sustainability education. It was designed to create a space where participants could engage freely, without the fear of “doing art correctly,” while also developing deeper ecological sensitivity and connection.

The first half of the workshop focused on gently challenging ideas about what makes a “good drawing” while encouraging sustained attention and close observation. In the second half, participants explored 2D and 3D forms using newspapers and spent time observing and sketching an insect. Since it is often difficult to observe an insect in detail for an extended period in the field, art became a way to slow down and notice its textures, patterns, and structures more carefully. Participants then translated their observations into collages using newspapers.

For me, art is not separate from sustainability education. It is a powerful pathway into attention, empathy, imagination, and connection. Both art and nature invite us to slow down, notice what we might otherwise overlook, and engage with the world more deeply. Whether sketching a bird, observing an insect, or creating with simple materials, art can nurture curiosity and wonder—qualities that are essential for building meaningful relationships with the natural world.

More than an art activity, this workshop was an invitation to pay attention. It reminded me that learning, like nature itself, emerges through relationships and connections. As nature educators, we often speak about interconnected ecosystems, but experiences like these help us feel that interconnectedness for ourselves. That, perhaps, is what I carried forward from the original workshop and hoped to share through my adaptation of it: the possibility that art can become a way of seeing, relating, and deepening our connection with both the human and more-than-human world.

We often think of ourselves as separate individuals, but aren’t we all interconnected in ways both visible and invisible? And doesn’t that interconnectedness make life richer and more meaningful?

Drawing Thought welcomes guest contributors!

We are especially interested in hearing from anyone who has participated in our in-person or online workshops over the years. How has drawing changed the way you think, teach, or see? What have you adapted, carried forward, or found unexpectedly useful? What happened when you brought these ideas into your own classroom, studio, or practice?

If you have a story, a reflection, or even just a few observations you’d like to share, we’d love to hear from you. Contributions can be short and we welcome images of your own work or your students’ work.

In response to my last post, The Edge of What I Have Become, mentioned her own museum sketchbook and asked if I’d share some of my museum sketches. I immediately thought of this notebook I kept seventeen years ago, in the fall of my first year as a doctoral student at Columbia University. We were asked to “befriend” a single work and return to it again and again across a semester. I chose Rubens. What follows are sketches and dated entries, as I drew my way inside Rubens’ painting. The friendship held. Through this project Rubens became an important influence and motivating force for more than ten years, and he remains a touchstone in my work. Thanks ! It was fun to realize that I’ve just been circling around these same ideas for so many years!

From 2009: This painting is hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Periodically over the past few months, I have spent time looking and sketching from this and related works at the Met, as part of my doctoral studies at Teacher’s College, Columbia University.

9-11-09 “I’m looking for beautiful turbulence”--that’s why I’m drawn to Rubens. Venus is begging Adonis not to go on a hunt which she knows to be his last. She is luscious, a deity, but as such, the epitome of female humanity, her flesh warm and tender, her desire for her lover, as full of longing and fear of loss as any mortal woman in love.

Adonis seems untroubled by her concern. He reassures her lightly. Is he looking forward to autonomy, independence, freeing himself from the entanglements of human relationship? The hounds are patient, but also ready to be off. Is Adonis a personification of courage in the face of the inevitable?

I am reminded of Jonathan Lear’s characterization of us humans as “finite, erotic creatures.” 1

There is a vortex at the center: the grasping, clinging arms of Venus and Cupid. A group of middle aged European men pass by (speaking Dutch?) and chuckle at this painting. I assume they are commenting on Venus’s succulence, identifying with the 50+ year old Rubens’ appreciation of this younger woman. The painter was just about the age of these men when he painted this work. Is it simply a male fantasy? Or is there some genuine understanding (on Rubens’ part) of what it means to be a woman in love?

Is all visual language, in some sense, the language of the body---of the human body as it moves through space?
What about the centrality of grasping--the infant’s first gesture, reaching out into the world, becoming an actor through those first interactions?
How does Cupid act out Venus’ deepest emotions? He is her surrogate in his no holds barred, desperate yet impotent struggle to pull Adonis back from death.

The dogs are impatient to be gone, untroubled by consciousness of mortality.

9-17-09 Turns out Rubens painted the flip side of this Titian composition, which is two galleries (one country and one century) distant from the Rubens room! Its startling to see this scene from the other side. It is familiar, yet completely different. Here we see Venus’ back, her trapezius and latissimus dorsi muscles so perfectly rendered, yet almost made of the pale marble of an ancient Venus. Her classical proportions are more important to the painter than the palpability of her flesh.

The transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque is played out in these two paintings. How classical grace and balance is supplanted by passion, perfection by the fallibility of the flesh.

When I go back to the Rubens, I am most struck by Adonis’ manliness. He is so much more believable as the true object of both Venus and Cupid’s longing. Ruben’s depiction of Venus attests to all Adonis has experienced and is forsaking. Cupid seems to be here the young son, begging his dad not to go. How much more poignant! Titian’s Cupid was content on the sidelines, perhaps happy at the prospect of having Venus to himself again. I wonder about Cupid.

9-24-09 I go down to the Greek and Roman sculpture galleries to look for Cupid, and find him sleeping, peacefully. He is unaware of all that has passed. The relaxed twist of his torso reminds me of Venus’ active, turning form. He seems to be a beloved child, so carefully observed that you can almost hear his breathing. I can see both Titian and Rubens in this body--as it is both perfect and real. Is it that this is how human children have always appeared, or that the Greeks taught us how to see?

10-1-09 Back to Rubens: who is this child? Rubens had children, five with Helena Fourment, the young wife of his last years who is the model for this Venus. Did his toddlers grab at his legs as he left for his workshop in the morning?

10-7-09 This painting hangs opposite Venus and Adonis, but I’ve avoided looking at it until now.

“This magnificent portrait of Rubens, his second wife, Helena Fourment, and one of their five children has usually been dated on stylistic grounds to the late 1630s. The child’s blue sash, heavy shoes, and plain collar resemble adult male attire and suggest that he is either Frans Rubens, born in 1633, or, more likely, Peter Paul, born March 1, 1637. Rubens married Helena Fourment on December 6, 1630, when he was fifty-three and she was sixteen. Helena became the model and the inspiration for many paintings by Rubens dating from the 1630s, particularly those dealing with themes of ideal beauty or love. The present composition was considerably revised during execution to shift the emphasis from Rubens, as the dominant half of a courtly couple, to Helena, as ideal wife and mother. The parrot, long a symbol of the Virgin Mary, suggests ideal motherhood, while the fountain, caryatid, and garden setting imply fertility and recall Rubens’s own garden in Antwerp, where he frequently escorted Helena.” —Museum Label

10-7-09 Looking at this painting, executed around the same time as “Venus and Adonis,” adds a new layer of meaning to my previous experiences. It’s the non-fiction version of the same story. Here is Rubens’ personal Venus, the teenage bride of his last decade. Just like Adonis, he is destined to leave her, with the difference that he is aware of this inevitability. His admiring gaze is also wistful. He knows he will leave her alone too soon: she outlives him by 33 years.

But Helena, unlike Venus, is at peace. She must anticipate her fate, but at least in her husband’s eyes, she is supremely content in her role as wife and mother. Her gaze drifts past her son as her reaches up toward her. The happy child is confident she will fulfill his needs, and she bathes in the warm admiration father and son bestow upon her.

She knows she is the center of their universe, she is the answer to their question.

In the gallery descriptions of the two paintings it is noted that Rubens softened Adonis’ facial expression to be less severe, and here modified his own, initially prominent appearance in order to foreground his wife. I wish I could ask him why, and guess it was out of love.

10-13-09 Ruben’s hands are surprisingly delicate, the fingers tapered and elegant. I have been working on a series of images of my husband and my hands, interwoven, and was wondering about the hands of Rubens and his wife. I am struck by the light touch, the way his gently cradles hers, and the weightlessness of her hand in his. How odd, the leash seems to grow out of her hand, rather than be held by it, the fingers hardly grasp it… (what is that fluffy thing in her other hand, and what does it mean?)

11-8-09 I came back today for a final reflection on “Venus and Adonis” and it was gone! They were restoring that part of the gallery, and put it in storage. I felt quite frustrated, almost as if I had been stood up for a date. I had really been looking forward to one last visit, but instead returned to this painting.

When I first saw Helena, I thought she looked a bit stupid and maybe even a little homely, with a weak chin. Now I am coming to appreciate her. Her gentleness and grace…I can almost see what Rubens saw in her. Is the beauty in the object of love or in the eyes of the lover? It is almost as if a spotlight is focused on her.

She seems to be living blissfully in the moment, without regrets or fears. Who was the real Helena, and what did she really think about her husband’s work? And what was life like for her after he was gone?

11-8-09 Here is the artist, portraying himself gazing at his beloved. He chooses to ignore us, his viewers, for whom he has made this picture. He is absorbed in the act of looking.

What does it mean to look, and to see? What does it mean to truly see another human being, or even more, to see through his or her eyes? What does it mean to devote your life to this act? I have tried to see through Ruben’s eyes, and believe I have in some small measure, by taking the time to truly try to see his paintings. Making these sketches has given me new insights into his work, through taking notice of the nuances and subtleties of line and shape, color and light. There is so much about experience, about our humanity, that we comprehend through our senses but cannot articulate in words.

A follow-up blogpost, also from 2009:

Being Peter Paul Rubens

A major function of the embodied mind is empathic. From birth, we have the capacity to imitate others, to vividly imagine being another person, doing what that person does, experiencing what that person experiences. The capacity for imaginative projection is a vital cognitive faculty. Experientially, it is a form of ‘transcendence.” Through it, one can experience something akin to “getting out of our bodies”–yet it is very much a bodily capacity.

George Lakoff & Mark Johnson Philosophy in the Flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought

Craig Schwartz: There’s a tiny door in my office, Maxine. It’s a portal and it takes you inside John Malkovich. You see the world through John Malkovich’s eyes... and then after about 15 minutes, you’re spit out... into a ditch on the side of The New Jersey Turnpike.

Maxine: Sounds great! Who the f**k is John Malkovich?

From the film, Being John Malkovich, 1999, written by Charlie Kaufman, directed by Spike Jonze

I have been thinking about my experience with Peter Paul Ruben’s painting, Venus and Adonis. What follows is a reflection on my inquiry, Looking at Love.

I was first introduced to Peter Paul Rubens in high school. It was a grand history painting, “Queen Tomyris before the Head of Cyrus,” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Nothing could have seemed more foreign, more incomprehensible to my teenage self. The beautiful queen gazes down serenely at the severed head of her foe, which is about to be dunked in a bowl of blood. Who are all those people crowded around, in all those glorious silks and satins? I remember being impressed by the sheer drama of it all, and the excess. This painting was surely made in a time when the act of painting itself was serious and consequential endeavor.

A few years ago at the Louvre in Paris I found my way to Rubens’ galley of enormous (11 feet by 24 feet or so each) paintings celebrating the life of Marie de Medici. The paintings, 24 in total, were commissioned to celebrate the major turning points in the life of the queen. Standing in the middle of this awesome gallery, it was striking that it was the artist’s name, rather than the once powerful queen, which brings viewers to gaze upon these majestic works. Teeming with anecdote and allegory, as alive to the sense of touch as to the eye, every inch seems to swirl and twist under one’s gaze. Its as close to living flesh as any artist has every gotten with oil paint and brush.

In a century when oil paint and canvas sometimes feels ridiculously obsolete, it can be a little difficult to give oneself over to these grand visions. But I when I was asked, in John Baldacchino’s course in Philosophies of Art in Education at Teachers College, to befriend a work of art this fall, Rubens immediately lept to mind. We were told to pick an artwork to revisit multiple times and become intimate with (a la “The Sight of Death”by T.J.Clark.) It seemed this was finally the opportunity to spend some time with an artist who always had felt both remote and seductive.

I located the Rubens gallery on the Metropolitan Museum map and headed straight for it. Once there, however, I felt lost. Standing in front of the work, I couldn’t imagine how to enter the mind of this painter who lived 400 years ago, under circumstances and in a society so vastly different from my own. I went back out to the museum store and picked the cheapest sketchbook I could find. Returning to the European Baroque galleries, a little more cautiously this time, I looked around at some of the other artists’ works. Eventually I came back to Rubens, and settled on Venus and Adonis, a much smaller and simpler work than the paintings in Paris and Boston. At first I was a bit worried I wouldn’t find enough in the work to sustain repeated visits. But I started to draw anyway, and in a matter of minutes, was flooded by my own intuitions of Ruben’s thoughts and feelings as he created this work. Drawing became my portal into the mind of Rubens. As my pencil traced the movements of his brush, I began to imagine I was truly able to see through his eyes.

After a few visits with Adonis and Venus, I went back to Rubens’ own inspiration in Titian, and even further, to the Greeks. I then turned to look at Rubens’ self portrait with his young wife and tiny son, hanging on the opposite wall, and mirroring the mythological family, of Adonis, Venus and Cupid that it faces. I had been avoiding the self-portait for weeks, barely glancing at it as I entered the gallery. It was almost shocking to look the artist in the face. I was surprised by the compassion and the closeness I felt for this immensely successful man who nonetheless seemed to be grappling with his own mortality in these paintings.

A woman raised her phone high in front of Raphael’s Portrait of Bindo Altoviti (above) obscuring everyone else’s view, including mine. I said to her, out loud this time, in what I intended was a helpful tone, “you know you can easily find that image on the internet, much better quality than what you can take with your phone.” She chuckled and moved on. I don’t really get it, the crowds rushing through museums these days, phones held high, photographing art instead of looking at it. They have outsourced the pleasure of seeing, my husband says it is like collecting hunting trophies.

What nobody seemed to be paying much attention to were the drawings. There was plenty of room to observe them closely. But the miraculous sensitivity of Raphael’s hand conveys more than what you see with your eyes (or can capture with your phone) you can feel it in your body.

On my way to the blockbuster Raphael exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, which my friends had told me was not to be missed, almost by accident, I wandered into a smaller exhibit of working drawings for Gothic architecture: the sheets where a master mason set down, in line, the geometry that would later stand up in stone. They are not pictures of cathedrals. They are the thinking that made the cathedrals possible. From the museum website: “The ability to think through and play with the elements of a design at the drafting table, away from the pressures of the building site, allowed Gothic architects to explore new and ever more creative ideas.” Someone had to draw it first, had to test in the drawing whether the thing would hold. The line was not a record of the building. The line was where] the building was discovered.

Raphael's earliest drawings, made just a few years after those in the Gothic design exhibition, show evidence of his remarkably delicate hand and observational skill, but something is not quite there yet: an understanding of how all the exquisitely rendered parts are connected beneath the surface. The internal architecture.

The drawings he made after he saw Leonardo's gestural explorations of the inner structures of the body visibly changed Raphael's marks. He stopped drawing the outside of a figure and begun feeling it develop from within: the weight, the way a shoulder turns in response to the angle of a hip. You can feel, in the later sheets, that he is no longer merely copying the appearance of the body in front of him. He is inhabiting it. (For more examples, if you can’t get to the museum, visit the Met Museum’s website, their images are copy-protected.)

Later that day I stopped by 192 Books in Chelsea, my personal favorite bookstore in the world: it is small, cosy, art forward (but not exclusively) with big windows facing west on Tenth Avenue, and every book I pick up feels like a jewel that was chosen for me. I picked up, on impulse, a collection of John Berger’s essays, Landscapes. I reread a 1953 essay on drawing with a shock of recognition.

FOR THE ARTIST, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase, it is quite literally true. It is the actual act of drawing that forces the artist to look at the object in front of him, to dissect it in his mind’s eye and put it together again; or, if he is drawing from memory, that forces him to dredge his own mind, to discover the content of his own store of past observations. It is a platitude in the teaching of drawing that the heart of the matter lies in the specific process of looking. A line, an area of tone, is important not really because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see. Following up its logic in order to check its accuracy, you find confirmation or denial in the object itself or in your memory of it. Each confirmation or denial brings you closer to the object, until finally you are, as it were, inside it: the contours you have drawn no longer marking the edge of what you have seen, but the edge of what you have become. Perhaps that sounds needlessly metaphysical. Another way of putting it would be to say that each mark you make on the paper is a stepping-stone from which you proceed to the next, until you have crossed your subject as though it were a river, have put it behind you.

This paragraph, which I read for the first time more than forty years ago, helped form my understanding of what drawing is all about. Like the Rilke passage I came across around that same time, it has echoed in my mind countless times since, even when I forget its origin. Drawing is an act of becoming, each mark a stepping-stone to the next, until, as Berger puts it, the contour is no longer the edge of the object but the edge of what you have become. The drawing is the place where the maker crosses into the subject and, in Berger’s startling final image, crosses it like a river and leaves it behind.

I have spent my life as both a maker and a lover of art, and the thing that actually moves me in front of a Raphael drawing is not only that he got inside his subject. It is that I get inside him. We are doubly inside: I am inside Raphael as Raphael is inside the body he drew. The drawing is a nesting of one act of attention within another.

As Berger writes, this may sound needlessly metaphysical. There is a plainer mechanism underneath, and our understanding of it begins with an accident in Parma. In the early 1990s a team led by Giacomo Rizzolatti was recording from single neurons in the premotor cortex of macaque monkeys, mapping the cells that fire when a monkey reaches for something such as a peanut or piece of food. The same neurons, they found, fired when the monkey merely watched someone else reach. Cells that were supposed to be about doing turned out to fire for seeing someone else do. They were named mirror neurons, and in the three decades since they have been asked to carry an enormous amount of weight: explaining the underpinnings of empathy, the origins of language, autism, the very foundations of human culture: far more, the skeptics rightly insist, than single-cell recordings in monkeys can honestly bear. I want to be careful here, because the gap between “a neuron fires when a macaque watches a hand grasp a peanut” and “I commune with Raphael across five centuries” is enormous and full of mystery.

Despite this gap, there is some neuroscience to substantiate our intuitions: our resonance with an observed action is stronger when the action is something we ourselves have done. The motor resonance is real, it appears in humans too, and is tuned by experience. We resonate most strongly with actions that we have experienced in our own bodies. The spectators at Wimbledon who play tennis flinch at the right moments; those who have never held a racquet watch a less exciting game. Show ballet to dancers and the motor system lights up for the steps they themselves can perform, and stays quieter for the ones they can’t. The body recognizes what the body has done. Watching, in this narrow and well-evidenced sense, is a covert kind of doing.

The cognitive scientist Alessandro Pignocchi described how this relates to how we see drawings: when we look at a drawing, we recover the draftsman’s gesture through our own motor system. We don’t infer the hand that made the mark. We feel it. I am not “appreciating” a Raphael drawing the way I appreciate a fact. I am, in some small embodied way, re-drawing it. The line he found, I find again.

To make a mark that stands for something, to externalize a thought or perception so it can be looked at and followed by others or by ourselves, is one of the most ordinary human acts there is, older and wider than writing itself. Which means the repertoire is universal. Everyone carries, in their own hand, the muscle-memory of a line committed to a surface. It is also a very old idea wearing new clothes. Bernard Berenson said in 1896 that great Florentine art works on us through “tactile values,” quickening our own tactile imagination; Gombrich named the viewer’s active role “the beholder’s share”; Baxandall called the trained, culturally shaped way of looking “the period eye.” The neuroscience didn’t discover that looking is an active, embodied act. It found a mechanism for what the critics had understood for a century.

Raphael’s oils efface the human gesture, it is dissolved into glaze and finish, until the image arrives looking as though made by a divine hand. A drawing does the opposite. It keeps the gesture: the pressure, the speed, the order of the marks, the moment of discovery. It is the place the maker’s body stays legible enough for the viewer’s body to go looking for it.

So these days, in museums, crowds raise their phones at the works where Raphael is least reachable, and walk straight past the ones where they could have truly felt his presence. The phone offers a frictionless experience that guarantees its holder will miss the only way in: the encounter with the artist's intention that happens not on the screen but in the body, mark by mark.

Berger said the artist crosses the subject like a river and puts it behind him. The viewer who really looks gets to make the crossing too, but only where the maker left the water moving. Stand in front of a drawing. Don't photograph it. Let your eye follow the line the way the hand did, and you will find, for a moment, that you are not on the near bank looking across. You are already on the other side.

[John Berger, “The Basis of all Painting and Sculpture is Drawing”, collected in Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing (1960). On the trained, embodied, and active nature of looking: Bernard Berenson, The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896), on “tactile values”; E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Pantheon/Bollingen, 1960), on “the beholder’s share”; and Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford/Clarendon, 1972), on “the period eye.” On mirror neurons and the action-observation system: G. Rizzolatti & M. A. Arbib, “Language Within Our Grasp,” Trends in Neurosciences 21, no. 5 (1998); for a critical/updated view, U. Hasson & C. D. Frith, “Mirroring and Beyond: Coupled Dynamics as a Generalized Framework for Modelling Social Interactions,” Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 371, no. 1693 (2016). On motor simulation in the perception of drawings: A. Pignocchi, “How the Intentions of the Draftsman Shape Perception of a Drawing,” Consciousness and Cognition 19, no. 4 (2010); and D. Freedberg & V. Gallese, “Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 5 (2007).]

Buy me a coffee?

There is a common assumption about how you get better at something: you practice. You do the same exercise, the same way, until it becomes automatic. Then you move to the next one. This is the logic of the drill, and it has its place. But it is not the only and often not the best way we humans learn.

Two bodies of cognitive research suggest why. This was research I learned about when I was working on my doctorate in Cognitive Studies and Art Education at Columbia University, and it has stayed with me all these years.

Capturing the fortress

In the early 1980s, the cognitive psychologists Mary Gick and Keith Holyoak ran a series of experiments using a problem first posed by Karl Duncker in 1945. The setup: a patient has an inoperable tumor deep in the body. A doctor has access to rays that can destroy it, but at the intensity required, they will also destroy the healthy tissue in their path. What do you do?

Left to their own devices, only about ten percent of people find the answer.

Gick and Holyoak then tried giving participants a seemingly unrelated story before presenting the problem. A general wants to capture a fortress at the center of a country. The roads leading to it are mined: a large force will detonate them, but small groups can pass safely. The general divides his army into small groups, sends each one down a different road, and has them converge simultaneously on the fortress.

After reading this story, thirty percent of participants solved the radiation problem. After reading it and being explicitly told it might be useful, seventy-five percent solved it.

The two problems have nothing superficially in common, one is military, one is medical. What they share is a structure: concentrate force from multiple directions on a central target. The story did not give participants new information. It gave them a conceptual form they could fit over a new problem.

Gick and Holyoak called this a schema, their term for an abstract representation of a problem type that transfers across surface differences. And it’s not just that analogies help, but that you need more than one. Participants who read two structurally similar stories before the radiation problem solved it at higher rates than those who read only one. The schema becomes more portable the more examples you have seen it in.

How babies learn to walk

Around the same time as Glick and Holyoak were conducting their research, the developmental psychologist Esther Thelen was studying how babies learn to walk.

The prevailing view was that walking appears when the relevant neural circuits come online. Development proceeds from the inside out, driven by a biological program. Thelen’s research complicated this picture considerably.

It turns out no two babies take the same path. Some crawl for months before walking; some skip crawling entirely and go straight to pulling themselves upright. Some bottom-shuffle, some roll, some commando-crawl. The sequence that looks universal from the outside turns out, on close inspection, to be a different story every time. What is shared is not the route but the destination, and the destination is reached precisely because each baby is finding their own way there, responding to their own body, their own environment, their own particular version of the problem.

This matters for drawing because the belief that there is one correct method, one right sequence of exercises, one proper way to hold a pencil, is the thing that stops more adult learners than lack of talent ever does. Thelen’s work suggests that this belief is not just discouraging but wrong.

Walking, it turned out, was not waiting inside the nervous system to be switched on. It was assembled, gradually, from the interaction of neural development, body proportion, muscle strength, the particular surfaces the baby encountered, their motivation to reach something across the room, and dozens of other factors that changed week by week. As Thelen wrote, the behavior “emerges in the movement.” It does not pre-exist the doing of it.

Skills are not unlocked. They are built, through varied contact with the world, and they take the shape of that contact.

What this means for drawing

Put these two bodies of research together and something emerges about how to get better at drawing.

Drawing instruction can too often proceed along a single pathway. There is an assumption that improvement follows from repetition of the right exercise. Find the correct drill. Do it enough times. The skill will appear.

Thelen’s work suggests that skill does not accumulate in a single channel. It emerges from the confluence of many different kinds of engagement. A drawing practice built entirely on one mode, always from observation or always from imagination, develops something real but also something narrow. The skill that forms takes the shape of the contact that formed it, and no more.

Gick and Holyoak add a different dimension. The reason to draw from observation and then from memory and then from imagination is not simply variety, or keeping things interesting. It is that each approach is a different story about the same underlying activity. The more stories you have, the more portable that structure becomes. Drawing from memory after drawing from observation does not just test whether you were paying attention. It begins to extract the schema, the abstract shape of how things are put together, from the specific instance. That schema is what eventually lets you draw things never before seen or imagined.

There is direct evidence for this in research on how experienced artists actually draw. In doctoral research at Columbia University, video documentation of mature artists drawing from observation, memory, and imagination revealed something unexpected: regardless of which mode they were working in, the artists engaged in the same kinds of actions, and in more or less the same sequence. They located, establishing where things were in relation to each other. They extended, developing and elaborating marks. They connected, linking parts into larger wholes. They revised, correcting and adjusting. They reinforced, committing to and strengthening what was working. The mode changed; the underlying activity did not. Observation, memory, and imagination turned out to be three different doorways into the same room.

Once those underlying actions become automatic, they stop demanding attention. What opens up in their place is something more like a conversation: between the drawer and the drawing, between intention and what actually appears on the page. The marks suggest something; the drawer responds; something unexpected emerges; they follow it. This back-and-forth is only possible because the foundational moves are running in the background, freeing attention for what is new, surprising, or not yet understood. Fluency is not the end of the process. It is what makes the interesting part possible.

The baby does not learn to walk by practicing walking. She learns to walk by rolling, reaching, pulling herself upright, falling, trying again on a different surface, getting stronger, getting heavier, getting lighter in water. Walking is the thing that eventually assembles itself from all of that. You cannot get there by a more direct route.

Gick, M. L., & Holyoak, K. J. (1983). Schema induction and analogical transfer. Cognitive Psychology, 15(1), 1–38.

Kantrowitz, A. (2014). A cognitive ethnographic study of eight contemporary artists’ improvisational drawing practices (Doctoral dissertation, Teachers College, Columbia University). ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global.

Thelen, E. (1995). Motor development: A new synthesis. American Psychologist, 50(2), 79–95. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.50.2.79

Buy me a coffee?

Monica is a PhD student at IIT Gandhinagar, and she enrolled in my short course on thinking through drawing across disciplines. One day she mentioned that her advisor was teaching English to the team at Sanchetana (an NGO in Ahmedabad) and to community leaders from the urban slums nearby. And that she'd asked them to draw. That was enough to make me want to meet the advisor.

Jooyoung is Korean, trained in theoretical linguistics at the University of Delaware in the U.S., and now teaching English at IIT Gandhinagar. She came to Gandhinagar because her husband had a position here. Her research moved from theoretical linguistics toward multilingualism, and her sense of what language teaching is for moved with it.

From Sanchetana’s webpage, Emotional Health

Sanchetana was founded over forty years ago by a medical doctor in the Ahmedabad area, it began with community health work, including mental health for women in low-income communities and expanded into vocational training, microloans, literacy, even a ChatGPT workshop. The women Jooyoung works with are project coordinators, program managers, community resource persons recruited from the neighborhoods themselves. Many dropped out of school around fifth or sixth grade.

From Sanchetana’s website:

…working with marginalized communities, Sanchetana recognizes the deep-seated emotional health challenges that impact communal relationships. This project uses creative Emotional Health, Art Therapy and Nonviolent communication (NVC) tools to address these issues and build a culture of empathy and cooperation.

The request for English classes was tentative at first, on both sides. “We were all like, let’s just try it,” Jooyoung said. “I didn’t want to just assume English would be useful to them.” Some women wanted to participate more fully in board meetings, which run partly in English. Some wanted to teach English to girls in their communities. One woman, in her thirties, raising two kids, said she wanted to read books. She was interested in nonviolence education and wanted to go deeper. That, Jooyoung said, is the kind of motivation she looks for. “When you’re teaching English, you have to first think about the learning objective,” she said. “Here, why should English writing be the target? What is the target group actually going to use it for?”

She doesn’t teach English the way you might expect: there are no drills and no decontextualized grammar rules. Instead she brings sketchbooks and color pencils and bilingual storybooks from Tulika Press. She also brings blank cards folded from thick paper, with a twelve-month grid inside where the women write or draw what they dreamed about, and later, what they achieved. She asked them to draw their plans for the year, decorate the front cover, sketch what they were working toward. Some drew embroidery machines. One drew a girl being guided toward school. Another drew something about a holiday play, fish in water, a religious symbol Jooyoung couldn't quite place.

“They can express it better without the pressure of English,” she said about the Ahmedabad women. “There’s no hesitation. They’re just talking. And then we add the language layer.”

Drawing, in Jooyoung's approach, isn't an art exercise, it's a way to get something down before it can be put into words. Her focus, at Sanchetana and with her students at IIT Gandhinagar, is how language helps us organize and externalize our thoughts, and express our inner lives. English is only the “cherry on top.”

The women at Sanchetana are not learning English to sound impressive. They’re learning it to get a seat at a table where decisions are being made about their communities. That’s a very practical understanding of what language is for.

This connects to something Jooyoung has observed about how multilingualism actually functions in India. She describes the way people here move between languages not as total fluency in multiple systems, but as something more like a “patchwork.” English is used for academic discussion and debate. Jooyoung said she realized she needed to learn Hindi for jokes. People tend to use their mother tongue (of which there are more tha 19,500, categorized into 121 language groups) at home. The languages fill different parts of a person's life, different emotional registers, different social contexts. Each serves a different expressive function.

Jooyoung and Monica volunteer once a month, two hours a session, probably not enough for measurable language acquisition. Jooyoung isn't sure that's the right metric. When she found a Korean bakery in Gandhinagar, she brought cake. When there was a festival, the women made sweets for her. “So it was a more about building connection,” Jooyoung says.

She teaches first-year composition to undergraduates at IIT Gandhinagar who’ve spent years preparing for entrance exams, suppressing their own opinions in favor of correct multiple-choice answers. Her instinct with both groups is to get them talking about something they actually care about before you ask them to write. Let them disagree. Let them ramble. Writing starts with speech, which starts when someone believes they have something to say.

“What we want to train them about,” she said, “is how to think, how to organize, how to assess, how to analyze. The writing is a result of that.”

In one of my drawing workshops at IIT, something unexpected happened that connected to Jooyoung’s approach. I asked participants to draw a real problem in their lives, then work in groups to visualize and eventually solve it. They never got to the solution. They kept elaborating the problem, going deeper into it. Monica described it afterward: “The problem looks very big, but when I was drawing it, it felt like, oh, this is fun. We were so happy describing the problems. We didn’t want to reach the solution.”

(video of problem solving workshop below)

That’s the thing Jooyoung seems to be after, in the NGO and in the classroom: the pleasure of articulation itself. The satisfaction of getting a complicated thing down, even if you never solve it. She’s not trying to produce fluent English speakers. She’s trying to encourage people to trust that their inner lives are worth the effort of expression.

Jooyoung Kim is a professor at IIT Gandhinagar. Sanchetana, the NGO where she volunteers, has been working on women’s empowerment in Ahmedabad for over forty years.

I spent three hours today on a schedule handout almost no one will read.

Anya is getting married next week. As the mother of the bride, I’ve been along for the ride, at least the part of it that I’ve been in town for, but the decisions are all their own. Their theme is spring flowers, garlands of them, which are not really my thing as far as my art goes. I’ve spent decades drawing and painting to understand structure and form. Drawing dissected human bodies in the gross anatomy lab when I was in grad school. Flowers as decoration is different work. But I sketched them anyway, drawing light and loose, garlands winding around the edges of a page that will tell guests where to go, when to sit down and when to eat.

The art I was working on today started out as the invitation. I’ve been moving it forward; repurposing, reworking, fitting it to new formats. Today I was finessing the final schedule, moving a flower here, shortening a leaf there that kept interrupting the text. The fonts are mine too: ones I designed for Drawing Thought, my first book. So there’s that: a decade of work in the typography of a wedding handout.

I couldn’t let go of a leaf that was interfering with the readability of the text. Or a stem that didn’t seem to be attached to anything anymore. That’s probably a metaphor for something.

I wanted it to be clearly human-made, and not a copy of someone else’s illustration, but something that could only come from me. Not because AI couldn’t do it: it could, faster and maybe more polished. But Anya deserves to have her mother’s hand in this. The slight wobble in the letterforms, the sketch lines that didn’t quite resolve. Evidence of someone who was here, paying attention, unable to let go of a leaf.

As I was fiddling with flower petals today, my dear friend Jessica (musician and composer) called, to check in and see how the wedding preparations were going. I’m spending way too much time on flower petals, I told her. And no one will ever know, except you because I’ve just told you.

While I was working, my husband Scott started playing Sunrise Sunset on the trombone in the next room. He’s become obsessed with learning to play the trombone lately.

For the sake of a single poem, Rilke wrote, you must see many cities. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, moving restlessly across the map these past months. And now back at home.

A couple of weeks ago we said goodbye to a friend gone way too soon. Now I’m preparing for my daughter’s wedding. What we carry. What we leave behind.

Maybe this is part of it: three hours on a simple handout, spring flowers I had to teach myself to draw, my own fonts, a leaf in the wrong place. A small thing made carefully yet imperfectly for someone I love. My version of a poem.

It was dusk when I first saw the nilgai. I was leaving my office on the IIT Gandhinagar campus, and something large moved in the shadows near the building. Too big for a deer, wrong shape for a cow. I stood very still and saw more of these creatures, indifferent and enormous, who stared back and then walked slowly away into the dark. I had to ask someone the next day what I had seen. Nilgai, they told me, technically an antelope, the largest in Asia. Common here and nothing to worry about.

Sharada CV is an archaeozoologist at IIT Gandhinagar. Her subject is the long history of the relationship between humans and animals. We met at the IIT library where she was giving a presentation to children and youth, passing around bones and stone tools, watching kids hold ancient fragments and ask what they were, who had touched them, what animal they came from. Then we sat down with three of her graduate students, Bhavna, Sreelekha, and Arefa, and talked for a while.

This campus is a good place to have this conversation. While on campus, I became much more aware of human animal interaction than I am at home. Troupes of langurs share the footpaths with humans. Campus dogs loll about everywhere, not bothering anyone except occasionally each other. Peacocks cross the road with the confidence of people who have been here longer than roads. There are cobras, I’m told, though I didn’t seen one myself, though I was looking carefully where I stepped. And there are nilgai grazing near the buildings, seemingly unbothered by the humans around them. One morning, looking for a good place to sit and draw, I heard dogs barking loudly. As I got closer I saw Sharada sitting on a bench with her dog Bella surrounded by campus dogs who had strong opinions about Bella’s presence. Sharada and Bella continued their walk and the barking subsided.

That negotiated proximity between animals and humans has been going on a long time.

Sharada’s research centers on human and animal interaction in the distant past. We have thought of domestication as something humans did to animals, but the evidence suggests more reciprocal and mutually beneficial relationships. “The animals took the first step,” Sharada said. “There’s a theory that they domesticated themselves.” It’s debated, she adds. But it reframes who we think we are in relation to other species, as participants in a set of arrangements that suited everyone well enough to persist.

Pigs, for instance, were likely among the first animals to associate closely with human settlements; not because humans sought them out, but because pigs are opportunists. Humans produced waste; pigs processed it; both benefited. Bhavna described how yaks in Ladakh still do something similar: during harsh winters they drift toward human settlements for warmth and shelter, people take their milk, and when spring comes the yaks wander away again.

Were early humans primarily hunters or primarily scavengers? Sharada said we’re still working it out. There is evidence that we arrived at kill sites after the apex predators had finished, taking what was left. We may have become active hunters later, perhaps as our capacity to coordinate in groups became more sophisticated. What is clear is that modern humans as natural-born dominators of the animal world is not born out by the scientific evidence.

And science can undermine the stories we tell about ourselves. For most of the twentieth century, the dominant explanation for the rise of the great civilizations of the Indian subcontinent was the Aryan invasion theory: a superior people swept in from Central Asia on horseback, destroyed the Indus Valley civilization, and replaced it with a more advanced culture. The theory was constructed by British scholars in the early 1900s, and proved resilient in part because both sides of the political argument wanted it to be true, just with different heroes.

The horse was central to this theory: it meant the invaders had the ability to overpower the Indus people. But the bones did not cooperate. Horse remains at Indus Valley sites are nowhere near sufficient to support an invasion narrative. The human skeletons show no evidence of trauma, no wounds, no signs of massacre. No weapons caches. No chariots. A few terracotta toy wheels were briefly interpreted as evidence of chariot culture; on closer examination they were toy wheels.

What the bones actually show are waves of migration, exchange, interbreeding. People moving across porous borders, trading animals and plants and ideas. Genetics has confirmed that there has been mixture of different gene pools across South Asian prehistory, but no evidence of a conquering population displacing an existing one. The story that served colonial power was written without evidence. The evidence was in the ground, in the bones, waiting for someone to look carefully enough.

Bhavna and Sreelekha are doing that looking with tools that didn’t exist a generation ago. Bhavna works on ancient DNA and proteomics (protein analysis) identifying animal species from bone fragments too degraded to identify by shape. Cattle, pigs, horses, sheep all have their own protein profile, preserved in bone for thousands of years. This kind of analysis is starting to fill in a picture of which animals were actually present, in what numbers, across which time periods.

Sreelekha reads diet through stable isotopes — carbon and nitrogen signatures absorbed from plants, which absorbed them from the soil and air, which absorbed them from the broader environment. From a fragment of animal bone she can determine whether that animal was eating rice and wheat, or millets. Bones tell us what humans were growing, how the land was being managed, and how that management shifted over time.

At one southern Indian site, Sreelekha described a clear transition: a Neolithic community that had always practiced dry farming of millets began, in a later period, to introduce wet rice cultivation. The bones can tell us how the climate had changed.

The past has been narrated as a series of catastrophes, civilizations rising and falling, species going extinct, cultures being destroyed. Sharada’s lab is producing evidence of resilience and adaptation. Sharada described ancient communities adapting to dramatic climate shifts by elevating their settlements on platforms when flooding came, engineering water systems to redirect rivers toward their fields, switching crops as conditions changed. Millets that were carried from Africa to India, are drought-tolerant, nutritious, adaptable and a cornerstone of this flexibility. They are also, she noted, currently being rediscovered by urban Indians as a superfood. Rural communities, she pointed out, never stopped eating them.

Humans have transformed the landscape in other ways. “If I say we found rhinoceros bones in Gujarat,” Sharada said, “people look at me like I’ve said we found penguins in the Sahara.” Rhino bones have been found across western India at sites four and five thousand years old. Today the species exists only in the far northeast. We changed the landscape until there was no habitat left for them. Not necessarily by hunting them out, but by deforesting, farming, diverting water, remaking the ecology so that the animals that had lived in it for millennia had nowhere left to be.

Archaeology, I’ve learned, can undermine our stories with scientific evidence. The distribution of species, the shape of landscapes, ideas about who belongs where, can be disrupted by the facts revealed by the bones.

The four women around the table: Sharada and her PhD students, Bhavna, Sreelekha, Arefa, are doing science in a field that is now numerically dominated by women at the student and early-career level. Archaeology doesn’t pay well, career paths are long and uncertain, and men in India tend toward disciplines with faster returns. They described being steered toward sorting and brushwork instead of digging, being told the axe is too heavy for girls. Women had been excluded from excavation sites because there was nowhere for a woman to stay. They were told: for a girl, you’re digging well. Lab work assigned because she’s married and must have other responsibilities while married male colleagues were assumed to be fully available.

It is not unrelated, I think, that the science these women are doing is precisely the science of listening carefully to what is actually there, rather than deciding in advance what the record should show. The Aryan invasion theory persisted for decades partly because of political pressure on archaeologists to find the evidence that powerful people wanted found. The women in this room are the ones with their hands in the actual material, reading what it says.

“We do our job very well,” Sharada said, “and then they are forced to say: I’m glad you were part of this.”

Arefa studies the cut marks left on animal bones by human tools: the angle of the blade, the depth of the groove, what they reveal about how a carcass was processed and by whom. She has an undergraduate degree in art and made a comic to explain the lab’s work. She is also enrolled in my thinking through drawing class.

For our first session she brought objects from the lab: bone fragments, pottery sherds, a stone tool. Students spent two hours drawing them eight different ways — not to produce images, but to look. To notice the weight of an object, the texture of a surface, the suggestion of a mark, the question raised by a particular edge. What force made this? Why?

These are not just art questions. They are the same questions archaeology asks, through a different instrument. Drawing can be a method of close looking: staying with something long enough to to resist the premature conclusion and pay attention. Used this way, drawing is inquiry. A parallel method, and a perhaps a more accessible entry point for those who haven’t spent years learning to read what a bone can say.

Sharada teaches people what the bones and other fragments our ancestors left behind tell us: in labs, at excavation sites, at public events across India, in a library full of children holding skulls and asking what they’re looking at. The objects sometimes don’t give up their meaning easily. You have to look carefully, and then look again, and resist the story you came in with.

A fragment, examined carefully, can be more truthful than a century of received narrative. That’s as true in a drawing class as it is in an archeology lab.

On my first day at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, I was taken for tea at a café in the midst of the academic area. In my jet-lagged haze, I noticed a lively mural: fish, birds and flowers in black line work that all seemed to flow together naturally. Several times over the past few weeks I’ve had occasion to return to this cafe, and got curious. Before I left Gandhinagar I had a chance to chat with Suman Choudhury, the artist in charge of this mural, to discuss how it got made (sponosored by Art@IITGN.) The first step, Suman told me, was to give people paper and pencil, and ask them to draw whatever they wanted: butterflies, fish, flowers, mountains, whatever came to mind. If they were too scared, then just something simple, but then keep going, adding patterns and details.

There’s a moment, early in any creative project, especially a public one, when most people, both experts and beginners, freeze. The blank surface is too clean. Whatever you put down could be a cause for embarrassment. I feel this myself, even after all these decades, worried about making something ugly or stupid that might allow others, or myself, to judge it harshly. I’ve learned to do it anyway. I can imagine Suman gently walking his participants through this process, encouraging them to feel joy, allowing that sense of joy to carry them forward. This is how a mural built by roughly fifty people, with very different skill levels and no preconceived theme or subject matter, manages to hold together.

Suman told me if someone was too scared to draw on the wall, they could just draw a circle and then see what it might become. Up close you can find individual signatures in corners. You can see the difference between someone who draws every day and someone who hasn’t really drawn since grade school. From a distance, it flows. It’s the hardest thing to pull off in community mural-making, and it’s where many projects fail, usually in one of two directions. The directing artist controls too much, the vision is theirs, the participants are labor, and what results is essentially a solo work with a feel-good origin story attached. Or the opposite: no one steers, everything gets equal real estate, and the wall ends up fragmented, visually incoherent, contributing little to the space it inhabits.

Suman found balance by providing just enough guidance. First, the choice to forego color and modeling with black line work helped to level the playing field and ensure overall coherence. His role was more like a choreographer than an auteur, watching where people placed their drawings, nudging a bird here, enlarging a fish there, letting the overall composition find its logic. As he describes it, his primary intervention was minimal and spatial, suggesting where images might sit in relation to each other. The worry in a project like this runs in both directions. The contributors worry their work will be bad, that their animal will look awkward, their contribution a visible weak point in someone else’s wall. What may be less talked about is the worry on the other side. The directing artist carries the whole thing. If the mural ends up incoherent and displeasing in a space people use every day, that’s on them. The public’s judgment lands on the person who was in charge and invited fifty mostly untrained hands onto a wall.

Suman’s methodology seems to be joy. He encouraged people to be happy while they worked, to treat the act of drawing as the point rather than the product. And it seems he extended that to himself, releasing the outcome, trusting the process he had designed, finding satisfaction in the choreography rather than control. The result is an uplifting piece of work that encodes and communicates that joy. A chair still sits up on a ledge near the unfinished section. The mural is ongoing. Perhaps more people will bring drawings; more circles will become more things. There’s still room for more contributions, more people to share their work with the IIT community, people who didn’t think they were artists finding out they were wrong

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The other day I got to sit down with Neeldhara Misra and Jyothi Krishnan, at IIT Gandhinagar. They are mathematicians and game designers who enjoy a good card trick. We talked for a couple of hours. I was struck by how many areas of common interest we uncovered. The desire to reignite a love of learning in young people, the role of play in building real understanding, issues women face in STEM aren’t just American concerns or Indian concerns. We are facing different versions of many of the same issues, in different contexts.

We talked about how people in India and the US often say they are bad at math or art. Jyothi Krishnan said, “I like art, but I’m afraid to create it. I was told: this is art, which I can’t match. I don’t have the physical skills.” We talked about how many people feel the same way about math. But there’s a whole different way of thinking about engaging with math or art. It’s about exercising our inherent human capacity to interact with the world around us, build understanding through exploration, and being allowed to follow our own curiosities.

Neeldhara lent me a book, Mathematics for Human Flourishing, which I’ve started reading and which resonates deeply with me. It’s about the joy of feeling your mind at work, similar to the joy I think drawing can provide. Jyothi Krishnan thinks games are to mathematics as books are to English. We don’t teach children to read by simply drilling phonics. That may sometimes be helpful in giving them important skills. But first we help them learn to love reading by offering stories they find engaging. Mathematics, she thinks, should work the same way: encountered physically and playfully, rather than through rote learning.

In my experience, young people learn best when they are exploring for themselves, when the process is either enjoyable or meaningful, or in the best of all possible worlds, both, rather than simply meeting learning objectives imposed on them from above.

“If somebody had sold me Scrabble with a learning outcome,” Jyothi says, “I would never have played it.”

The question underneath Jyothi’s work, and I don’t know if she would frame it this way, but it’s what I heard, is what it costs a person to be told, early and absolutely, that they are bad at something.

She will tell you, without embarrassment, that she makes stick figures. She says it with a slight defensiveness, and says she has artist friends who have spent years pushing back, but she is not entirely convinced. She is less convinced of the opposite than she used to be, though. She even admits that her stick figures are kind of cute.

“What does it even mean to be bad at something?” she asks.

Both Neeldhara and Jyothi ask this about mathematics as much as art. A research mathematician they know walked into a combinatorics seminar and found it incomprehensible. By the standard most people apply to themselves, this person is bad at math. But they’re an excellent mathematician. They just don’t like this corner of it, the way a novelist might be indifferent to poetry.

“There’s an issue of taste in pretty much every field,” Neeldhara says.

We almost never talk about mathematics this way. The label “bad at math” gets applied early, and not as “you haven’t found the part that interests you,” but as a categorical verdict about a person. People don’t often return to things they’ve decided they’re bad at, or where they don’t feel entirely welcome.

I know this from my own history. In 1980 I walked into MIT to learn computer graphics and found a world so thoroughly male: not hostile exactly, just with the unquestioned assumption that I was there to make the interfaces look pretty and not to learn to code. I completed my programming project but then thought: okay, see you later, I’ll be an artist.

I asked about gender bias in STEM in India, and it seems a bit different than in the US. Neeldhara tells a story about a job interview. A senior person reviewed her record and said: “You collaborate a lot. All your papers involve working with people from all over the world.” Neeldhara thought it was a compliment. She thanked them warmly.

Her friends explained afterward what had actually been communicated: that her collaborative record was being used to question whether she could produce independent work. The implication was that she needed other people, that she couldn’t be trusted on her own.

“There may have been a gender undertone to it,” she says. “But I wouldn’t have gotten it.”

She thinks about the spaces she gradually drifted away from as a student: programming, CS, technical spaces that were overwhelmingly male. She realizes she never, at the time, attributed her discomfort to gender. “I thought they were discriminating against me because I was dumb,” she says. “I always framed it as a meritocracy problem.”

My daughter is a civil engineer. She’s thirty, manages young men who sometimes describe her as scary, which she would not be if a man said the identical things in the identical tone. She organized a women’s support group at her company to have somewhere to talk about it and strategize together. When Neeldhara said “I thought it was a meritocracy problem,” I thought about my daughter in her college years, often calling me in a panic that she would fail the next exam, which she never did, and where her unfounded fear of failure might have come from.

Jyothi puts the structural version well. Growing up in India, she says, sexism was often overt -- you could see it, name it, and respond to it directly. What she found in the US, where she did her graduate work at UC Berkeley, was something harder to locate. “Nobody says anything. But you can sense it, like a hum in the background.” In India you could outperform them and eventually be left alone. That strategy didn’t transfer. “You couldn’t just win once and be done with it.”

We went on to discuss what constitutes good teaching. It’s too simple to say that open-ended exploration is always best, that over-measurement kills curiosity, that children need room to be wrong. I mostly believe all of this. But it’s often more complicated.

Years ago my stepson taught at Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, one of the poorest places in the US, a place where you’re lucky to live to fifty. The kids had two hours of art a day. My stepson thought this was a waste, because those two hours weren’t giving those children anything that would help them survive. Not literacy, not numeracy, nothing that would give them a better chance at life. I took that seriously. It’s part of why, when I worked in high-poverty settings in New York City schools, I always questioned whether what we were doing was actually benefiting the children we were teaching.

Jyothi knows this tension from the inside. “You realize what teachers actually have to transact,” she says. And Neeldhara extends it further: students who make it to an elite college as the first person in their family in generations to reach this level… they may not want an experimental curriculum. Plausibly, they want the credential that makes the sacrifice mean something. And if so, judging them for that ignores what they’ve been through.

And yet the system that produced them has taken something from them. The JEE pipeline, years of coaching that start in seventh or eighth grade, sometimes lower, crowding out play and sleep and ordinary childhood, produces young people too exhausted to be curious. “They feel increasingly cheated,” Neeldhara says.

But what the future seems to actually require is adaptability, comfort with uncertainty, the ability to approach genuinely novel problems without a known procedure. These are the capacities that the system spent years training out of them. Students in the US may not be put through such a grueling system, yet still suffer from anxieties about the future that often cripple their creativity and enthusiasm in a different way.

Jyothi and Neeldhara are working on this inherent contradiction in the educational process: designing games, building courses that make room for confusion, pushing back on the premise that every activity needs a pre-justified learning outcome. They are making the argument by example that curiosity is not something you add to education after the real work is done but something that makes the real work possible.

Near the end of our conversation, Neeldhara mentioned an online drawing course she had taken once. One of the first lessons: when you want to draw something, simplify it into the smallest shapes you can, and draw those. For days afterward she found herself walking around decomposing everything she saw, buildings, faces, trees, into component shapes. “It changed how I perceived things,” she said. “You start noticing light, shadow, distance. Things you’d walk past without registering.”

I was drawing while she said this and hadn’t mentioned it. When she asked, I said: yes, that’s it exactly. You’ve been drawing us? she said. Not very well, I said. We’ve been talking. My initial sketches were pretty sloppy, but they helped me pay attention in an important way.

I came to IIT Gandhinagar believing that learning to tolerate not knowing whether you’re doing it right is not a soft skill. In a world where the map keeps changing faster than anyone can update it, learning to explore and adapt may be the most important capacities a person can develop. Both require room to play, not just to survive turbulent times, but to flourish.

I’m still feeling a bit lost here in IIT Gandhinagar, though I’ve had some incredibly inspiring conversations with faculty and students, which I’ve started writing about (more soon!). But I wanted to tell you about a tree I’ve befriended, right across from my apartment block on campus.

It’s one of the larger, older trees around. Lately, first thing in the morning, around 6:30 am, when the temperature is pleasant and people are out walking and enjoying the fresh air, I sit on a bench just opposite it and do my best to put what I’m noticing down on paper. It’s become a kind of modest anchor for my day.

A couple of mornings ago, a troupe of langur monkeys passed through while I was drawing. Suddenly one jumped into the tree I was drawing and stayed there for quite a while. I got a little nervous it would jump down on me, but the langur seemed as content in the tree as I’ve started to feel beneath it. I think I may have left before it did.

Today I came out a bit later than usual, and the sun was already shining brightly on the tree, though the temperature was still comfortable. I had been working on the drawing for a while when a gentleman came by with his young grandson. He stood behind me for some time, watching me draw, and then finally decided to engage me in conversation. Do you know what kind of tree this is? he asked. Of course I didn’t. It’s a Neem tree, he told me. It has all kinds of medicinal properties.

He went over and broke off a small branch, which was a bit upsetting, though he told me the tree was probably no more than thirty years old. That means it must grow remarkably quickly, because it is enormous. Right now it is flowering: tiny white flowers that, he said, cure a fever. Though it only flowers once a year, if you eat them at that time you will stay healthy all year. He ate some and then offered them to me. They had a strong, bitter taste, surprising in such a tiny, delicate flower. The leaves, he said, can cure diabetes, and when he got Covid he chewed them and they helped him recover.

I don’t know whether any of these claims have been verified by science, but I do use neem oil on my roses to keep them healthy, so perhaps what is good for roses is good for us too. In any case, I now have new reasons to admire this tree, which already provides much-needed shade during my morning drawing sessions.

The gentleman went on to tell me that he is from a forested region where lions, tigers, and leopards share the woodlands with people. Since I love trees, he said, I should come visit, and he put his contact information in my phone. (Mr. Patel.) The lions, he said, are not a problem, as long as they’re not hungry. It’s the tigers you have to watch out for. They’ll attack you whether they’re hungry or not.

His tiny grandson, waiting patiently at his feet, grew restless, and Mr. Patel turned to go. You are welcome to come visit, next time you are in India, he said. I’ve received many such invitations since I’ve been here, to fascinating places I won’t have time for on this trip. I’m leaving in two weeks and my schedule is getting quite full. But I’m hoping to return, and perhaps I’ll make it to Mr. Patel’s forests.

I wouldn’t have met Mr. Patel if I hadn’t been sitting there every morning, pencil in hand, looking. Drawing the same tree over and over didn’t make me an expert on it. But it made me someone who could be taught. I arrived in Gandhinagar feeling lost. The tree gave me a place to be. And being in that place, drawing every day, opened something up that moving through would I would have missed entirely.

Where to begin...

Glass cases of multicolored polyhedra lined the hallway outside the Center for Creative Learning (CCL) at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar. I was immediately transported to MIT’s Architecture Machine Group, more than four decades ago, when I programmed an animation of multicolored polyhedral transformations in C, which in those days ran on huge mainframe computers the size of large refrigerators. (There was a roomful of them.) I can’t remember at all how I did it, but I do remember the thrill of figuring it out and making it work.

Inside was a huge space with scattered workstations and piles of miscellaneous parts. Manish Jain, the founder of the Center, came over. He explained that his motivation in setting up this Center was to dispel the tedium that takes over children’s lives in school, and to reintroduce play and joy into children’s learning. He set a cup of coffee in front of me and asked me to tell him my life story. Not a common request. I was thrown off guard, my mind blank.

So I just started talking about my dad. It was the first thing that popped into my head. My father was an inventor, a rocket scientist who passionately believed that true creativity begins at the edges of things. He invented the ceramic coating that allowed rockets to reenter the earth’s atmosphere without burning up. His primary research was in aerodynamics and fluid mechanics. He taught me early that the boundary between disciplines is mostly a bureaucratic fiction, and that the most creative and important work is done in the liminal zones between domains. I’ve more or less lived in those in-between spaces ever since.

I surprised myself (and even embarrassed myself a little) by sharing this so quickly with a stranger, something I don’t usually talk about. But for some reason I don’t quite understand, this place makes that kind of conversation feel normal.

I arrived at IITGN in time for the Curiosity Conference 2026, and I am staying for four weeks as Scholar in Residence. The conference was organized by Argha Manna ( cancer researcher turned comics artist) and Jaison Manjaly (professor of philosophy and cognition.) It brought together artists, researchers, educators, philosophers, science researchers, and communicators from across India as well as local college and high school students. Everyone seemed happy to be there. I don’t know who else felt as I did, that gratification that comes from finding people who also have been working at the boundary between art and science, perhaps a little lonely for it, suddenly not alone.

There were a number of engaging presentations by artists, scientists, and artist-scientists. Shailesh BR talked about his Philosophy Machines: mechanized installations that hold life and death, commerce and devotion, absurdity and sincerity in conversation. His machines hold a complexity of meaning that words can’t, that give life to the contradictions inherent in the human condition.

I was also moved by the work Jenia Mukherjee and Pratyasha Nath presented on Kolkata’s East Kolkata Wetlands: a vast, intricate ecosystem of wastewater, fisheries, and centuries of human ingenuity on the edge of the city. Pratyasha is telling this story through comics, which seem well suited to the subject. She is thinking about the gutters of comics, the spaces between the frames, as a metaphor for the actual gutters of Kolkata.

The campus of IIT Gandhinagar itself is a kind of argument. Interdisciplinarity at IITGN is built into the physical structure. Offices don’t cluster by department. Labs are intermingled. The architecture is full of acute angles and unexpected passages, designed, I’m told, to get you lost on purpose. I can confirm it works. I keep thinking I know where I am and then find myself heading in exactly the wrong direction. Spatially, intellectually, linguistically, I have been lost in all three arenas since I arrived. Conversations pull me in, I lose the thread, and then sometimes manage to pick it up again. Sometimes, mid-discussion, people shift into Hindi, and I think I should have tried harder to learn at least a little before I came.

And yet (mostly) I feel comfortable and at home.

But tonight I feel empty, someone who just showed up with a sketchbook and a jet-lagged brain and a series of half-formed ideas. But maybe that is okay. I often say drawing as a form of inquiry, a way of following a line toward what you don’t yet know you want to find out. You have to not-know first. It’s important to allow yourself to get lost.

At the Center for Creative Learning, Manish Jain asked me to tell him my life story and I started with my father. What I didn’t say, but am thinking now: my father would have loved this place and these people. He would have recognized the familiar sparkle of curiosity in their eyes, as I do. I’m still getting used to the coffee.

Last week I returned from a three-week residency at Centrum, Fort Worden, Port Townsend, Washington, at the edge of the Salish Sea. It was a solitary residency. I spent many hours, days and miles wandering around on my own through the overgrown historical military site, dating back to the 19^th century, feeling as if I were traversing the edge of the earth.

Under an overcast sky, giant trees, century old concrete bunkers and the sea appear and disappear, shifting with the mist. But when the sun burns through, the shadows turn almost black, and the light blinding. On a sunny afternoon, the majestic and still active stratovolcano Mt. Baker (also known as Kulshan, derived from one of the names given to it by Salishan peoples) looms over the Cascade Mountains on the eastern horizon.

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In rain or sun, plump, black tailed deer, seemingly as indifferent to human presence as the weather, placidly graze grass which has grown over massive concrete bunkers, built starting in 1902. They were built not against storms or tsunamis, but against the possibility of attack from other human beings.

I walked for miles, drawn by curiosity, driven to explore with no pressure to narrate, occasionally stopping to draw until my fingers were numb with cold. I paid attention to the specific qualities of the spaces in which I wandered, noticing and trying to capture what drew my eye, not really knowing why. Wrapped in solitude, I kept company with the trees and moss. The trails felt magical and mysterious, the bunkers haunted by those who built them over a hundred years ago, with only traces left where enormous cannons and tanks once rested.

The imagined invasion from the Salish Sea at Fort Worden, which motivated the construction of these bunkers, never took place. Perhaps they served as a deterrent. One might say that all that engineering, the labor, the extraction from the earth were wasted. We are capable of such extraordinary achievements and so much of it is aimed at either destroying or defending ourselves from other humans.

The architecture of the bunkers, with their thick walls and trapezoidal supports, reminded me of the Incan ruins in the Sacred Valley of Peru, which my husband Scott and I explored a couple of years ago. I thought about the tremendous attention, resources and brilliance we humans pour into potential and actual lethal conflicts with other humans. The Incan fortresses, as majestic and massive as they still are, did not protect the people who built them from the Spanish conquistadores.

Drawing feels like an almost ridiculously humble activity in comparison. It’s not about avoiding or causing death, but rather for me simply becoming as alive as possible to the places and times in which I find myself. Sitting on top of a bunker, I felt a different kind of urgency as I pulled out my sketchbook, pencils and paints. Every moment felt as precious and fleeting and full of some kind of meaning I couldn’t put words to. Drawing encourages me to stay with what's actually there, to let something emerge without forcing it into explanation.

The last few days of the residency Scott joined me. His best friend from high school, Joey, lives with his family in the adjacent town of Port Townsend, and they were so happy to spend time together, to talk endlessly about their shared passions of comedy and magic, and life’s vicissitudes. Joey’s daughter, Phina, shared some new ideas for her one-woman show (with tuba and puppets), made us pizza, and life was good, the way an ordinary life can be.

The morning we left Washington state, we woke to the news that the US and Israel had started a hot war with Iran. March 1, 2026. I had spent three weeks practicing one kind of human attention. We woke up to news of another. It was shocking but not surprising. A dead weight descended into the pit of my stomach.

Scott and I were both in Manhattan on September 11, 2001. He came out of the subway that morning in time to see the towers disappear in a cloud of smoke and ash. We smelled what we imagined was the stench of death for weeks afterward. An ordinary day and a beautiful blue sky can be transformed so quickly in such unexpected and horrifying ways.

On Sunday, March 1^st we drove to the airport in relative silence. It was still early morning. The consequences of the enormous events that took place while we slept are still to unfold.

Last October, I went on a meditation retreat in Massachusetts (a little closer to home) with my two sisters at Kripalu Yoga Center. Not that we are serious students of Buddhism (we are all atheist Jews), but we try to spend a weekend together, just us, no partners, adult children, or grandchildren, once a year when we can.

It is a time to discuss the reverberations of long-buried childhood experiences, and to share feelings and thoughts we wouldn’t share with anyone else. Although the rest of the year we live very different lives, each with our own private challenges, during these few precious days we have a bit of space and time to share how our life stories and our deepest feelings are intertwined.

The retreat focused on loving-kindness meditation, led by two American Buddhist converts, Stephen Cope and Missy Brown. One of my sisters had already studied and practiced this form of meditation (Metta); the other had no interest in being lectured to by an old white man at this point in her life. But I, as the youngest, dutifully listened and took notes. (Metta, as I understand it, is Chesed, loving-kindness, in our tradition.)

One of the things I learned about was Indra’s net: a metaphor originating in Hindu cosmology and central to Mahayana Buddhism, where Metta meditation is rooted. Indra’s net (or web), we were told, is an infinite glittering net with a jewel at each node, and in each jewel you can see reflections of all the other jewels. Our job is to love our tiny corner of the net, and through that, love the whole.

Yesterday, doing laundry in preparation for my long-awaited trip to India (nearly two years in the planning), I came across a folded piece of paper sitting on top of the washing machine. I opened it to find my diagram of Indra’s net. Then, at 4:45 am this morning, I got a text from my host in India: the government was halting all foreign visitors to the university where I was to be a scholar-in-residence. Some visitors already in transit were currently stranded.

Probably not the best time for a trip across the world (my original flight was scheduled to connect through Doha). But it made me think about how we are all caught up in a common human story, whether we want to be or not, and that story is impossibly complex and difficult to comprehend, much less to predict. No one knows whether or how the violence at play in the Middle East will be resolved, or how it will ultimately affect every person on this fragile planet we call home.

There is another small sketch on that folded notepaper from our meditation retreat. Its pretty rough but I can tell you what it illustrates: a Zen parable. A monk chased by a tiger leaps off a cliff to avoid being devoured, only to find another tiger waiting at the bottom. Grabbing some vines on the way down, he notices a beautiful, ripe strawberry, and then sees a mouse gnawing at the vine that is temporarily saving him. He plucks the strawberry and savors its sweetness as he falls to his inevitable end.

This is not a sad story. I love strawberries, and blueberries, and many other kinds of berries, and watching the hummingbirds that will return to our backyard soon. I’m reminded of Humphrey Bogart’s words in Casablanca: “I’m not good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” In Casablanca, they all went on to do the work they had to do to try to make the world a better place.

So in the meantime, I will love my tiny, sparkling corner of the infinite net as best I can. And enjoy the strawberries.

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I’ve learned to be okay with the fact that my drawings and paintings always fall short of what I see around me when I am done. Because after I put my paints away, the world seems immeasurably more beautiful and mysterious than it did a short time before, when something caught my eye that I wanted to capture.

It turns out this is not only my personal problem with drawing. It’s a problem with the way we humans perceive the world. We live surrounded by mystery, and we are remarkably good at not noticing. The human brain, and especially the society in which we live these days, is mostly optimized for efficiency. We replace the full strangeness of a face, a tree, a hand with an idea of what we are looking at, a shorthand that gets us through the day without existential vertigo. We don’t see; we recognize. We don’t look; we confirm.

Drawing breaks that spell.

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When you sit down to draw something, really draw it, not trace a symbol you already carry, you discover how little you actually know about what you’re looking at. The interplay of angles, the play of light as it filters through the trees. The exact relationship between a table and the wall behind it. Places and objects you may have passed by a thousand times and never, not once, actually seen.

This is the first gift of drawing: it returns you to not-knowing.

What strikes me about drawing is that it is, in practice, a daily reckoning with exactly this. Every line or mark you put down is a hypothesis. It says: I believe the edge goes here. And then you look again, and reality disagrees, and you have to decide: do you defend the line, or do you follow what you see?

Most of us, most of the time, defend the line.

In our short lifetimes, we can scratch only the surface of the world. The more carefully you look at anything — a stone, a sentence, a relationship — the more it opens into depth you didn’t know was there. This is not frustrating. Or rather, it is frustrating, and also the most alive feeling available to us.

Drawing teaches you to stay in that feeling rather than escape it.

Each mark is provisional. Each session is an ongoing negotiation between what you intended and what the drawing is becoming. The work evolves not by enforcing an ideal, but through sustained, humble attention. What accumulates is not a perfected image; it’s a record of thinking in action, a map of your encounter with something that exceeded your grasp.

Drawing cultivates tolerance. Tolerance for ambiguity, for error. Tolerance for the distance between what you see and what you can put down in arrangements of marks and lines. Tolerance for mystery.

I think this is why drawing can feel unsettling and maybe even a bit scary to people who are otherwise competent and confident. It doesn’t confirm what you already believe. It reveals how much of your knowledge rests on assumptions you never examined, about what things look like, about what you’re capable of, about what’s worth paying attention to.

It brings you face to face with unreason. Not irrationality, but the fertile, uncertain ground beneath logic, where intuition and perception and ambiguity live together.

And here is what I find hopeful in all of this: once you loosen your grip on the perfect picture, things open up. Knowledge becomes more generous. You stop defending your internal map of the world around you and start revising it. You stop performing understanding and start practicing it.

Drawing is my practice of that wonder.

Not a destination. A practice. A way of staying with uncertainty, of working in the crevices rather than sealing them shut; returning, again and again, to the page, where mystery waits patiently for the next mark.

What have you been drawing lately that surprised you with something you’d never actually seen before?

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There is a tree I pass on walks near my house. It is quietly commanding, larger and older than the forest around it. I admire it each time I pass. It was one of the first of a series of tree drawings on mylar I have been making over the past couple of years.

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The work above is more layered and searching than where the work has since gone. I was working on both sides of the Mylar in charcoal, sumi ink, China marker, acrylic, and alcohol, building up and erasing, revising and second-guessing. The Mylar holds some marks and releases others, and those traces, erasures, and re-drawn edges became part of the image.

It was made for In and Out of Lineage, an exhibition of SUNY New Paltz faculty curated by Eva Zanardi, which asked how artistic influence travels; whether it moves in a straight line from teacher to student or through something more like a web, multidirectional and hard to map.

The curator asked us to map our personal artistic journeys. I thought about my influences. The literati poet-painters of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, particularly Gong Xian, who melded imagined and observed landscapes. During graduate school, painter Catherine Murphy deepened my understanding of how abstraction and intense realism could coexist. David Reed introduced me to the Hudson River School, whose artists walked this same valley I now walk. I feel their influence in my own practice, that light and perception constantly shift as we move through the ever-changing world.

The title comes from Mary Oliver's “When I Am Among the Trees," a poem I return to again and again for the way she describes keeping company with the more than human world.

WHEN I AM AMONG THE TREES
by Mary Oliver

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness,
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, "Stay awhile."
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, "It's simple," they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine."

More recently my tree drawings have gotten simpler, more direct, and maybe more abstract: sumi ink on Mylar, sometimes with a single color in shellac ink on the reverse side, visible through the translucent surface. Then I let it be, and move on.

I’d love to hear about your artistic journey!

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Since June, I have been on the move. I’ve traveled from my home in the Hudson Valley to Sun Valley, Idaho; through the mountains of Southwestern Virginia and the streets of New York City; up to Central Maine and Massachusetts; down to Austin and San Marcos, Texas; north (west) again to Minneapolis; south to the Atlantic coast of Hollywood, Florida; and finally, after a stop in Seattle, to where I sit now: Port Townsend, Washington, gazing at the Pacific. Next month I plan to travel to Gudjarat, India. Most of these travels have been art-related, to make or share my work.

The weather, the light, and the landscape in each of these places are unique. And everywhere I have had opportunities to connect with new people and renew old friendships in deep and meaningful ways.

When I was a teenager, I admired and aspired to Henry David Thoreau’s famous brag: “I have traveled much in Concord.” It suggested a depth of observation that required staying put. Yet, in spite of myself and to the consternation of my life partner, lately I have been moving restlessly across the map. I seem compelled to wander, each new place propelling me forward into the unknown.

What do I carry with me from place to place?

Just in case you have never come across this passage from Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. It was shared with me by a professor of poetry in college, and has stayed with me through all the decades since. Rilke was in his 20s when he wrote it, as I was when I read it, but it has stayed with me as words of wisdom, guidance and comfort.

Ah, but poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) — they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents who you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else —); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars, — and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves — only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

Rilke reminds us to allow experiences to change us. The light, the landscapes, and especially the human connections I have found from Virginia to Washington State are not souvenirs or trophies to be lined up on a shelf. Instead, I breathe in each new encounter, taking it in as deeply as I can, feeling the life flow in and around me. I am so grateful for this artist life I’ve been able to lead. I hope I have something to offer in return, to exhale an image or an insight that could be meaningful to someone else. A small gesture of love. My own version of a poem that can live on when I am gone.

What do you carry with you? What do you hope to leave behind?

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I spent the last week at Hollywood Beach, Florida, while back home the Hudson Valley was blanketed with more than two feet of snow. Every morning, as is my habit, I got up before dawn to draw. By the ocean, I was drawn to the horizon, a long, uninterrupted line I can’t easily experience inland, where hills and trees constantly interrupt the far distance. And the constantly changing color and light between sea and sky was endlessly fascinating.

Why return to the same view? Because every morning, at every moment, this seemingly simple horizon changed. The relationship between color and light, the heaviness or weightlessness of the air, the specific architecture of the clouds and waves; all of it was in constant flux. My goal was to be as specific as possible to the place and time I was witnessing, becoming more aware of my exact position on the planet, and in our solar system, through the act of looking.

Some days, I made it outside well before dawn, arriving when it was still too dark to distinguish the colors of my paints and know what I was putting down. I had to prop up my phone’s flashlight just to see the surface I was working on, painting in a small pool of artificial light as the horizon began to glow.

Then, as soon as the slightest hint of dawn appeared, the scene changed quickly. Colors washed over the sky, signaling the sun’s approach long before it was visible. It was a specific, fleeting window where the light seemed to color the air from below the horizon.

Every day, people gathered on the beach to watch the sunrise. It is a common ritual, but staring so intensely at that flat, unmoving horizon line for an hour or two each morning shifted my perception. Instead of seeing the sun “rise,” I began to feel the Earth moving. I could almost feel the planet rolling backward under my feet, turning us into the light.

This specific sensation of moving through time and space reminded me of my favorite book of the last year, Orbital by Samantha Harvey. (It won the Booker Prize in 2024, though I read it in 2025.) Harvey imagines the daily lives of six astronauts on the International Space Station, circling the Earth at a speed of 17,000 miles per hour. There is no traditional plot; nothing really “happens” except the profound act of Harvey’s imagination, what it must be like to witness our place in the universe from above. In 24 hours, the astronauts observe sixteen sunrises and sunsets.

At Hollywood Beach I witnessed seven rotations of the Earth. While I sat in my very temporary and tiny spot in the universe, trying to capture the slow but relentless turning, the inevitable passage of time, and the change it brings, became my subject.

It is the essence of what motivates me to make art, trying to catch the fleeting beauty of our blue planet before it spins me (and all of us, eventually and forever) back into the dark.

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Here is the collected record of my week in the sun. I’d love to hear from you: When was the last time you noticed the Earth moving? Do you have a specific place or ritual that helps you see the world on a different scale?

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One of the things I love about mid-winter is that the dark, quiet, pre dawn hours last longer. I have had a practice, on and off for many years, of getting up an hour or so before dawn to draw, and letting the quiet to draw out thoughts that I would not have had the time or attention for at other times of day. Mirroring the process, noted in the drawing above, of how form emerges from formlessness.

Do you draw in the morning? At some other regular time of day? What does a daily ritual of drawing bring into your life?

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Being a mom taught me to be a morning person. And luckily, my children were not super early risers. I discovered that pre-dawn hour to be so precious, when my eyes and mind are the clearest, before being overwhelmed by the busyness and worries and tasks of the day.

This winter I’ve come back to this practice, finding that it grounds me once again in my own aliveness. I’m noticing many of my pre-dawn drawing thoughts are concerned with the passage of time. I’ve started posting some of these as notes, and collecting a few here. They are not all joyful, this is one I made the morning after Renee Good was killed. (A message from Minneapolis here.) I wasn’t thinking about it consciously, but it became a meditation on mortality.

In the way shells and bones hold traces of life long past, I’m thinking how art itself preserves traces of our lived moments. (For me, one of the great pleasures of visiting a museum is being able to sit with the traces of someone else’s moments, perhaps centuries and continents distant from my own.)

In my usual art practice, I sometimes reference photographs I have taken (never other people’s photographs) and they help me remember details of what I have seen. sometimes my morning drawings are simply playing with mark and form with no reference. (Here’s a collection of morning drawings from last year that I animated.) But this winter I am finding myself digging out objects I have collected over many years, things that attracted my eye in some forgotten time and place. The context is lost, but what pleases me remains.

And the dynamic, the mystery of perception, the shifting slip-sliding relationship between what is me and what is not me, is foregrounded.

The breath of life, the rhythm of drawing processes, the porous boundary between self and world. This is the magic of what this morning process brings into my life.

I’m so curious how many of you also have a daily ritual like mine, and if so, what it looks like! Please share your drawing thoughts, I would love to know!