Botanical Drawing
I recently finished reading Annie Dillard’s beautiful book, "Teaching a Stone to Talk.” In it, she travels to various wild and wonderful places, including the Napo River in Ecuador. She writes:
“The point of going somewhere like the Napo River is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what’s there. We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place...”
artwork made by UT 49
I was clutching Dillard’s book on a nature walk in Mumbai recalling her words. “What is there is interesting,” she writes. A botanist who was leading the walk was showing us all the strange habits of various trees, the design choices employed by various spiders, the bizarre behaviour of certain fruits, flowers and flies.
All of a sudden Mumbai felt new, wondrous and weird. I wanted to bring pieces of that feeling in forest and so I gathered leaves, fallen fruit and flowers in a bag and laid them out in front of my class.
Hidden Kingdom, Nirupa Rao
We used Nirupa Rao’s illustrations that delicately balance beauty with science as a blueprint to work from. I asked my class to observe the natural forms, the curl of a leaf’s upper lip, or the veins on its body. I asked them to try to work like scientists — and describe the objects in front of them visually, so another scientist searching for the same species might be able to find it in the forest.
The flowers I had chosen had little chance of making it onto the page. As soon as the students saw them, they wanted them to wear in their hair. “We don’t get to wear flowers in here, ma’am,” one female prisoner explained.
When I collected the pages at the end of the class I was struck at how much details they had included and how keenly they were observing the plants. Many knew stories about different seeds and leaves, and wanted to tell them.
artwork made by UT 141
