Animal Museum Drawings
In 1993, in my freshman year in the Art Institute of Boston, my Basic Drawing class was taken by our fantastic professor Joan Ryan, to the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) . Joan’s goal was to make us draw something different from still lives and human figure. At that time I had a completely different relationship to the MCZ, where my ex-husband was working in the lab of professor Lewontin. I was used to entering that building from the back door and going to the labs, but I hadn’t been to the museum proper.
That first trip turned out to be one of many many many in the last 30 years. The museum became my go-to, when I wanted to draw “from life” (although that expression becomes ironic, or sinister or just sad, when describing drawing animals that were killed and stuffed a 100 years ago). During my life in Boston I would go there at least once a week, and after we moved I would go every time we came to Boston. The museum changed a lot in those years, the exhibits got modernized, gone is the invasive smell of formaldehyde that used to limit my drawing time to 2 hours max, after which I just had to go outside and breathe. The name is changed too, now it is Museum of Natural History.
I would bring my drawing students there again and again and, years later now, I still chuckle every time I see my favorite Moose, trying to draw which used to reduce my toughest students to tears.
For me those animals became some weird form of friends. I have known them for more than a quarter of a century now and I’ve drawn them from every angle imaginable. Through the process of drawing, you become super familiar with the subject, the way they move, the way they gesture, the distribution of weight on them. In order to truly SEE you need to rid yourself of all pre conceived ideas about what you are seeing and kind of descend into the realm of total abstraction. It is a Strange Magic that by detaching yourself you become so intimate with the subject. Sometimes I think of myself as a ghost in that space. From time to time I materialize in those isles of stuffed animals with my sketch book, sit on the floor, forget the crowds of visitors, and tune into the animals themselves. I always thank them too, it never hurts to be polite.
