Our 5 weeks of drawing are now over [sigh] - I was only just beginning to understand how important it is. The answer to my questioning of the importance of drawing came (serendipitously) from an unexpected source this morning. The book (top right image) of scientific paintings of mutant insects by Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, has a preface in which she says: 'the actual scientific research process took place during and through the picture-making...Pictures can transcend the barriers of verbal communication.' She gives Galileo's sketches of the moon as seen through his telelscope as a telling example: 'Galileo's problem - which almost cost him his life - was that he could provide no witnesses to his discoveries. Those who looked through the telescope saw nothing. They were the seeing blind - they looked but they could not recognise what they saw, because they had not gone through the perceptual and pictorial processes that enabled Galileo to describe his observations.' Top left image, her own working drawing; bottom, my last attempt yesterday - possibly my most successful, but for me showing that the process of discovery is only just beginning.
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