Observation, research and contemplation usually come first.

Former Oregon poet laureate Bill Stafford once said that poems begin “at the corner of the eye.” Ideas for my drawings have often emerged that way, observing ideas and things that are not the main focus of attention. For example, I might find myself attracted to a tiny ant hill and ant trails at the base of an enormous conifer I came to visit. 

 

Or a word embedded in the dead end of a conversation—like “rhizome”—might lead to ideas of connection in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guatari or to how a fairy ring of seedlings protects young redwoods.

 

Other times on-going research on different topics will connect, as it did between the Dogon foxes and the forest spirit in the kids’ film, Totoro. 

 

If serendipity and research produce nothing I often just begin to draw. Once, while making fractals with a shot glass at a brewery I attracted a mathematician passing by who explained fractals to me in various ways that I was able to use to re-draw them. 

 

Many people don’t feel they can afford to buy original art or even reproductions of art in museums which they feel are insanely over-priced and the whim of fashion. But beyond the physical labor of producing art and marketing it is the over-looked price of incubation. It may take months or even years of research and/or contemplation to create a piece. Writers’ autobiographies often mention ideas they hoped to use for many years in their fiction. It took me fifty two years to complete my postmodern detective novel on Central America!

 

 The actual process for each of these drawings begins using a mechanical pencil, then tracing over it with ink pens on various kinds of white or cream papers, ranging from thin to heavy poster board. This is then scanned and printed on the cheapest Fed-Ex scanner paper to show children they can get a decent drawing even on affordable paper. I then do a color version on this humble paper with cheap colored pencils. Sometimes I also print another scan of the original and fill it in with black ink. So the black outline, the black and white version and the colored version are all available as fine art prints on archival paper. Soon the original scanned outline will be available as coloring poster.

 

Even in childhood I was interested in just about everything. As a student I also wanted to major in everything  but math and science. I was deeply interested in the latter two, but back in Medieval times when I was growing up these were the inner sanctum of the high priests of exclusion. By that I mean these subjects weren’t taught in a collaborative or explanatory way. It was assumed that you either had the answers or you didn’t. While I was good at geometry and loved using it in art and carpentry, I struggled with algebra. Temple Grandin explains how America’s mostly visual learners have been excluded in Visual Thinking. Reading that book may spawn your own artworks and explain how you were barred from certain kinds of learning. 

 

My drawings are partly my own re-education, especially in math and science. Coloring in one of my drawing posters using math sequences like prime numbers (which no mathematician has ever found a formula for!) or Fibonacci Sequence (found structurally in the branching patterns of so many plants) will help you, through repetition, memorize the sequences for quite a distance in numbers. More importantly it will let you learn and see them visually on the page. Ditto with the drawing that has the disguised molecular structure of a couple dozen drugs. 

 

As I was saying, my education was an attempt to major in or study as widely and deeply as possible. For example, my graduate degree was in an American Studies Program at the University of Iowa where I studied American and Afro-American literature, intellectual history, anthropology, music, film and more. As a professor at Eastern Oregon University I developed a way to get students fully invested in their learning by inventing “multi-writing.” They had to marry their personal and academic passions in a project that used relevant multiple genres, whether it was a blues lyric or a business report and multiple disciplines, which might be biology, psychology or physics. They also had to use multi-media, whether hard-copy, photographs or video and multiple cultures, if relevant. These projects ranged from topics like the space shuttle Challenger to Houdini the magician or mules. Students performed them for each other. If you’d like to try creating such a project, you can find the book I co-wrote about it here: 

 

https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Multiwriting-Researching-Composing-Disciplines/dp/0809327546

 

Similarly, I’ve done composite research on wildly different things for most of the drawings, as you’ll see from the comments that accompany each drawing. It might be the mandala a puffer fish male makes in the sand on the ocean floor to attract a mate and on the way maps lie. It could be the shifting of the magnetic poles of earth or the fairy circle a giant redwood creates to protect its seedlings. 

 

I hope you’ll be interested in exploring some of these areas of research, as well as discovering your own. I’m equally hopeful that you’ll try filling in the posters in your own way with either black and white or color. The coloring posters will be on better paper than I used. You’ll notice that I both give into and resist symmetry in every drawing. “Mis-takes” happen naturally or I build them in. All this is part of the perfect imperfection! Remember, there is no “unperfect” in the dictionary. Perfection is only an ideal or goal, but imperfection is the elixir of life, making a mutant of any clone. 

 

The text that accompanies each drawing has many (sometimes simultaneous and contradictory) purposes: to explain, embellish, resist, parallel or evolve the drawing. These comments accompany the fine art prints but will be subverted in a gentler and plainer text for children who order the coloring posters.