In March 2019, Richard Bright of Interalia Magazine interviewed me for the journal’s Drawing Thoughts series. Drawing Thoughts explores contemporary thinking on the practice of drawing, discussing its creative, expressive and educational value, and its fundamental importance to translating and analysing the world. The issue’s overarching aim is to affirm the value of drawing.
A lengthy excerpt of my interview is available on line here. The full-text is available to Interalia subscribers.
In an audio interview and this edited transcript, Wyoming Public Radio reporter London Homer-Wambeam interviewed me about an art-science integration paper I co-authored.
In the peer-reviewed article, Poetry as a Creative Practice to Enhance Engagement and Learning in Conservation Science, co-authors and I point to evidence-based examples of how poetry can be a powerful learning, reflection, and creativity-enhancing tool in science classrooms and scientists’ regular practice.
Read the interview transcript here. Read the ‘poetry and science’ paper here.
Exhibit A, from The Autobiography of Charles Darwin:
“[Not being urged to practice dissection] has been an irremediable evil, as well as my incapacity to draw.”
It was actually Darwin’s shipmate on the HMS Beagle, Conrad Martens, who made the sketches best known from that expedition. And, it wasn’t until well after Darwin’s famous voyage to the Galapagos that a publisher sent an artist back to that region with the express responsibility to illustrate Darwin’s observations.
Most publications from Darwin’s era were similarly professionally illustrated, with many of the illustrations based on specimens he collected. However, these illustrations were not Darwin’s own work.
“Tree of life” sketches (Charles Darwin, in the public domain)
Mind you, Darwin did occasionally sketch, as can be seen in his diagrams of “trees” roughly indicating how organisms were related. And, there are a handful of rough sketches of plant cross sections and geologic formations scattered through his myriad notebooks. But, these few sketches pale alongside the copious volumes of written notes and manuscripts he made.