Through drawing, learn biology; through biology, learn to draw
“How are we doing on the wings and the dragonflies?” Walter Hatke asks the class.
A voice from the far side of the room calls out, “Slow!”
Laughter follows.
Students in the biology and art course titled “The Illustrated Organism” are still busy working on both projects. Fiona Kyte '05 pays rapt attention to the dragonfly she is holding in one hand and drawing with the other. Another student, Emily Klug '03, consults with Biology Professor Peter Tobiessen about her dragonfly drawing.
At the same time, Jason Tucciarone '05 works on an illustration of the wing of a green-winged teal. “Which is not really green,” points out Hatke; “it's irridescent.” He urges the students to “get color as true, as accurate as possible, using base color and colored pencil over it.”
Hatke, the May I. Baker Professor of Fine Arts, and Tobiessen preside at the twice-weekly, three-hour sessions in this course, which is so popular that “We always have to turn students away.”
In the course, drawing is used to teach biology, and biology is used to teach drawing. The course requires painstaking attention to detail. To the two professors, the minutiae of things observed are not irrelevant distractions. Says Hatke, “The students have to resign themselves to a huge time commitment. It is pretty much two courses in one-we get our pound of flesh!”
Students begin each project using sketchpads to get their ideas down. They then transfer preliminary sketches to heavier paper using a light table, adjusting composition as they go. The students work mostly in pen and ink on the first few projects. Once they progress to drawing duck wings and flowers, they move into watercolor.
The course was first offered ten years ago by Hatke and Carl George, now professor emeritus of biology. Before that, says Hatke, “When Professor George, who's a kind of Renaissance man, was on my tenure review committee, I talked about the 'physiology' course I had taken in high school, and he said, 'You know, we should have a course like that.'”
Today's class entails not only drawing and painting, but also attending a wind tunnel demonstration of the aerodynamic properties of a duck's wing. The students must understand and be able to explain the flight dynamics of bird versus insect. Ann Anderson, associate professor of mechanical engineering, demonstrates the circulation of air over the wing, at a high angle of attack. She injects smoke into the wind tunnel and illuminates the tunnel with a laser, so the paths of air currents became visible. An attached computer tracks particle velocity on the screen and allows students to visualize turbulence.
Students learn through individual observation in the classroom and on regional field trips to places such as Collins Lake; using the College's resources, such as its Audubon portfolio of birds; doing outside research; engaging in teamwork; and the professors' lectures. They have visited an exhibit of biological illustrations at the New York State Museum, and they have gone fishing-catching, killing, preserving, and then drawing whatever fish they caught. There also are guest lectures from well-known botanical illustrators, such as Eleanor Wunderlich, from the New York Botanical Gardens, and Carol Woodin, from Kew Gardens in London.
Around the classroom-biology lab are old illustrations and prints, along with boxes of mounted dragonflies, a set of spread turkey wings, diagrams, and mounted drawings from last year's class-images of birds' wings (blue-winged teal, American black duck), dragonflies, sunflowers, trees (white ash, Norway spruce, scarlet oak), lilies, dandelions, skulls of coyote (teeth overlapping like scissors indicates a carnivore), lynx, beaver, black bear; and fish (Johnny darter, spotfin shiner, pumpkinseed sunfish, blue gill sunfish, largemouth black bass).
Tobiessen points out an interesting pattern: Species that are prey have eyes on the sides; with predators, the eyes are in front. We humans are predators.
With boyish enthusiasm, he then passes around a heron's wing for everyone to hold-it's amazingly light for its great size.
Then, it's on to their new homework assignment: the skull project. Each student gets a skull of a different but related small mammal to draw and study. Says Tobiessen, “You'll be expected to identify the approximately thirty bones and teeth in the skull and be able to talk about how evolution changes them.”
Each three-student team works on the skulls of one carnivore, one rodent, and something in between, from different ecological niches, explains Tobiessen. Peter Sage '04 examines a wolverine skull, while Michael Losure '04 looks over a lynx skull. Their assignment-to draw skulls accurately and illustratively, to discover how and why the skull is built the way it is, and to compare it to other skulls, annotating their drawings with scientific fact and theory. In the drawings, the students are asked to take multiple perspectives and interrelate them; this allows the discovery of key organizing ideas involving both the structure and functions and the evolution of living things.
The professors place great emphasis on student teamwork, as well as the interactive nature of scientific inquiry. Developing a portfolio is a way of integrating not only text and graphics but also the element of teamwork, which is so important professionally. The teams work together, critique one another's work, rotate roles. Each team combines students with different majors-arts, sciences, interdepartmental or interdivisional
-and each student contributes his or her strengths.
The complexity of the material unfolds progressively. While Tobiessen introduces biological concepts, Hatke gradually teaches more sophisticated techniques of drawing and working with various media, progressing from black and white to color. Asked if he, too, does this kind of drawing, Tobiessen grins and replies, “Sure,” challenging us to pick out his own illustration from amid student works on a display board.
Did Hatke ever take a course like this? “Yes, in high school, though it was really a college-level course. We dissected sheep hearts, eyes, whole frogs. It's like learning new grammars-it gives you a new slant on life. That way of thinking has influenced my work.
“It used to be that any educated person would have some drawing,” he continues. “That's kind of fallen by the wayside. It can be a very humanizing experience in addition to great intellectual exercise.”
For the past five years, Hatke has been invited to Yale to teach freehand drawing to graduate architecture students. “It's important for them to be able to get ideas down fast. You've got to know where to start-there's no substitute for hands-on drawing.”
Drawing is a learning tool, in service to science, says Hatke. “The way you scrutinize things in biology is not unlike the way you scrutinize things in painting. I've always felt there was a real closeness between art and science. There's a real unity that runs throughout life and thought. People in our disciplines have become too isolated and specialized.”
Adds course co-founder Carl George, “As with so many innovative ideas, the course is partly a rediscovery of the past, a past in which drawing was a recognized approach to understanding structure, a confirmation of intense examination,” citing the examples of drawings from nature by German poet-dramatist-scientist Johann Goethe and British scientist Thomas Huxley.
George, who retired in 1997 after thirty years at Union, is now involved in aquatic ecology, and the importance of wilderness in the development of human character (he's also a trustee of the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks).
“When I was a student,” he says, “we were called upon to do a lot of drawing. In my introductory biology course, we were required to draw what we saw through the microscope. I still have those memories. Those images have served me. In a field so intensively structural, learning vocabulary is just a trivialization-not that that isn't essential, but to reduce the study of biology to names is a loss.
“Drawing programs the brain in a very important way,” he says. “Images that you implant when you draw something, particularly when you're younger, last a lifetime and are important references for all kinds of analytical work, no matter the field.”
He agrees that “the ideal is the two forms of communication working together. But drawing leads you to look more closely. The process of engaging graphically forces you into a dialog that's very intimate. And you gather information that can break old paradigms. So this course is challenging on many levels. It's also an important way of recognizing that art and science are not all that different if conducted well.
“Finally, it's a lesson in patience-learning how to regulate the self so you don't get exhausted-learning to back off, recoup, return after have re-gathered energy.
Otherwise, you will destroy your undertaking.”
Can anyone learn how to draw? Says George, “A lot of kids claim they can't. But if you can write, you can draw.”
Students not only drew but created etchings from their fish drawings, learning in the process how Audubon made prints. Students etched the images onto plates photographically. The prints they made on fine paper wound up as many holiday gifts.
At the end of the course, the Biology Department displays some of the students' prints
in its third-floor display case, challenging passers-by to
distinguish the art majors from the biology majors. No one's been able to tell yet.
The Audubon
collection at Union
One of the most remarkable teaching aids in American colleges is the group of Audubon lithographs in the College's Special Collections. Students from “The Illustrated Organism” course can often be found systematically visiting and studying these historic pieces.
Carl George explains how this treasure arrived at Union:
“In 1844, Audubon came to Union as the first visiting artist here. Eliphalet Nott cannily bought one of the last copies of his portfolios. He sold us the double elephant folio-a masterpiece of lithography-as a personal favor, as this was his parlor copy. Nott had the wisdom to spend $1,000 for the Birds and another $300 for the Quadrupeds. A superb investment!”
The Audubon prints are now worth millions of dollars and are the centerpiece of a rich collection of natural history materials housed in Special Collections.
“I never realized
a fish had
so many scales.”
“For me, biology was the easy part,” says biology major Kim Maison '03, who took “The Illustrated Organism” course last year. “I hadn't taken art since high school. I was excited. Before, art was never a feasible option. It was overwhelming at the beginning. Professor Hatke told us the basics and threw us in.”
She talked about the tedious work of drawing her bluegill sunfish: “We stippled the whole thing-it took forever. I never realized a fish had so many scales. But it was beautiful.”
Her classmate, art and psychology major Brett Kessler '04, hadn't taken a science course since high school. It was helpful to her working in groups of three-“I was confused about the parts of the flower, but a biology major helped me out
a lot.”
She also hadn't drawn much from nature before: “It's different if you go out and observe it for yourself. I really like watercolor now because of this course. I took a watercolor course afterwards, and did a lot of paintings of flowers.”
On Hatke's suggestion, Kessler used the work she'd done in “The Illustrated Organism” to apply to the International School of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture in Italy. “I got in-I didn't think I would, but I did. Only twenty-five people from all over the world were accepted.” She plans to go on to fine arts school after graduation.
An earlier student used his portfolio to get into dental school. Says Carl George, “He came by to thank me. 'What do you mean,' I asked? 'They looked at my portfolio during my interview,' said he, and they said 'you're in! It shows you have patience. And manual skill-anyone with that kind of control over pen and pencil should have no trouble with a dental drill.' ”
Biology major Kelly Ennis '03, who had never before taken an art class, says, “We learned to see patterns. Pine cones should spiral, for example. That's something we would never think about otherwise. We had to look much closer; we even had to count the scales for the fish drawings.”
Ennis, who admits to having an artistic side, loved the idea of drawing, but found the course a bit overwhelming at first. But the following year, she went on to take oil painting with Hatke. “I would never have thought of doing this otherwise.”
Ennis began graduate studies this fall at the Graduate College of Union University, pursuing a master's in teaching biology and perhaps chemistry. “This course helped me make the decision-I want to go in the direction of having to be creative every day.”