{"id":13072,"date":"2017-11-14T11:00:28","date_gmt":"2017-11-14T16:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/?p=13072"},"modified":"2024-07-29T11:09:41","modified_gmt":"2024-07-29T15:09:41","slug":"drawn-to-drawn-from-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/2017\/11\/14\/drawn-to-drawn-from-experience\/","title":{"rendered":"Drawn To, Drawn From Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"

Circulating Now welcomes guest blogger Dawn Hunter<\/a>, Associate Professor, School of Visual Art and Design, University of South Carolina and Fulbright Espa\u00f1a Senior Research Fellow at the Instituto Cajal in Madrid, Spain. Her new body of work is a suite of biographical drawings and paintings about Santiago Ram\u00f3n y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience. \u00a0Her series is comprised of creative works and formal investigations of Cajal’s scientific drawings that are currently on display<\/a> at the John Porter Neuroscience Research Center at the National Institute of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.<\/em><\/p>\n

Every great drawing\u2014even if it is of a hand or the back of a torso, forms perceived thousands of times before\u2014is like the map of a newly discovered island.\u00a0 Only it is far easier to read a drawing than a map; in front of a drawing it is the five senses that make a surveyor.”<\/p>\n

\u2014John Berger from A Painter of Our Time<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The wholly integrated experience of phenomena is powerful.\u00a0 The union of the mind’s curiosity, the heart’s passion, and the body’s senses sing a chorus that reminds us of the wonder of our own existence.\u00a0 The U.S. 2017 solar eclipse was that experience for many.\u00a0 However, it was also predictable.\u00a0 Sitting on the front steps of my home in South Carolina, steeped in the avalanche of media coverage, I experienced the path of totality only with my mind; my brain perfectly primed with expectations.\u00a0 The forecast sound bites focused the quality of celestial delivery, and by doing so reduced the universe to a branded experience.\u00a0 It may sound like I am complaining, but I am not.\u00a0 The obstacle of mediated experience served as a reminder to value those encounters when I experience the extraordinary, nonaligned, for myself.\u00a0 While ignorance is not bliss, on rare occasions, it can be a blessing\u2014allowing new, unexpected experience of phenomena to rival the first time one bit into a luscious strawberry or walked across hot sand.\u00a0 Encountering Santiago Ram\u00f3n y Cajal\u2019s scientific drawings of the nervous system for the first time was one such extraordinary experience for me.<\/p>\n

\"An<\/a>
Dawn Hunter, Surreal portrait of Cajal, pen, marker and ink on paper, 5.5\u201d x 13\u201d from my handmade sketchbook, 2015<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I am an artist, and I draw every day.\u00a0 It is how I know and understand the world.\u00a0 One day back in 2012, I was looking up neuroscience terminology to supplement an article I was reading on the claustrum<\/a>, I stumbled across Cajal’s scientific drawings.\u00a0 In the midst of trawling visuals on the web, I was swept away within “gesturely expressive” cellular images drawn in implied space.\u00a0 I was dwarfed and transported into Cajal’s microscopic world.\u00a0 Other neuroscience<\/a> drawings were in the image cache, like those of Camillo Golgi<\/a>.\u00a0 However, I was not as taken with them, because Golgi’s illustrations were surrounded by a border that created closure and containment and possessed a topographical mannerism.\u00a0 Based on those visual qualities, I felt Golgi’s drawings were “designed,” and that construction revealed a particular point of view regarding the role of drawing in his work:\u00a0 that drawing was a vehicle to guide, transcribe, and organize nature in a manner that demonstrated a theory.\u00a0 Instead of creating drawing from a designer\u2019s perspective, Cajal’s work in comparison is drawn with a type of perceptual observation, one in which the inherent design of nature is discovered through sighting.\u00a0 Drawing was a tool to observe, discern and recount microanatomy structure.\u00a0 Cajal’s drawings are filled with actual lines and drawn with implied space.\u00a0 I believe they demonstrate a philosophy that he was at the service of nature\u2014recording and reporting the truthfulness of sight\u2019s journey.<\/p>\n