A Nest of Thorns: Drawing God

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Drawing God

Leonardo drew things to explain them to himself . . . . That's an essential quality of any work of art, the authenticity of the need for understanding. I once told Barney [Newman] a story which he wanted to adopt as the motto for the Abstract Expressionists: A little girl is drawing and her mother asks her what are you drawing? And she says, "I'm drawing god." And the mother says, "How can you draw god when you don't know what he is?" And she says, "That's why I draw him."

-- the artist Hedda Sterne, quoted by Sarah Boxer in "The Last Irascible." New York Review of Books, December 23, 2010, 43-45.

1 comments:

Jeffrey Lott said...: I'm so glad I came across this. In the 1970s, when I was an elementary school art teacher, there were always boys and girls (mostly boys, I remember) who said they were finished with the day's project well before the time allotted had expired.

Of course, this was a failure of the teacher (me) to design a project that was creatively open-ended enough to engage a third-grade boy for a full hour. It was not an easy thing to do. So to fill the time—and keep the child out of trouble—I would hand the "I'm done" kids a blank sheet of white paper and a couple of drawing instruments (pencil, pen, marker, or crayon), and say, "Draw me a picture of god."

Often, this would take them by surprise. No one had ever suggested to them that they might do something as absurd or momentous as that. The drawings varied widely, from scribbles and spirals to stars and suns (lots of suns, I remember). Occasionally there was an anthropomorphic figure, loosely based on the god-in-heaven figures popularized by Michelangelo and Blake. A sort of eight-year-old's Sistine Sparky or Urizen.

But mostly, they would either say, "I can't," then try anyway, or make a secret drawing that they folded and took with them—and maybe never showed anyone.

So this story is a new insight into why I have tried to get children to draw god—and why I should spend more time on this myself.; January 1, 2012 9:58 PM

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Creative Nonfiction Texts

Alexander Masters-- Stuart: A Life Backwards
Alexander Masters-- Stuart: A Life Backwards. A tour de force of close-up biography that explores the series of catastrophes that turned a happy-go-lucky little boy into a violent, drug-addicted sociopath living on the streets of an English city.
Frank McCourt—Angela’s Ashes. A memoir of a tragic childhood amid the poverty and squalor of 1930s Ireland.
Joseph Mitchell – Up in the Old Hotel. Portraits of child prodigies, Mohawk iron workers, urban gypsies, and a legendary Greenwich Village eccentric that established a template for half a century of New Yorker profiles.
Vladimir Nabokov – Speak, Memory. Nabokov’s memoir of his childhood and young manhood is above all a reflection on the operations of memory.
Azar Nafisi. Reading Lolita in Tehran. A female professor’s experiences in 1980s Iran.
Michael Ondaatje – Running in the Family. The author of The English Patient sifts through the facts and legends of his aristocratic Sri Lankan family.
George Orwell. Homage to Catalonia and All Art is Propaganda. The Spanish Civil War and essays on language, literature, politics, and power.
Nicholas Reding – Methland. The human face of the Midwest’s meth epidemic.
Katherine Russell Rich – Dreaming in Hindi. Rich combines memoir with science writing to recount the year she spent in Rajasthan studying India’s national language.
Richard Rodriguez. The Hunger of Memory and Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father
Oliver Sacks—The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, and Uncle Tungsten. Our foremost and most lyrical explicator of the enigmas of the brain and mind.
W. G. Sebald – The Rings of Saturn and On the Natural History of Destruction. Two works that straddle the divide between fiction and nonfiction, history and lyric essay.
David Sheff-- Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction
Rebecca Skloot-- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The story of African-American woman whose cells made possible the most prevalent cell llines for research.
Susan Sontag – Against Interpretation and Regarding the Suffering of Others—Two critical works by a literary critic, novelist, and philosopher who turned serious thinking into a high-wire act.
Gore Vidal – United States, Selected Essays. Barbed, mandarin essays on literature, politics, and American society.
John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers. Memoir. The author's relationship with his troubled younger brother, whose career of petty crime escalates to murder and prison
Simone Weil – Waiting for God. Essays and letters by a French Catholic mystic and social thinker.
Terry Tempest Williams -- Refuge. A work that combines environmentalism and memoir, as Williams examines the effects of nuclear-weapons testing in Utah through the lens of her family’s history of breast cancer.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley
Tobias Wolff – In Pharaoh’s Army, A memoir of military service in the slow-motion debacle of Vietnam

Events

Talk, "Bill Sikes's Dog: The Value of the Irrelevant Detail in the Work of Creative Nonfiction," Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY. February 18, 2010, 5:30 PM
Talk, "The Value of the Irrelevant Detail in the Work of Creative Nonfiction." University of North Carolina at Wilmington, Wilmington, NC. November 3, 10 AM
Panel discussion, "I Was Doing My Job: the Language of Work in Nation-building and Genocide. Olin Auditorium, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. October 22, 7:30 PM
Reading, Muhlenberg College, Allentown, PA. October 15, 2009, 7 PM
Reading and talk. Grayson Community College, Denison, TX. Sept. 17, 2009, 7 PM