Science Picture BooksA Love Affair with the Natural World

Artwork by Paul Mirocha(Except for the Van Gogh and a couple others)

When I met people for the first time and they asked me what I do, I used to say, “I’m an artist.” That seemed to cover it all, and leave room for all kinds of exotic things for them to imagine that I do. Now I say, “I’m an illustrator.” I think it says what I actually do. I feel that art is work, and more than personal self-expression. It is meant to add something to people’s everyday life, even if it’s how they see things.

Illustrators make images like a shoemaker makes shoes, or a carpenter builds a house. Illustrators fill a need within a culture for images of quality and honesty that reflect and challenge the communal thinking of the time.

Scattered through this talk, I’m going to show some images that have influenced me throughout my life. These cave paintings from Lascaux actually saved me in some ways. I used to go to the campus library and just sit and look at these paintings in books when I was a confused, rudderless freshman in college. Without a mentor or much of a clue what to do with myself. I didn’t read much of the text. These images became touchstones for me, remaining latent in memory, it comes back to me when I need it for reference.

It still has an effect on all of us after 17,500 years regardless of the media.

Why is this image so engaging? It’s not the medium, but the content. In the 60s Marshal McLuhan said the medium is the message. Yet, in library books, these cave paintings still came through. They even look great on my iPhone. The message is the message.

The Aurochs was the most powerful and terrifying animal of paleolithic times and the successful hunt would have been something like winning the Superbowl. This bull became a god in many ancient cultures and symbol of great power and strength. I don’t know for sure, but I can see that the artist had first-hand experience with this animal and had probably been on a hunt.

Contrast this with a 19th century engraving of an already extinct aurochs. It is technically accurate, but fails to motivate me. No color, no wildness, no interaction. It’s just a boring, factual science illustration.

Aurochs. (Bos primigenius), the ancestor of domestic cattle, was a type of large wild cattle which inhabited Europe, Asia and North Africa, but which is now extinct; it survived in Europe until the last recorded aurochs, a female, died in the Jaktorów Forest, Poland in 1627. Her skull is now the property of the Livrustkammaren ("Royal Armory") museum in Stockholm, Sweden.

Even more boring...You can look it up in the dictionary or encyclopedia, but you will get only the verbal part of the reality, just one facet of the whole gem. That’s why we have both brains--reality can not be understood with only one side of the mind. It requires both. That’s why we have them.

• Feeling and emotion

• Relationship with the subject

• Lasts in memory

• Nature images seem to be primal

I have identified what elements these cave paintings have. What makes them so alive and motivating to the Homo sapiens mind, regardless of culture and technology?

Sociological Inquiry, February 2012, J. Allen Williams, et al

This study with came out in February 2012 by a group of sociologists from different universities wanted to study trends in the depiction of the environment in children’s picture books, just as similar studies had done for other major issues of our time, such as race and gender.

They looked at 296 Caldecott award winners over 70 years since the award for best illustrated children’s books first was created in 1938.

Their assumption was that the books read to children at a formative age reflect the values and beliefs that adults want to pass on to them. So these book would reflect those values in the culture as a whole.

One can see that the setting of picture books in a wild natural environment has steadily declined in favor of a built environment.

You can see here the rise of the environmental movement in the 60s, and it’s unexplained downturn as reflected in kid’s books. The yellow area represents the 25 years where I worked on at least one science and nature picture book per year. This, which once was a bread and butter business, has now dropped off almost entirely.

The authors conclude that isolation from the natural environment and the use of electronic media were major factors in this trend. Out of sight is out of mind. Urban dwellers are up to 80% of the population. In addition, one study cited stated that ”America’s young people spend more time using media than engaging in any other activity except sleeping.”

Studies do suggest that the book medium is better for young children. They relate better to the physical object like a book and do not learn well from electronic images.

Other studies show that visitation to national and state parks is down; parents are more likely to bring children to a “safer”, more controlled place like a manicured park if they go outside at all. There is a decline in “everyday encounters with nature”. Even school textbooks have shown a decline in attention to the environment.

The paper’s conclusions: “...the current generation of young children listening to these stories and looking at the images in children's books are not being socialized... towards greater understanding and appreciation of the natural world and the place of humans within it.”

“Parents have begun pressing their kindergartners and first graders to leave the picture book behind and move on to more text-heavy chapter books. Publishers cite pressures from parents who are mindful of increasingly rigorous standardized testing in schools.”

–The New York Times, front page, Oct. 7, 2010

Picture Books No Longer a Staple for Children

One more item: As the article states, according to interviews with bookstore workers, children’s picture books are languishing on the shelves of bookstores. Why? First we might blame the economic recession, and publisher’s weekly reports the sales of picture books down 10-15% in 2011. Or flat, depending on who you talk to. Or rising... I’m not going to try to analyze the state of the publishing industry here. Clearly, it’s complex and there are many factors operating. It could also be that there has been a glut of picture books and the decline is not significant in terms of quality, just an adjustment to the market.

But the second trend: parental pressure to early graduation into chapter books for kindergarteners and first graders, reflects the verbal and logical bias of our left-brained educational system.

To quote the article: “Parents are saying, ‘My kid doesn’t need books with pictures anymore,’ ” said Justin Chanda, the publisher of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. “There’s a real push with parents and schools to have kids start reading big-kid books earlier. We’ve accelerated the graduation rate out of picture books.”

I had to include this image from the Tucson Festival of Books guide. Would Harvard really accept this kid when he grows up? Or would they want someone more balanced and human, perhaps?

Aa everyone has seen before, the brain is divided into two separate minds that work as one. Like the pictures and words in a good picture book. They work like our minds do. People have been born with only one hemisphere and still live close to normal lives--the hemisphere that is there tries to take on the two functions of the normally two brains.

Split brain experiments garnered a nobel prize in 1981, and the startling results still bear remembering. Show a fork to only the right brain: it knows what it is for, but can’t name it. The left brain can name it, but doesn’t know what it is for. The left brain can set up definitions, names, and hierarchies, but it can’t quite get at the meaning of things, which may go beyond words.

Pictures contain a complex depth of information. Looking at them develops a part of the mind that is equally important as reading. Images are powerful--they also engage and motivate us. Our brains are wired for pictures, like a sponge is designed for water, or a plant for sunlight. I’ve seen the work of illustrators as producing these magical and motivating pictures to feed the image-hungry mind.

Picture books are the art gallery for children. It’s where they get the images that may stay with them throughout life. It’s the raw material their dreams come from.

I think this one would look good on a cave wall, maybe with a digital pigment ink-jet printer of some kind.

More recently, I’ve come to see that rather than capturing our minds and involving us with the picture, the illustrations might become more like windows into the subject matter: which could be anything in the world. They can be windows to reality. Rather than getting wrapped up in the image, we would be inspired to go past it, explore the real world, maybe put the iPad down and walk out barefoot into the backyard mud during a monsoon.

At a recent open-house up at the Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, I watched as a scientist held a gila monster for people to see up close, even pet it, if they dared. How many times in a life would one even see a gila monster, much less touch one? People did. Yet I saw one kid 3 feet from the lizard, taking pictures of his friend on his electronic game, warping them, and laughing, Ignoring the lizard.

That boy was being captured by the media and was not seeing what was in front of him.

Increasingly, I see the issue of science education as one of instilling a “world-view.” Besides learning concepts and information, learning to do the needed calculations, we instill a certain world-view in our young people.

There is a familiar belief about ourselves that comes from school, supposedly based on science, but actually not supported by evidence. We grow up believing that we live in our heads, our bodies are its servant, and everything outside of our skin is either dead, or if alive, it’s dumb. We walk around in the world, but are not connected to it. That whole universe that starts 1 mm from our outer skin is so vast, and probably as unknown as the surface of... Pluto. It might as well be that far away for the attention we give it.

In some ways we are becoming, as a society, as human-centered, or anthropocentric, as the medieval scholars that showed the earth as the center of the universe.

That’s because we don’t really see it, nor identify with being part of the world. We have no real relationship with it. Yet we are part of it and it is part of us. There is a continual flow into us from the environment and out toward it. When does that become us or not us? If you contemplate that, the boundary can become quite arbitrary.

Another old image that comes to mind. About 35 years ago a teacher of mine mentioned the Old Greek idea of the cosmos being like an onion. That image has stayed with me and comes up when I need it, like the cave paintings. We no longer view the cosmos as a series of earth-concentric spheres. But I still use the image as a way to understand almost anything. It’s my theory of knowledge. I also like how small things we don’t think of as significant can become symbols of the whole. That’s another idea of the ancients.

The metaphor has still been used by scientists like Richard Feynman: understanding the world in terms of successive layers.

Each layer is a limited concept we have. As you go deeper, there is more imagination required as layers will contradict each other. As you go to a deeper layer, your world-view will be challenged. Something might look like a wave, then a particle--usually mutually exclusive things. On a deeper layer they may be reconciled. Feynman once commented that there may be millions of layers... I think it’s infinite.

Right brain thinks with images

The functions of the right brain are to process incredibly complex amounts of information into a unified whole that can’t always be explained. Like a picture.

Images give meaning, even though we do this processing so fast and so effortlessly that we do not realize we are doing it. It’s what motivates us, not logic, statistics and words, but things that appeal to the right brain have their own intrinsic validity.

Marketing researchers have found that people actually make purchases based on emotion, but use logic later to explain it. Hence the preponderance of highly sophisticated imagery in advertising.

So drawing is a kind of thinking. An investigation of its own.

The act of drawing is hidden, maybe, but is the heartbeat of the book. It’s a process that connects one to the world in a profound and inexplicable way. It’s like love, hidden in the layers beneath the book one picks up from the shelf.

A strange effect many artists will admit: Sketches more compelling than final work. Why is that? Drawing may take place deeper inside the onion.

This example is from a cookbook for kids using wild plants. I recently brought out all the sketches I used when I was researching and composing the paintings. The pencil drawings, not meant to be seen, still felt more alive to me. The final paintings seemed overdone, although the book was well received. In a sense the secret behind this book was brilliant. Just like I did to find my reference material, kids who wanted to make these recipes would be crawling around in the wood looking for these plants. While they are doing that, they can’t help but notice lots of other things.

Drawing is like the theatrical designer and playwright that places the characters in a scene and sets a stage up. They are still very fluid and unfinished, but so interesting to watch.

But there is still more to a sketch than working out the final art. More than putting the details together and understanding them.

Drawing is a simple thing, almost nothing to it at first glance. Not remarkable, not frameable perhaps, or even worth saving (though I always do) but it is decisive, makes all the difference.

Starting a drawing can be very challenging and may defy your own world-view. In college, I causally picked a fern leaf and tried to draw it. I was discovering more than just fractal geometry--it was so complex and challenging that I was filled with admiration. I changed my major to an interdepartmental “Art/Biology” degree.

Another subject that confounded and challenged me only a few weeks ago. Drawing a rattler. The scientists I asked for help did not understand the problem. I had to explain to them how humbling this was once you tried to draw it. There are three axes, the scales are arranged in this impossible geometry of intersecting spirals that one finds throughout nature, in pine cones, fish scales, leaves on a stem, prickly pear pads.

One sees details that are not noticed when just merely looking and identifying something. Once you try to draw it, you really see it.

I have hundreds of pages of sketchbooks that have never made it into paintings. They exist just as investigations deeper into the world onion. Once I spent an hour watching water bugs. Ny doing this, I felt I had developed a relationship with them.

It’s one of the deepest mysteries: the relationship between us and what we are viewing. Where do we end and the world begins? There is no one answer, of course.

One artist I was sketching with recently told me: “You know, drawing is an act of affection. When you pay that much attention to something, and spend that time with it, it’s love.”

I don’t think a lot of scientists would say that in public. There is the principle of objectivity to consider. But I am inspired by the careful attention I see biologists pay to their subjects. I have been photographing that with scientists on Tumamoc. That dedication even puts us artists to shame.

Ultimately, we are talking about love. Maybe we can relate to the natural world as we would to another human being, with all the give and take that implies.

Drawing is also a visual and verbal record of an experience. Sitting down one day by the trail and sketching, I can look at this page now, 8 years later, and still see the scene again, the weather, what I was thinking about, what was happening at the time. It’s all in one multi-layered package compacted into a kind of symbol that can be unfolded again when I look at the page.

Another set of images that have helped me throughout life: Van Gogh’s nature studies. They combine attention to detail with such an emotional connection. I think that’s what has made his work so popular.

The healing power of images. A current show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art features of Van Gogh’s plant paintings. As the reviewer for the New York Yimes wrote, VIncent “consciously spent time focusing on the minute details of the natural world... to settle his unstable mind.

In fact, an image does not need a medium at all to affect the mind. It’s created in the mind and can work purely internally, in our imaginations.

The real power of imagery was not apparent until some courageous people suffering from powerful negative images went for help. Over the decades, a new definition was created through evidence from therapists working with Post Traumatic Stress. Talk therapy was not working. They found that internal images were the only thing that worked to heal or calm the effects of extremely negative memories.

Sometimes a spontaneous positive image would come to a person’s mind that would turn things around for them, healing them.

• Victor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, while forced by abusive guards to walk for miles between work sites and a Nazi concentration camp in freezing darkness writes, “...my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me; saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than he sun, which was beginning to rise.”

• A Vietnam Vet: 20 years later, talking about it still did not help. He lived in an abandoned building, made primitive weapons to keep people away, but found a discarded record player and a John Coltrane record.

“The music was so pure and lovely, but so edgy and real. It sent right through my body. I started to see beauty again... For a long time, the only thing I could stand to do was listen to that music, over and over again. 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. That was my healing.”

As the research progressed on defining and treating PTSD, therapists began to intentionally encourage suffering people to evoke a positive image or memory in their imagination. These most often were nature places of beauty, safety, and peace.

• 9/11 witness to plane crashing into the towers: A woman on her way to work, witnessed the first plane hit the World Trade Center tower. She was sobbing uncontrollably and unable to function when she arrive at her workplace. They happened to have a counselor in the building and this person helped her find a peaceful nature place from her memory. Twenty minutes later, the second plane hit. She was still traumatized, but l;eft with teh determination to organize volunteers in church to help the victims.

She went from, “I can’t get this image out of my head.”to: “I can do something to help.”

Beauty will save the world.

– F. Dostoevski, The Idiot

In another Nobel prize speech, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn quoted Dostoyevski’s mysterious and often quoted phrase. His understanding was that Beauty, which is based on an honest experience, could stand in even when Truth and Goodness are lost. Truth becomes beauty. Logic can form a sequence that can convince for a while, but the opposite conclusion can also be reached through the same logic. “A work of art bears within itself its own verification.” I’ll take his word for it.

Statistics can lie, logic can be contradicted by another logic, but art and literature can have it’s own internal validity which can be ignored, but not be easily refuted.

In other words, beauty largely is found rather than created. The original source and inspiration is nature. It’s where we originally experience beauty as a child and understand the concept, even when created within a built environment. This is what I use as my guiding thought in illustration.

John Keats. 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is allYe know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

A few examples from my science picture books.

The Exxon Valdez oil spill was the ecological equivalent of 911 for the environment. I was hesitant at first to take it on. I used images of beauty with mostly just hints of the threatening oil.

Kids at book signings would focus on the beauty. Kids would always say to me, “I love Sea Otters” or “Orcas are my favorite animal.”

When it came to this scene, I painted this clean-up worker close- up with the oil-soaked bird, to show the emotional experience it was.

This was the final result. The editor, maybe rightly, maybe wrongly, edited out the emotional scene.

I was using opaque watercolor, so I actually painted over the first painting. (After taking a photo)

Where possible, I try to insert emotion into a technical illustration, contrary to the usual attitude in science textbooks. There is always a way.

A scientific illustration of a saguaro flower: I could say the hand is for scale, and the faces of the animals on the right. But also I was trying to add a tactile, and emotional connection. The experience of holding a saguaro flower in one’s hand, if you’ve even done it, is very sensual; it’s delicate, yet strong, and has an intoxicating subtle scent, aimed at bats. When you slice it open, it reveals it’s secrets, just like the onion.

Working on this book influenced my thinking more than any other project. Goethe’s thinking is encapsulated here for children. This book is about Goethe’s philosophy of science, actually his poem called “The Metamorphisis of Plants” made into a picture book. Wonderful idea: to write botany in poem form.

Nature’s Dance: “The rosebud is nature breathing in, just like your hand in a fist...”

And the blossom is like your fingers stretched wide.

Then it contracts into the seeds. Yes, and when the seeds find their new home in the soil, the whole cycle begins over again.

So in these afternoons drawing in the garden, Goethe’s theory of knowledge is explained in simple, concrete down-to-earth form, like the right brain likes it.

Goethe: His brand of science uses right-brain processing--the eye itself is the starting point. what you see after spending time in contemplating reflection on an object. He is using the right brain’s holistic mode: seeing the whole first, then moving down to all the parts

“Mr. Goethe, how did you ever learn to paint these plants so they look so alive?”

Mr. Goethe turned his kind face to me. “First, he said, I listen with my eyes. I give each plant my full attention, as I do you. Like friends, plants tell you their secrets only when they know you care.”

I went to Weimar with Diana Cohn, the author, to research this book on site at Goethe’s house, now a museum. To make sure everything was authentic, we sat in Goethe’s garden and drew plants to get the full experience.

The other book I’m featuring here is The Bee Tree. We, my co-authors and I, traveled to Malaysia six times over a 10-year period to research the book first hand.

This is the actual clearing where this particular Bee Tree stands. It’s a focal point in the surrounding rainforest. Also a place I sometimes go to in my imagination when I need to find calm and peace or abundance.

Again I filled several sketchbooks with drawings and quick, on-site watercolors.

The book was done with digital painting, but I still used the sketches as the main basis for the final art.

Greeting the unseen owner of the forest. When the honey hunters entered the forest the touched their hearts and said, “Assalamu alaikum.” just as they would when entering someone’s house as a guest. No one defined who the “Unseen Owner” was, but they should respect the place as guests.

The story from folklore encodes a relationship with nature in an oral tradition that comes from the Vedas at least 1000 years BC.

In the book, the story of Hitam Manis is told around an oil lamp in the camp. When harvesting the honey, they are aware that they are dealing with the spirit of the bees, a woman wronged. That’s why they are polite, and refer to the bees with polite terms of endearment. When they are stung, they laugh. They leave enough honey behind fr teh migratory bees to carry off so they will return every year to the same tree.

Long ago, a beautiful servant girl named Hitam Manis worked in the Sultan’s palace. She and the Sultan’s son fell in love. He called her ‘Sweet Dark One’. But it was forbidden for a prince to marry any other than a princess. When they were found out, the furious Sultan ordered his soldiers to chase her from his kingdom.

Hitam Manis fled with her loyal friends. As they ran, a metal spear struck Hitam Manis. The Sweet Dark One fell, but she did not die. A miracle happened. Hitam Manis and the other servant girls turned into a swarm of bees and disappeared into the forest.

Years later, while hunting, the prince noticed honey combs draping off a tree limb. He climbed up with a pail and cut a chunk of the comb with his knife. When the pail was lowered to the ground, the other hunters were horrified to see their prince cut in little pieces. From the treetops, came the voice of Hitam Manis. Because she had been hit by a metal spear, she ruled, “No metal must touch our honey, ever! This man has broken our law!” But when Hitam Manis realized the man was the prince she once loved, her tears fell into the bucket and the Prince was restored to his whole self.

“And that is why,” Grandfather said, “we always hunt without metal, and use only a bone knife, a wooden ladder, and a cowhide pail.”

An illustration from a poster series on native American plant folklore. This illustrates a Yaqui Deer song about the mescal agave. It illustrates a world-view alien to the anglo culture, but essential to the Yaqui, who are part of our Tucson community.

Deer singer Felipe Molina, whom I worked with on this project says that the Wilderness World of Yaqui language means a very specific place, partly in the mind of humans and partly the wild desert areas outside of the village. It’s not translatable, but it’s a little like our concept of “Heaven.” Their sense of the sacred is not in the sky, but over in the mountains, the wild lands. We found this dying mescal agave, and important plant to the Yaqui, which I drew, in the mountains near Yaqui country in Sonora.

Yaqui poet Refugio Savala says, “The deer songs are sacred because they come from the wilds. “ When you dream (ie. have visions) you go to a place in nature. Nature is the source of inspiration and prayer.”

This sort of connection to the world is deep within the onion, hard for Anglos to understand. But it would be worth our while to do so.

Tumamoc Hill

Transition to Tumamoc Hill. It’s an island of wild lands surrounded by Tucson, almost in downtown. Originally protected as an ecological study plots by scientists at the Carnegie Desert Botanical Lab est. in 1903, it has study plots that have been monitored closely for over 100 years.

It’s managed by the UA College of Science.

It is revered by hikers and health enthusiasts who stay to the one road to the summit, leaving the rest of the 860 acres untouched, in its natural state.

This is a cultural value--leaving a place wild, protecting its natural state. A lot of parents bring their kids, even babies up there. It’s one of those missing wild places that the Caldecott study mentioned and it’s a wilderness area right in our own backyard.

More recently, artists have been meeting on Tumamoc to do, guess what? Yes. Drawing on site.

The scientists working on the Hill understand that drawing and painting from life on the Hill adds meaning to the place without intruding upon it. Not just because drawing does no harm to the environment. We are accumulating images of attachment to a place. It builds cultural values about attachment to a particular place, a landmark. Like: maybe we want a wild land mountain in the middle of our downtown because it’s good for us.

It’s not so much about creating artwork as it is about observing and spending quality time with plants, listening with your eyes for their secrets.

TumamocSketchbook.com. Is like a bank account full of images about this one place. From this blog, the pictures could go into a book or any kind of media. The media is not that important.

I have searched, but not found another similar blog that is devoted to one small place. But I feel that is one of the aspects of love: it is singular. Before you say you love mankind, try loving an individual person first. Before one can love the whole earth, one must love one area, like the Sonoran Desert. To love that area, one must first love one small part of it. Because the parts contain the whole.

In conclusion, there is an often-quoted Native American saying that we borrow the world from our descendants. Perhaps the best thing we can will to them for when we are gone is not a set of silverware or a piece of furniture. The best thing might be a bank of positive internal images of connection and love for the world, hooked into their right brain memory, lying latent in their subconscious, ready to be brought up when needed as motivation as they make the thousands of tiny decisions that will create their own world.

Maybe they will save the world and by so doing, save themselves.

The post card handout. “Walkers” by Paul Mirocha