Language - Part 2 - Art

In a recent essay about John Sell Cottman, Sanford Schwartz commented on the ubiquity of drawing masters in upper echelon homes in the early nineteenth century. Rather a commonplace, except he went on to suggest it was a tool for amateur historians and naturalists to record their explorations of the English countryside which were then an activity of the most advanced intellectuals.

When I sat with a box of watercolors in public school, I never considered them an implement for exploration. I assumed we were condemned to them by economics. They were the cheapest possible medium that was the easiest to clean from clothes. Certainly, none of my teachers, either in elementary or secondary school, gave the slightest hint the paints were good for anything more than filling some obscure requirement that children be exposed to the arts.

The use of watercolor by Cottman’s friends would have been both an accompaniment to natural history, and an antidote to it. Following Linneaus, the language of plants became more and more precise, and more and more focused on the reproductive mechanisms that probably were not discussed by male teachers with properly educated young ladies. Painting allowed enthusiasts to continue to focus on what interested them, any discrepancies with reality could be excused as impressions, especially after Monet and others looked primarily at the effect, not the reality.

Once photography was available to people of my social class, the function of the amateur disappeared. The obsessive connection between art and the reproductive aspects of botany continued in the work of Georgia O’Keefe, certainly not someone mentioned in my Michigan hometown in the 1950s. But then, I don’t remember hearing Monet’s name either.

Photography was promoted for preserving memories, the emphasis was on portraits. In a period when the affable were praised and conformity expected, the camera gave people a way to preserve their position in society, to make the everchanging concrete.

Scientists, who implicitly trust impersonal technology over unreliable human senses, preferred photographs to illustrations in field guides. When I was a child, lecturers would visit town to show their photographs of plants and animals; if they were flush, they had films. I don’t remember an artist ever being booked for the nature travel series.

Contrarily, I find guidebooks with photographs the most difficult to use. Sometimes I think plants are included only if they take a god picture, since tiny flowers in my yard don’t appear. The closeups, while true, aren’t usually what I see. If the plant is still available I can get on the ground and stare, or reach down and pick it. But if I saw it from a distance, I can do nothing but turn pages in frustration.

I prefer line illustrations grouped by flower color and shape (implicitly, plant family). I usually can get a rough match that provides a genus and potential species. With that, I can look the plant up in other books and make a determination based on the descriptive words.

I rarely use the field guide I have that uses watercolors and photographs. I suspect the artist took the pictures to aid her memory when she did the paintings which are neither detailed nor impressionistic. She lacks the skill of Cottman, and gives only dabs of color for flowers, but renders stems and leaves with relative accuracy.

Now, I can take the tentative name and turn to the internet, where I find digital photographs posted by people like me. They vary from mass planting habitats to the closest closeup. With patience, it’s possible to find someone who sees something exactly the same way, and finally identify a flower.

This summer I bought a digital camera, and for the first time, picture taking is free - so long as I already have invested in a computer. The high costs are still in reproduction, in color cartridges and paper for even the cheapest printer. But storage is cheap. I already owned a zip drive, and at $15, the discs are the price of three rolls of film, when I last had film developed. They store considerably more that 102 pictures on those three rolls.

I rediscovered the joys of exploration and the frustrations of art. I began by taking pictures of flowers in my yard. I was soon disappointed by poor color, and began experimenting with settings that control the amount of light. After some trial and error, I am able to photograph roses and other pink and yellow flowers, but the color of blue flowers never comes true. I’m assuming there’s some technical limit in my camera in how it records the reds and blues it sees.

The camera’s focus is beyond anything available when I was a child. I can get closer to the subject before things get fuzzy. There are limits, which I’m sure are overcome with money. I probably cannot get pictures worthy of Linneaus, but I can see the hairs on a Shirley poppy stem and the scales on the cup holding an aster.

I’m not a natural scientist. I have to work at seeing things and logging them. I assume this is an innate aptitude for those who stay with the discipline.

The thing about my pictures is I realize how feeble is my memory and how poor are my writing skills. I may look on the same things as the camera lens, but one of the frustrations is that it doesn’t capture what I see. Only later can I appreciate that it preserves what I didn’t notice.

I simply lack the linguistic skills to write about the plants that interest me. One part shirks from the absolute precision of botany, when, if I mastered it, I suspect I could barely communicate with myself. My observations would be as dense and obtuse as the papers I wrote in history in graduate school.

The alternative for writers has been pure poetry, which focuses only on impressions.

My experience of nature is somewhere between O’Keefe and Monet, between Linneaus and Wordsworth. There is no language for what I see.

I think this is the less the result of a failure to write, than the fact that watercolors and pencils made it possible for people to communicate without words. Art, even poorly rendered sketches, was far better at preserving observation and memory than writing.

With that realization, the focus on the drawing master suddenly becomes much more obvious in the world discussed by Sanchez. It was indeed as important as the mathematics teacher, who taught the rigors of science, or the French and dancing masters who taught social skills to children who saw only their siblings and cousins.

The masters represented, not artifice, but an engagement with the natural and, according to Schwartz, historic world. Language didn’t develop because it was not needed.

Digital photographs represent a revolution in botanical illustration. Even more, it may be restoring the world of the amateur that bridged the arts and sciences and disappeared with the professionalism of both. The technologies of the internet and digitalization make it possible to revive the world of Cottman described by Schwartz and rebuild the missing link rued by C. P. Snow.

Sources:
Schwartz, Sanford. "The Neglected Master," The New York Review of Books, 21 Sept 2006.

Snow, C. P. "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," 1959.