In 1973, Frederick Franck wrote The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as meditation. It is a handwritten book that, as Franck cautions, “may be a little slower to read, but there is no hurry, for what I want to share with you took a long time to experience.” I discovered the book in 2012 as I was preparing for Project Feederwatch: Sketch, a 6-week collaboration with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Along with a phenomenal team of researchers, designers, and educators, I taught citizen scientists to draw the birds they were counting in their backyards.
The Feedersketch team in front of some of the drawings uploaded from our participants.
The project is a highlight in my career and for many reasons—the team, the participants, the focus on birding and drawing—but a detail I must credit in part is how my preparation for the project took place on a trip to Paudash Lake with my two dear friends, Chris and Charlotte.
Paudash Lake, Ontario
Chris’s grandfather won a small cabin, which sits on a tiny rock island in the middle of Paudash Lake, in a poker game long ago. Every summer, they go to the cabin for many weeks to restore and I was given the honor of being invited to spend time with them while they were there. It was such a lovely experience that I think of it regularly to this day and have in many the years since. While much of that loveliness has to do with Chris and Charlotte and our friendship, I do not hesitate to attribute some of it to the experience I had reading Franck’s book while I was there.
Charlotte
Chris
To practice the Zen of Seeing, Franck asks you to sit and stare at an object intimately before beginning to draw it. Then, he asks you to draw it without looking away. That means you must draw without seeing what you’re drawing. The idea, in the long run, is that you transcend the self by truly seeing what you are drawing. Here’s how Franck describes the activity in his book (pp. XiV-XV). Notice how even the in-person version meets our present-day requirements to be socially distanced (!):
I distributed cheap sketchpads and pencils and transferred my workshop to the grounds of the college. I asked the participants to sit down somewhere on the lawn. “Anywhere, as long as you leave at least six feet of space between one another. Don’t talk, just sit and relax.
“Now, let your eyes fall on whatever happens to be in front of you. It may be a plant or a bush or a tree, or perhaps just some grass. Close your eyes for the next five minutes…
“Now, open your eyes and focus on whatever you observed before — that plant or leaf or dandelion. Look it in the eye, until you feel it looking back at you. Feel that you are alone with it on Earth! That is the most important thing in the universe, that it contains all the riddles of life and death. It does!
You are no longer looking, you are SEEING.
“Now, take your pencil loosely in your hand, and while you keep your eyes focused allow the pencil to follow on the paper what the eye perceives. Feel as if with the point of your pencil you are caressing the contours, the whole circumference of that leaf, that sprig of grass. Just let your hand move! Don’t check what gets onto the paper, it does not matter at all! If your pencil runs off the paper, that’s fine too! You can always start again. Only don’t let your eye wander from what it is seeing, and don’t lift your pencil from your paper! And above all: don’t try too hard, don’t “think” about what you are drawing, just let the hand follow what the eye sees. Let it caress…”
With the limitations set forth by the pandemic, nearly all of our learning is happening virtually, and I am happy to say that the Zen of Seeing is an activity that not only transcends our spiritual realities, it also transcends the physical/virtual divide. I would even go so far as to say that the activity uniquely benefits from being online. Here’s how I do it.
Instructions
A recent Zen of Zooming sketch.
Step One: I ask everyone in the meeting to turn on their cameras and microphones so that we can see each other and share in a common soundscape. (I do make a disclaimer that those who don’t want to turn on videos or unmute for whatever reason are fine to remain unseen/unheard or some combination of the two.)
Step Two: I ask everyone to enter “gallery mode” so that videos of all participants are up at once. We scan the “room.” And then, like with Franck’s instruction, we allow our eyes fall on someone.
Step Three: We “pin” the video of the person we’re observing so it’s nice and big, and we sit in silence looking at them for about a minute.
Step Four: We start to draw. I give folks similar instruction as to Franck: “Don’t look down, start over if you want or need to.” I don’t use the word “caress” but I do say something like, “let your pen or pencil etch the contours of what you see onto the page.” We draw for about two or three minutes.
Step Five: I tell folks to stop drawing and ask everyone to look down to see what they did. There is always laughter, especially from those who have attempted to draw teeth.
Step Six: I ask if anyone wants to share their drawing and inevitably a few brave souls will offer their page to the camera. We all pin the video while they describe their experience.
Those dreaded teeth (that’s supposed to be me by the way).
The only people I’ve ever drawn like this, outside of a Zoom call (and even once on one), were of people that I know intimately and love. For the typical professional conference, classroom, or virtual training it would seem, perhaps, too much to expect that our participants open to each other enough to sit and stare and draw each other this way. But the Zoom interface miraculously shoulders the awkwardness of this activity. You can’t know who’s looking at you and whoever you’re looking can’t know it, either. No one can see what you’ve drawn unless you offer it up. The whole experience is publicly private.
I hesitate to imagine what Franck would think of this interpretation of his activity. I am sure he’d shame us into getting off our screens and into a meadow. But I'm also sure I would defend this in his presence because, in my experience, it is humanizing and intimate and real—all things our Zoom calls could use a lot more of.