Drawing to an end

From 'Flood Story' Gerald Davies 

The flower of the bee orchid (Ophrys apifera) is shaped as an idea of what a female bee would look like to a male bee. However most of these orchids are now self pollinating because the bee population that used to pollinate them has now died out. The flower is now a memory of an extinct bee, the image of which is nature's own vanitas painting, a momento mori for an easily forgotten small event. The art of memory being something that is perhaps not just the preserve of humans. 
In recent posts I have begun to reframe drawing as something that is as much the provenance of nature as of human beings, and in this case we have a drawing of a bee shape that could have taken millions of years to produce. Millions of small touches or marks are made as one flower received more visits than another from a certain bee, until the day when one particular orchid had the perfect flower to attract a male bee and so became the template for many more to follow. 

Ophrys apifera

Rudolf Steiner predicted the demise of the bees in his 1923 lectures. Steiner was a philosopher who wanted us to see how important our perceptive imagination, inspiration and intuition were to the future of both humanity and the world. His philosophy of 'anthroposophy' asks us to look at science as something allied to spirituality rather than being its polar opposite and his drawings, often done to support his lectures on these subjects were very influential on Joseph Beuys. 

Rudolf Steiner: drawing done during bee lecture

In opening out drawing's definition, I'm more and more aware that as a species we have drawn doodles all over the planet Earth. It feels moreover as if we have scribbled all over it, like some sort of manic lunatic, who draws obsessive spirals over and over again until their pencil or pen begins to break through the surface of the paper and begins to rip it apart. We have rubbed out jungles and forests, sliced down into the rocks to extract our precious minerals, blacked out vast stretches of once fertile land by polluting it with our love for carbon. Eleven billion of us will be making our mark on the planet soon, and wether we like it or not, such a huge number is totally unsustainable. "Less is more" used to be a Modernist mantra, but I think we ought to resuscitate the phrase as the slogan for our coming times. The only way we will revive the dying ecosystems of the world will be if we can leave them alone to regenerate and if we keep our numbers expanding at the same rate there will be no room for this, no room for anything else except some sort of self induced asphyxiation. Climate change is forcing mass migration and tensions rise as the Earth fights back. It may be that the fast arising redundancy of antibiotics is a sign that nature is developing its own cure for the problem and that one of Earth's oldest lifeforms, bacteria, are evolving to the point that there will be a new terraforming, just as there was when cyanobacteria released the oxygen locked up in water molecules, to enable life to evolve on Earth as we now know it.   
The graphite drawings that go to make up the exhibition 'Flood Story' by Gerald Davies use speculative thinking about global warming and rising sea levels, to imagine environments of the future. Davies' drawings are like blueprints for the future, in them towns and cities are smashed and flooded, the details of devastation prevail, his drawings operating as some form of archaeological map for future fossil hunters, whatever species they may be. 

From 'Flood Story' Gerald Davies 

Davies is very aware of what possible futures we may be setting up for ourselves and his drawings reflect this. The Earth will though be making its own drawings of the events and as it does, hopefully it will still include us in the picture. 

For a much more in-depth article on the work of Gerald Davies click this link

For more Steiner drawings

Kate Raworth's Donut economics (including the power of drawing to visualise what is happening)