“Drawing on chalkboards is too much work to be erased,” I overheard one of the bio professors say.
Yes. I mean, you’re not wrong.
But this is joining the toughest of analytical sciences with an ephemeral art form. Both involve inspiration, discovery, tedious hours learning and practicing, but also a refuge from hostility, and ultimately, redemption. Physicist Lisa Randall said it best: both science and art “promise, in their different ways, to help transcend the narrow confines of individual experience and allow us to enter into—and comprehend—the realm of the sublime.”
The fleeting reality that someone is gonna come and sweep all of this away, that the janitors will come in when it’s too late and too early and spray the chalkboards clean before anyone gets here, is not something to condemn, but rather something to embrace and celebrate. The lack of stability of the medium is not meant for longevity, but for impermanence. My drawings may not last long (a few weeks at best, like some of the cells in our bodies), but I find that drawing them is illuminating and inspiring. I’m making something out of nothing, and as always, someone said it better than me:
“I suddenly realized that you could create life — that you could create life with a pencil and a brown paper bag — and it was truly a miracle in my recollection. Although people are always telling me that memory is just a device to justify your present, it was like I received the stigmata and I suddenly realized that you could spend your life inventing life. And I never stopped since — at five, my course was set. I never deviated, I never stopped aspiring or working in a way that provided the opportunity to make things that, if you did right, moved people.”
— Milton Glaser
For a few hours, I draw things and forget about my own struggles, and if I do my drawings well, they could help other people forget about theirs. There is some sort of creative, temporal glory in drawing on blackboards, kind of like an inside joke. If you get to see my drawings, I hope they make you feel something before they’re gone.
– Amanda Sagasti