Wendy MacNaughton »Drawing is looking and looking is love«

Bild: ©Alanna HaleCan’t be done? There’s no such thing for the illustrator and graphic journalist Wendy MacNaughton. That’s why she not only drew and wrote the first graph­ic column for The New York Times, had the first illustration ever on its front page, wrote several best­sellers and launched the children show Draw Together on Instagram, which has now become an impressive nonprofit organization. She told us what drawing has to do with love and seeing the world as it r­eally is, how it can bridge divides, heal fears – and what endless fun it is. 

Your career is all about drawing. Yet you started as a copywriter. How did that happen?
Wendy MacNaughton: There was a time when I didn’t really draw very much. And it started ironically in art school. When I went there in the late 1990s, there was a focus on conceptual art, and I became very interested in creating terrible performances (laughs). But it was also in art school that I became interested in advertising, because I thought of it as the most powerful art form around. Very few people go to a museum, compared to the amount of people who drive by a Los Angeles billboard. So I went into advertising thinking that that would be a place where I could create engaging work. You laugh because we are no longer 22 years old and know how the world works. But that’s how I ended up getting a job as a copywriter.

What did you work on?
Among others for a luxury brand for which I came up with an ad that said something like “But are you sure you need it?”. My creative director was stunned, and I realized that advertising was not the place for me. But I am grateful for the visual storytelling I ­learned there. What I didn’t learn was how to work collectively. I just knew how to tell people what to do (laughs). So I went back to school for social work ­because I wanted to learn how to ask questions, how to listen and also how to trust in what somebody tells me, instead of thinking that I know best. Most of this time I didn’t draw.

But you started drawing again taking the BART from Oakland to San Francisco on your way to work. Of all places …
The public transportation is such an interesting place early in the morning. It’s like a no person’s land, in which we are transitioning from our per­sonal to our professional selves. And where we’re maybe just able to be with ourselves as a result. Not everybody was looking at their phones yet. Mostly people were lost in their thoughts and seemed very vulnerable. That’s when I started to draw again.

»With the pace of our lives, I think we don’t connect very often and don’t see people or places as they are. We see them as we are«

You became a graphic journalist and had your visual column Meanwhile in The New York Times where you told stories about all kinds of people, about trees or markets, and you even converted your Honda into a drawing studio.
I wanted to feel like I could go anywhere and talk to anybody at any time and just draw and sleep in the back. At the same time, I didn’t want people to know that I was there. My mobile studio is very small and homey, and I love it so much. I’ve slept at gas stations, in parking lots or on the side of the road. When I was doing a story on truck drivers, I just spent a couple of nights at truck stops.

It seems that you don’t have any fear of contact.
I like people. But I am always scared though. People assume that I am fearless, but I’m not. Every time I arrive at a new place and have to get out of the car and open up to people, I suddenly become an agoraphobic and just want to stay inside where it’s safe and known (laughs). But in all the years I’ve been doing this work, I’ve learned to reframe my fear into excitement and see it as a sign that a good thing is about to happen.

No wonder you have faced so many challenges and so successfully. One of your illustrations of the court trials in Guantánamo was the first ever illustration to appear on the front page of The New York Times. It must have been a very special situation there. As a political being but also as an illustrator working the way you do.
The time I had there was intense. Guantánamo is a place nobody really knows and of course it shouldn’t exist. I’m not a courtroom sketch artist who always tries to be neutral. So much of what I’m interested in, is connecting with the people I draw and finding little details that tell a story about who they are. But in Guantánamo I wasn’t allowed to connect with anybody. I wasn’t even allowed to make eye contact. If I did, I was told that I should pretend that I was looking right through them. There were so many rules and every drawing had to be approved when I left. They took a picture, put a sticker on it, and I wasn’t allowed to add anything later. That’s why I ­also colored the drawings directly in the court­room. I sat there with a sketchbook on my lap and with my paints and a little cup right next to me on a folded chair. It was a challenging experience that I am grateful for, but I don’t think that I would choose to have it again.

You even made inks with materials you found in Guantánamo.
I did grab a little bit of dirt and some paint chips and stuff like that. From the ink maker Jason Logan I learned how to make ink out of any material. I also do this when I travel around in my mobile studio. Call it conceptual or mystical, but I like the idea that the place becomes literally part of the drawing.

You also made drawings on the corner of 6th St and Mission St in your hometown San Francisco, a tough spot dominated by drugs and mental illness. Or at the library there, which is a shelter for the homeless. How do you find all these stories off the beaten path?
With the pace of our lives, I think we don’t connect very often and don’t see people or places as they are. We see them as we are. But if we slow down and pay attention, we start to see who and what is really right in front of us. And for me drawing is the best way to do that. For Meanwhile I always had a story before I started. That’s fine. It’s just a very limited experience of the world. But it opened up as soon as I ­slowed down and paid close attention by looking, asking questions and listening. Drawing is looking and looking is love.

»Restrictions do cultivate creativity and help us come up with things we would never ever imagine if we had all the choices in the world«

The story of a bootmaker you drew in Utah is also interesting. He regarded The New York Times as fake news, but at the end, your story about him hung on his wall. Is drawing also an opportunity to overcome divisions in society?
Drawing helps us to meet a person where they are at, like they say in social work. As I draw from life, I’m spending hours with someone, and so Don
the bootmaker and I learned a lot about each other (laughs). We learned how very different we are and also how very similar. We had a lot of things in common, bonded over our crafts and the importance of it. Today people are afraid to talk about differences. That’s sad and it’s counterproductive because it’s the differences that teach us other ways of experi­encing the world. I’m not saying that I get it right. Ask my wife, I can be pretty judgmental (laughs). But I’m working on it and drawing helps me do that. I’m my better self when I draw.

In general, there’s a lot of talk about the topics of your drawings but rarely about your drawing style itself. How did it evolve?
Out of necessity. I was trained classically. The first naked person I saw outside of my family was a nude model (laughs). But the style that I draw in now was developed when I was on the BART. I had a pen and I had a notebook. I hated watercolors because I thought that’s what old ladies use to paint flowers and kittens. But I didn’t have any space for oils, so I bought a tiny little set of them. And I also draw like this because I’m a perfectionist. If you give me oils, I will paint that painting for years because I can wipe it away. But if I put a pen down and draw the line, it doesn’t matter if it’s right or wrong. It’s document­ing what I’m seeing and feeling, and so that line is right. And like watercolors I can’t erase it. You either throw the thing away or you keep going. And that works for me. It’s more the way I want to be in the world, as opposed to being the perfectionist.

With the beginning of the pandemic, you started DrawTogether on Instagram, an art making show for children, with up to 12.000 kids per episode participating. How did that happen?
I’m a pretty responsive person. And when the pandemic happened, there was definitely a lot to respond to. I’ve never taught kids before, I never even thought about it. But now I’m obsessed with it (laughs). With the pandemic everything changed for everybody. I had a huge studio but like everybody else was suddenly trapped at home. All my wife Caroline and me had on hand was some cardboard paper, pens, our phones, and my Instagram account. But it turned out that you can do a lot with that (laughs). I think that restrictions do cultivate creativity and help us come up with things we would never ever imagine if we had all the choices in the world. We just used everything we had in the house, we made props and costumes, and it was like being back in art school again. We did 72 live sessions before we built a studio. And everybody wanted to help. We had amazing artists like Christoph Niemann. He taught us how to draw facial expressions and it was so much fun. I love him. We had an entomologist who talked about bugs, and a baker who taught us how to make cupcakes. When we switched over to building the studio, same thing. We shot 12 episodes, had stop motion animation, we went on field trips. All of this was done with very little money and with an incredible team. It’s a big group effort.

You always start DrawTogether asking the kids to take a deep breath.
That’s from social work. I think it’s the most under­appreciated degree and everybody should study it (laughs). When we take a deep breath, we center our­selves and we get in contact with our feelings. Drawing is one of the best ways for kids to process their emotions. Especially for kids who don’t have the vocabulary yet. But I also know a lot of grown-up kids like in their forties who don’t have that either. We can all benefit from it. Drawing boosts curiosity, creativity, and self-confidence. It helps to identify, to process emotions, and to feel connected to yourself and to each other.

Your work is always about drawing by hand. But drawing on a screen gets more and more popular. Can that be the same?
I can just speak for myself, but for me it’s very tactile to use a piece of paper and a drawing tool. There’s the touch, the smell, the sound, and a very physical experience. If I am working on an iPad, it is metal on glass and doesn’t feel like an embodied experience at all. There’s a tiny lag when you’re working on the iPad and also a tiny distance between the tip of the pencil and the screen. For me that’s also an emo­tional distance. But hey, I’m 46 and was raised with different tools than kids now.

You said that DrawTogether was a total game changer for you and that you can’t go back to what you did before, knowing that it’s possible to do such meaningful things.
I always will keep on drawing. But creating a show, a podcast, and supporting art education through a non­profit arm – that’s a different kind of art making than I’m used to. And it’s very joyful too. Some kids will probably never draw again and that’s fine. But I have no doubt that there’ll be a group of kids who might lean into their creativity and feel more self-confident in
a deep way, who are not afraid to make mistakes and try new things because they drew a silly dinosaur when they were young. And if we at DrawTogether can help to create that opportunity, how could we not?

You already expanded DrawTogether, pro­vided more than 2000 art kits and launched DrawTogether for classrooms, supporting school kids with the materials they need.
When we found out that a lot of teachers were using DrawTogether in their classes because there’s no fun­ding for art, we launched the initiative DrawTogether Classrooms where we provide them with all the tools they need. As art supplies are expensive, we raised mo­ney to give them to kids who need them. And quality ones because we think that makes a really big differ­ence in a kid’s creativity and self-confidence. We have a hundred classrooms in thirty states now that we support and our goal is 10.000 classrooms by 2023.

That’s ambitious.
Yes, but why not? (laughs)

Your graphic journalism was already very dedicated, and it seems that DrawTogether is now continuing this engagement in a straightforward way.
Yes, I’ve always engaged with social issues in my work. As my Meanwhile column in The New York Times was in the busi­ness section, I thought I could change something by focussing on the decision makers, the corporate and government leaders. But I don’t believe that anymore, because I learned that it’s very hard to change your mind when you are older. But watching kids who are so critical of themselves, who are scared to make a mistake, and what happens when you give them a safe space where they feel supported is unbe­lievable. Since I have seen how they turn their insecu­rities into confidence and all the other transformations I would have never believed to be possible, I want to put my energy into the kids. They are our hope.

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