Geordie Millar's Giant Walking Moose

Wow. I'm stunned. As you may have ascertained by now, I like drawing animals and I like drawings of animals.

Furthermore, I have a lifelong affinity for charcoal. Just love the stuff. I use it in the classroom all the time because I think it helps to loosen up students who are too wedded to the precision of line they get from a pencil (not to mention their over-dependency on erasers). I want students to get their hands dirty, work large, and to risk smudging their paper with unintended marks.

So here I was, fishing around on the Internet, when I came across Canadian Artist Geordie Millar's Walking exhibit, which is a series of 16 huge (average size 60 X 76) charcoal on paper portraits of a single female moose walking, standing, lying down, turning, and so on. It's mesmerizing as a study of an animal and as art. The website set-up to showcase the exhibit is nicely done. Just click on any of the images scrolling by and take some time to appreciate the detail. Then recall that it's done in charcoal.

What I like very much about these drawings, as a teaching tool for young students, is that they show what drawing can be. The analogy I use with students is that learning to draw well is like learning to play an instrument. It takes time, dilligence, discipline and all the rest, but the reward is that with mastery comes very tangible results. But drawing from intense observation is also a form of meditation.

In his Artist's Statement about the "Walking" exhibit, Millar notes, "Are we comfortable around animals in the wild? No. Are they comfortable around us? No. This is one of the beautiful parts of life, simply because these glimpses are so vividly intense. One moose to draw and she's still a mystery to me after all these hours of drawing."