“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character

But Is It Art?

Once I was at a party playing bongos, and I got going pretty well. One of the guys was particularly inspired by the drumming. He went into the bathroom, took off his shirt, smeared shaving cream in funny designs all over his chest, and came out dancing wildly, with cherries hanging from his ears. Naturally, this crazy nut and I became good friends right away. His name is Jirayr Zorthian; he’s an artist.

We often had long discussions about art and science. I’d say things like, “Artists are lost: they don’t have any subject! They used to have the religious subjects, but they lost their religion and now they haven’t got anything. They don’t understand the technical world they live in; they don’t know anything about the beauty of the real world—the scientific world—so they don’t have anything in their hearts to paint.”

Jerry would reply that artists don’t need to have a physical subject; there are many emotions that can he expressed through art. Besides, art can be abstract. Furthermore, scientists destroy the beauty of nature when they pick it apart and turn it into mathematical equations.

One time I was over at Jerry’s for his birthday, and one of these dopey arguments lasted until 3:00 AM. The next morning I called him up: “Listen, Jerry,” I said, “the reason we have these arguments that never get anywhere is that you don’t know a damn thing about science, and I don’t know a damn thing about art. So, on alternate Sundays, I’ll give you a lesson in science, and you give me a lesson in art.”

“OK,” he said. “I’ll teach you how to draw.”

“That will be impossible,” I said, because when I was in high school, the only thing I could draw was pyramids on deserts—consisting mainly of straight lines—and from time to time I would attempt a palm tree and put in a sun. I had absolutely no talent. I sat next to a guy who was equally adept. When he was permitted to draw anything, it consisted of two flat, elliptical blobs, like tires stacked on one another, with a stalk coming out of the top, culminating in a green triangle. It was supposed to be a tree. So I bet Jerry that he wouldn’t be able to teach me to draw.

“Of course you’ll have to work,” he said.

I promised to work, but still bet that he couldn’t teach me to draw. I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It’s difficult to describe because it’s an emotion. It’s analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the whole universe: there’s a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run “behind the scenes” by the same organization, the same physical laws. It’s an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It’s a feeling of awe—of scientific awe—which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had this emotion. It could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.

Jerry turned out to be a very good teacher. He told me first to go home and draw anything. So I tried to draw a shoe; then I tried to draw a flower in a pot. It was a mess!

The next time we met I showed him my attempts: “Oh, look!” he said. “You see, around in back here, the line of the flower pot doesn’t touch the leaf.” (I had meant the line to come up to the leaf.) “That’s very good. It’s a way of showing depth. That’s very clever of you.”

“And the fact that you don’t make all the lines the same thickness (which I didn’t mean to do) is good. A drawing with all the lines the same thickness is dull.” It continued like that: Everything that I thought was a mistake, he used to teach me something in a positive way. He never said it was wrong; he never put me down. So I kept on trying, and I gradually got a little bit better, but I was never satisfied.

To get more practice I also signed up for a correspondence school course, with International Correspondence Schools, and I must say they were good. They started me off drawing pyramids and cylinders, shading them and so on. We covered many areas: drawing, pastels, watercolors, and paints. Near the end I petered out: I made an oil painting for them, but I never sent it in. They kept sending me letters urging me to continue. They were very good.

I practiced drawing all the time, and became very interested in it. If I was at a meeting that wasn’t getting anywhere—like the one where Carl Rogers came to Caltech to discuss with us whether Caltech should develop a psychology department—I would draw the other people. I had a little pad of paper I kept with me and I practiced drawing wherever I went. So, as Jerry taught me, I worked very hard.

Jerry, on the other hand, didn’t learn much physics. His mind wandered too easily. I tried to teach him something about electricity and magnetism, but as soon as I mentioned electricity, he’d tell me about some motor he had that didn’t work, and how might he fix it. When I tried to show him how an electromagnet works by making a little coil of wire and hanging a nail on a piece of string, I put the voltage on, the nail swung into the coil, and Jerry said, “Ooh! It’s just like fucking!” So that was the end of that.

So now we have a new argument—whether he’s a better teacher than I was, or I’m a better student than he was.

I gave up the idea of trying to get an artist to appreciate the feeling I had about nature so he could portray it. I would flow have to double my efforts in learning to draw so I could do it myself. It was a very ambitious undertaking, and I kept the idea entirely to myself, because the odds were I would never be able to do it.

Early on in the process of learning to draw, some lady I knew saw my attempts and said, “You should go down to the Pasadena Art Museum. They have drawing classes there, with models—nude models.”

“No,” I said; “I can’t draw well enough: I’d feel very embarrassed.”

“You’re good enough; you should see some of the others!”

So I worked up enough courage to go down there. In the first lesson they told us about newsprint—very large sheets of low-grade paper, the size of a newspaper—and the various kinds of pencils and charcoal to get. For the second class a model came, and she started off with a ten-minute pose.

I started to draw the model, and by the time I’d done one leg, the ten minutes were up. I looked around and saw that everyone else had already drawn a complete picture, with shading in the back—the whole business.

I realized I was way out of my depth. But finally at the end, the model was going to pose for thirty minutes. I worked very hard, and with great effort I was able to draw her whole outline. This time there was half a hope. So this time I didn’t cover up my drawing, as I had done with all the previous ones.

We went around to look at what the others had done, and I discovered what they could really do: they draw the model, with details and shadows, the pocketbook that’s on the bench she’s sitting on, the platform, everything! They’ve all gone zip, zip, zip, zip, zip with the charcoal, all over, and I figure it’s hopeless—utterly hopeless.

I go back to cover up my drawing, which consists of a few lines crowded into the upper left-hand corner of the newsprint—I had, until then, only been drawing on 8? X 11 paper—but some others in the class are standing nearby: Oh, look at this one,” one of them says. “Every line counts!” I didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but I felt encouraged enough to come to the next class. In the meantime, Jerry kept telling me that drawings that are too full aren’t any good. His job was to teach me not to worry about the others, so he’d tell me they weren’t so hot.

I noticed that the teacher didn’t tell people much (the only thing he told me was my picture was too small on the page). Instead, he tried to inspire us to experiment with new approaches. I thought of how we teach physics: We have so many techniques—so many mathematical methods—that we never stop telling the students how to do things. On the other hand, the drawing teacher is afraid to tell you anything. If your lines are very heavy, the teacher can’t say, “Your lines are too heavy,” because some artist has figured out a way of making great pictures using heavy lines. The teacher doesn’t want to push you in some particular direction. So the drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical Problems.

They were always telling me to “loosen up,” to become more relaxed about drawing. I figured that made