Handcrafted data

Why many great reference works still rely on paintbrush and pencil, not the digital camera

IT WOULD BE naive to expect any improvement on the knowledge, artistry, and dedication that made John James Audubon - a man who drew birds - into a household name. His magnum opus, "Birds of America," published in several installments between 1827 and 1838, is an unrivaled masterpiece of both art and science, distilling 14 years of brave travel, careful scholarship, and technical innovation into hand-colored, life-sized prints depicting 497 of our native species. He single-handedly introduced an entire continent's birds to the world; it is hard to think of a more imposing or influential project in any discipline.

Still, one might be forgiven for assuming that by now Audubon's painstaking methods would have been entirely superseded by the other groundbreaking image-maker from the 1820s: photography. Having developed greatly in recent decades - to the point where birds can be caught at very high resolution, in all kinds of motion, at great distance, and in all but the lowest light - photography has long since become the measure of visual realism.

But in fact, nearly two centuries after the publication of his famous folios, it is Audubon's technique, and not the sharp eye of the modern camera, that prevails in a wide variety of reference books. For bird-watchers, the best guides, the most coveted guides - like those by David Allen Sibley and Roger Tory Peterson - are still filled with hand-painted images. The same is true for similar volumes on fish, trees, and even the human body. Ask any first-year medical student what they consult during dissections, and they will name Dr. Frank H. Netter's meticulously drafted "Atlas of Human Anatomy." Or ask architects and carpenters to see their structures, and they will often show you chalk and pencil "renderings," even after the things have been built and professionally photographed.

All of this handmade descriptive illustration raises an interesting question: Why would 21st century bird-watchers - to say nothing of doctors or architects - still consult watercolors and gouaches for information? It seems odd that painting would have anything to contribute to our accumulated trove of megapixels, much less that it would be a preferred medium among fact-seeking insiders. But painting offers something the mechanical methods don't - a sophisticated technology of its own for showing us what we really need to see. And although Audubon himself (a fierce innovator) would probably be surprised to find his technique still going strong, his drawings provide an excellent example of just what makes painting so irreplaceable.

Looking at the many handsome examples in the new "Audubon: Early Drawings" - due to be published this fall by Harvard, this is the first book to collect and reproduce the pastel, ink, and watercolor studies from early in his career - it's not hard to glean the first principle that makes his illustrations so effective: spareness. Although Audubon usually sketches in some contextual clues - a tree stump, some sand, three or four leaves - his pages are remarkably blank. What he is really studying is the bird, so Audubon surrounds the specimen - the osprey, the bullfinch, or the linnet - in white, letting his notes take care of the habitat, migration patterns, and the rest. Audubon preemptively limits the context, isolating and foregrounding the more salient details so we know at a glance what's important and what isn't.

Besides seamlessly imposing a hierarchy of information, the handmade image is also free to present its subject from the most efficient viewpoint. Audubon sets a high standard in this regard; he is often at pains to depict the beak in its most revealing profile, the crucial feathers at an identifiable angle, the front leg extended just so. When the nighthawk and the whip-poor-will are pictured in full flight, their legs tucked away, he draws the feet at the side of the page, so we're not left guessing. If Audubon draws a bird in profile, as he does with the pitch-black rook and the grayer hooded crow, we're not missing any details a three-quarters view would have shown.

Later, as Audubon composed the more complex pictures for "Birds of America," he would often arrange gatherings on a branch, so we're shown several views - of the ivory-billed woodpecker, for example - which efficiently reveal the wings and beaks in their multiple aspects and positions. Sometimes, as with the Carolina turtle-dove, Audubon even includes a nestling in the scene, so we can see the species in its various stages of development. A subtle kind of cubism is at work here: several well-chosen two-dimensional images start to imply the three-dimensional - and even the four-dimensional - shape of the bird. The synthesis of what Audubon referred to as "hundreds of rude sketches" (which fed annual bonfires on his birthday), the refined glimpses we see are never arbitrary, contingent, or incomplete. From the famous plunging Jer falcon to the scurrying oyster-catcher and the dramatically looping neck of the American flamingo, Audubon always constructs a view that is nothing if not ideal.

Painting excels at just this kind of Platonic portraiture, abstracting the "form" or ideal of something from the individual examples. When we turn to a picture to identify a bird - or the human pancreas, or a Doric column - we want a likeness not of any particular instance, but of the category itself. Ignoring all the anomalies and idiosyncratic moments that cameras helplessly collect, a draftsman of Audubon's caliber is free to focus on what's essential or distinctive and distill those qualities - gathered from observing live birds, posing dead specimens, and studying skeletons - into an image that invites both recognition and classification.

What separated Audubon from his many competent predecessors, however, was that he went beyond mere illustration. Even in these early works he elegantly fuses the scientific and artistic requirements of his genre, so we learn not just the physical characteristics of a species, but also the outlines of its personality. Many of the plainer birds are presented plainly - itself a sensitive choice - but Audubon's round-eyed barn owl, for example, regards us rather stoically, having just swiveled its neck a perfect 90 degrees. Meanwhile, the clown-faced Carolina parakeet, sadly now extinct, is pictured playfully grabbing a bright pecan, and the chimney swift is just a stark silhouette tilted in flight.

Audubon "typically shot the birds he drew," Richard Rhodes tells us in the introduction to "Early Drawings," but his genius was to convey their liveliness. One of his major innovations was to use wires to hold recently killed birds in various lifelike poses before he did the taxidermy. (Previous generations of illustrators would fix the bird first, and then be stuck drawing that one position.) The movement of the artist's hands also plays a role: Flicks of the wrists and the brush can generate marks that look both accurate and fleeting; likewise, subtleties of touch can make a specimen look perfectly positioned rather than simply deceased. Even though Audubon's letters reveal frustrations in this regard ("I made some pretty fair signs for poulterers!"), and his notes include complaints about his materials ("Poor imitation of Colour the natural Bird being extremely Glossy and Rich"), these "difficulties and disappointments," he wrote, "never for a moment destroyed the desire of obtaining perfect representations of nature."

Audubon held this faith in painting because it allowed him to synthesize a staggering amount of anatomical, behavioral, and visual information into a single suggestive and iconic image. Of course, none of this is to say that high-resolution photographs, films, videos, or computer-generated holograms of birds are useless or necessarily inferior to the painted versions. (In fact, we can safely assume that contemporary bird illustrators consult them religiously!) But the present-day survival of the genre Audubon mastered does make a case for the special qualities of painted information.

The role of handmade images may even be expanding in the information age, taking visual representation in unexpected new directions. The recent popularity of graphic novels, for example, reminds us that drawing can convincingly present a tremendous amount of imagined and recollected information, and projects by Joe Sacco (who has made densely illustrated books about the conflicts in Palestine and Bosnia) and Steve Mumford (who made a series of watercolors while embedded with the Army's Third Infantry Division in Iraq) have shown us that painting has a role to play even in journalism. In Sacco's case, the painstaking effort required to draw, for example, crowds of refugees humanized the collective experience of war in a way that has proved difficult for conventional photojournalism. With Mumford, the unlikely result was that in some situations his set of watercolors proved more innocuous than a digital camera, resulting in some very candid - and even intimate - images from inside the Iraq war. Both artists reported from the front lines not just with new information, but new kinds of information.

Confronted with unprecedented quantities of data, we are constantly reminded that quality is what really matters. At a certain point, the quality and even usefulness of information starts being defined not by the precision and voracity of technology, but by the accuracy and circumspection of art. Seen in this context, Audubon shows us that painting is not just an old fashioned medium: it is a discipline that can serve as a very useful filter, collecting, editing, and carefully synthesizing information into a single efficient and evocative image - giving us the information that we really want, information we can use and, as is the case with Audubon, even cherish.

Dushko Petrovich, a painter and critic, is the resident fellow in painting at Boston University and the founding editor of Paper Monument.