Cartoonist Barry's challenge

By: Yoko

Original source: http://www.npr.org/2013/05/29/187079888/looking-ahead-to-the-future-of-cartoons-and-creativity (NPR)

Lynda Barry is a cartoonist. She had worked in alternative newspaper and was in charge of weekly comic strip Ernie Pool’s Comeek. After she worked in there from 1979 to 2008, she decided to shift her focus to teaching and started to work as an artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin.

 

She has a course which is described as a “writing and picture-making class with focus on the basic physical structure of the brain”. In the first class, she named all students with “brain names” such as Thalamus and Hippocampus so that she can know her students by their work, not by their personalities. Students remember names of brain when they finished semester by calling each other by names of brain. Lynda and students in this course got the point that they don’t be surprised to hear student say “Yeah, I saw Hippocampus at the party with Limbic System”. Now she become assistant professor of interdisciplinary creativity and is called Professor Old Skull.

In her class, she tries to soften student’s stiffed brain and help them tap innate creativity. Barry strongly believes that doodling has a power to inspire creativity. So she teach student to draw when they are listening to people read the stories, and aims to get that drawing habit into student’s hands. She herself is always with pen and paper.  The students wrote about 50000 words and hundreds of drawings during the course of semester, according to a student known as Brain Stem. 

Her courses are not requiring drawing skills or former experiences. She says that she is interested in how people draw who didn’t draw or who didn’t feel they could draw. She sometimes surprised to see the work of people who had quit drawing around adolescence and started to draw again. 

When she was 19, her teacher asked her “what is an image?” This is why she got interest in the intersection of art and brain science. She is still trying to answer this question.

I really respect people who can draw. I don’t think I can draw, but Barry believes a possibility in people who like me… maybe I can try drawing from now：）  Her classes look so unique. Encouraging student to doodle is interesting. Expanding own major to another field is good. I’m not sure what kind of biological function of the art she is trying to figure out. I want to look growth of her work.