NOTEBOOK: I tried to draw Stonehenge

In which I try to draw again

Some of my best friends moved to Britain. I tried to stop them, by talking about all the amazing developments unfolding in the United States of America. It didn’t work.

So my family crossed the ocean to visit them. They took us to Stonehenge, which I have always wanted to visit but never have. Like tacos at an out-of-the-way food truck that you have to find the current location of on Instagram, it lived up to the hype.

Now, one of things I’ve learned as a parent is that if you want your children to endure experiences they may or may not like, you should bring them a notebook to draw in. We have crushed many museums this way. So my wife, Priya Parker, had brought notebooks for the kids, and she happened to bring some for the adults as well.

I am, sadly, one of those adults whose days of drawing, sketching, painting were mostly left behind in childhood, along with the ability to process carbohydrates. But now here I was in Stonehenge, and we had our notebooks, and I decided to draw.

As I began to look at the stones, really look as you have to look at things in order to record them, they morphed under my gaze. Sure, you could just draw the rocks as they were. But what if they were more than rocks?

Still, at first, I started with the very basic, the very literal.

(I don’t do shading and texture and things like that, because, like I said, I retired.)

But I also have another best friend (as I believe Mindy Kaling said, it’s a tier, not a role) who studies drawing and has gotten very good, and he was in my head as I began.

Now I started considering other ways of looking at what I was already looking at. Stonehenge, but make it more skyliney. Urbanhenge. (You never do leave New York…)

Or maybe the one above is actually a family that doesn’t give its members enough personal space. Let’s call it Indianhenge.

OK, what about Stonehenge but a single-line drawing? No lifting of the pencil!

But make it weirder, I was thinking to myself. Make it boxes, like some Legohenge.

Make it wooly, blurry, alive. Furryhenge.

My son, who is ten, has a penchant for inventing secret languages. I think it may be because he doesn’t want me to understand what is going on. But if you are reading this, son, let me just say: Elee dodu tolo tolo pippery stan. Somehow, watching him work in parallel, I got the idea of treating Stonehenge like a language or lost code.

I also tried to strip down the code, homogenize it, find imaginary signal in the noise.

Now I built on the code idea, though “building” might be an overly strong word here.

Finally, to make my mathematically oriented, engineer-trained father proud of me, I attempted to convert it into numbers. Quanthenge. Even though I am very glad it does not, in fact, look anything like this drawing:

I don’t exactly know why I am sharing these utterly mediocre sketches with you. Actually, it’s not me doing it; it’s the kid in me. After all, it’s summer. I guess I thought I’d share in case there is a kid in you wanting to dust off some old pursuit, too.

---