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

by Richard Phillips Feynman

  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 no more sense than telling someone who’s just learning to drive to “loosen up” at the wheel. It isn’t going to work. Only after you know how to do it carefully can you begin to loosen up. So I resisted this perennial loosen-up stuff.

  One exercise they had invented for loosening us up was to draw without looking at the paper. Don’t take your eyes off the model; just look at her and make the lines on the paper without looking at what you’re doing.

  One of the guys says, “I can’t help it. I have to cheat. I bet everybody’s cheating!”

  “I’m not cheating!” I say.

  “Aw, baloney!” they say.

  I finish the exercise and they come over to look at what I had drawn. They found that, indeed, I was NOT cheating; at the very beginning my pencil point had busted, and there was nothing but impressions on the paper.

  When I finally got my pencil to work, I tried it again. I found that my drawing had a kind of strength—a funny, semi-Picasso-like strength—which appealed to me. The reason I felt good about that drawing was, I knew it was impossible to draw well that way, and therefore it didn’t have to be good—and that’s really what the loosening up was all about. I had thought that “loosen up” meant “make sloppy drawings,” but it really meant to relax and riot worry about how the drawing is going to come out.

  I made a lot of progress in the class, and I was feeling pretty good. Up until the last session, all the models we had were rather heavy and out of shape; they were rather interesting to draw. But in the last class we had a model who was a nifty blonde, perfectly proportioned. It was then that I discovered that I still didn’t know how to draw: I couldn’t make anything come out that looked anything like this beautiful girl! With the other models, if you draw something a little too big or bit too small, it doesn’t make any difference because it’s all out of shape anyway. But when you’re trying to draw something that’s so well put together, you can’t fool yourself: It’s got to be just right!

  During one of the breaks I overheard a guy who could really draw asking this model whether she posed privately. She said yes. “Good. But I don’t have a studio yet. I’ll have to work that out first.”

  I figured I could learn a lot from this guy, and I’d never get another chance to draw this nifty model unless I did something. “Excuse me,” I said to him, “I have a room downstairs in my house that could be used as a studio.”

  They both agreed. I took a few of the guy’s drawings to my friend Jerry, but he was aghast. “Those aren’t so good,” he said. He tried to explain why, but I never really understood.

  Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art. I had very little appreciation for things artistic, and only very rarely, such as once when I was in a museum in Japan. I saw a painting done on brown paper of bamboo, and what was beautiful about it to me was that it was perfectly poised between being just some brush strokes and being bamboo—I could make it go back and forth.

  The summer after the drawing class I was in Italy for a science conference and I thought I’d like to see the Sistine Chapel. I got there very early in the morning, bought my ticket before anybody else, and ran up the stairs as soon as the place opened. I therefore had the unusual pleasure of looking at the whole chapel for a moment, in silent awe, before anybody else came in.

  Soon the tourists came, and there were c
rowds of people milling around, talking different languages, pointing at this and that. I’m walking around, looking at the ceiling for a while. Then my eye came down a little bit and I saw some big, framed pictures, and I thought, “Gee! I never knew about these!”

  Unfortunately I’d left my guidebook at the hotel, but I thought to myself, “I know why these panels aren’t famous; they aren’t any good.” But then I looked at another one, and I said, “Wow! That’s a good one.” I looked at the others. “That’s good too, so is that one, but that one’s lousy.” I had never heard of these panels, but I decided that they were all good except for two.

  I went into a place called the Sala de Raphael—the Raphael Room—and I noticed the same phenomenon. I thought to myself, “Raphael is irregular. He doesn’t always succeed. Sometimes he’s very good. Sometimes it’s just junk.”

  When I got back to my hotel, I looked at the guidebook. In the part about the Sistine Chapel: “Below the paintings by Michelangelo there are fourteen panels by Botticelli, Perugino”—all these great artists—“and two by So-and-so, which are of no significance.” This was a terrific excitement to me, that I also could tell the difference between a beautiful work of art and one that’s not, without being able to define it. As a scientist you always think you know what you’re doing, so you tend to distrust the artist who says, “It’s great,” or “It’s no good,” and then is not able to explain to you why, as Jerry did with those drawings I took him. But here I was, sunk: I could do it too!

  In the Raphael Room the secret turned out to be that only some of the paintings were made by the great master; the rest were made by students. I had liked the ones by Raphael. This was a big jab for my self-confidence in my ability to appreciate art.

  Anyway, the guy from the art class and the nifty model came over to my house a number of times and I tried to draw her and learn from him. After many attempts I finally drew what I felt was a really nice picture—it was a portrait of her head—and I got very excited about this first success.

  I had enough confidence to ask an old friend of mine named Steve Demitriades if his beautiful wife would pose for me, and in return I would give him the portrait. He laughed. “If she wants to waste her time posing for you, it’s all right with me, ha, ha, ha.”

  I worked very hard on her portrait, and when he saw it, he turned over to my side completely: “It’s just wonderful!” he exclaimed. “Can you get a photographer to make copies of it? I want to send one to my mother in Greece!” His mother had never seen the girl he married. That was very exciting to me, to think that I had improved to the point where someone wanted one of my drawings.

  A similar thing happened at a small art exhibit that some guy at Caltech had arranged, where I contributed two drawings and a painting. He said, “We oughta put a price on the drawings.”

  I thought, “That’s silly! I’m not trying to sell them.”

  “It makes the exhibition more interesting. If you don’t mind parting with them, just put a price on.”

  After the show the guy told me that a girl had bought one of my drawings and wanted to speak to me to find out more about it.

  The drawing was called “The Magnetic Field of the Sun.” For this particular drawing I had borrowed one of those beautiful pictures of the solar prominences taken at the solar laboratory in Colorado. Because I understood how the sun’s magnetic field was holding up the flames and had, by that time, developed some technique for drawing magnetic field lines (it was similar to a girl’s flowing hair), I wanted to draw something beautiful that no artist would think to draw: the rather complicated and twisting lines of the magnetic field, close together here and spreading out there.

  I explained all this to her, and showed her the picture that gave me the idea.

  She told me this story: She and her husband had gone to the exhibit, and they both liked the drawing very much. “Why don’t we buy it?” she suggested.

  Her husband was the kind of a man who could never do anything right away. “Let’s think about it a while,” he said.

  She realized his birthday was a few months ahead, so she went back the same day and bought it herself.

  That night when he came home from work, he was depressed. She finally got it out of him: He thought it would be nice to buy her that picture, but when he went back to the exhibit, he was told that the picture had already been sold. So she had it to surprise him on his birthday.

  What I got out of that story was something still very new to me: I understood at last what art is really for, at least in certain respects. It gives somebody, individually, pleasure. You can make something that somebody likes so much that they’re depressed, or they’re happy, on account of that damn thing you made! In science, it’s sort of general and large: You don’t know the individuals who have appreciated it directly.

  I understood that to sell a drawing is not to make money, but to be sure that it’s in the home of someone who really wants it; someone who would feel bad if they didn’t have it. This was interesting.

  So I decided to sell my drawings. However, I didn’t want people to buy my drawings because the professor of physics isn’t supposed to be able to draw, isn’t that wonderful, so I made up a false name. My friend Dudley Wright suggested “Au Fait,” which means “It is done” in French. I spelled it O-f-e-y, which turned out to be a name the blacks used for “whitey.” But after all, I was whitey, so it was all right.

  One of my models wanted me to make a drawing for her, but she didn’t have the money. (Models don’t have money; if they did, they wouldn’t be modeling.) She offered to pose three times free if I would give her a drawing.

  “On the contrary,” I said. “I’ll give you three drawings if you’ll pose once for nothing.”

  She put one of the drawings I gave her on the wall in her small room, and soon her boyfriend noticed it. He liked it so much that he wanted to commission a portrait of her. He would pay me sixty dollars. (The money was getting pretty good now.)

  Then she got the idea to be my agent: She could earn a little extra money by going around selling my drawings, saying, “There’s a new artist in Altadena …” It was fun to be in a different world! She arranged to have some of my drawings put on display at Bullock’s, Pasadena’s most elegant department store. She and the lady from the art section picked out some drawings—drawings of plants that I had made early on (that I didn’t like)—and had them all framed. Then I got a signed document from Bullock’s saying that they had such-and-such drawings on consignment. Of course nobody bought any of them, but otherwise I was a big success: I had my drawings on sale at Bullock’s! It was fun to have them there, just so I could say one day that I had reached that pinnacle of success in the art world.

  Most of my models I got through Jerry, but I also tried to get models on my own. Whenever I met a young woman who looked as if she would be interesting to draw, I would ask her to pose for me. It always ended up that I would draw her face, because I didn’t know exactly how to bring up the subject of posing nude.

  Once when I was over at Jerry’s, I said to his wife Dabney, “I can never get the girls to pose nude: I don’t know how Jerry does it!”

  “Well, did you ever ask them?”

  “Oh! I never thought of that.”

  The next girl I met that I wanted to pose for me was a Caltech student. I asked her if she would pose nude. “Certainly,” she said, and there we were! So it was easy. I guess there was so much in the back of my mind that I thought it was somehow wrong to ask.

  I’ve done a lot of drawing by now, and I’ve gotten so I like to draw nudes best. For all I know it’s not art, exactly; it’s a mixture. Who knows the percentages?

  One model I met through Jerry had been a Playboy playmate. She was tall and gorgeous. However, she thought she was too tall. Every girl in the world, looking at her, would have been jealous. When she would come into a room, she’d be half stooped over. I tried to teach her, when she was posing, to please stand up, because she was so el
egant and striking. I finally talked her into that.

  Then she had another worry: she’s got “dents” near her groin. I had to get out a book of anatomy to show her that it’s the attachment of the muscles to the ilium, and to explain to her that you can’t see these dents on everybody; to see them, everything must be just right, in perfect proportion, like she was. I learned from her that every woman is worried about her looks, no matter how beautiful she is.

  I wanted to draw a picture of this model in color, in pastels, just to experiment. I thought I would first make a sketch in charcoal, which would be later covered with the pastel. When I got through with this charcoal drawing that I had made without worrying how it was going to look, I realized that it was one of the best drawings I had ever made. I decided to leave it, and forget about the pastels for that one.

  My “agent” looked at it and wanted to take it around.

  “You can’t sell that,” I said, “it’s on newsprint.”

  “Oh, never mind,” she said.

  A few weeks later she came back with this picture in a beautiful wooden frame with a red band and a gold edge. It’s a funny thing which must make artists, generally, unhappy—how much improved a drawing gets when you put a frame around it. My agent told me that a particular lady got all excited about the drawing and they took it to a picture framer. He told them that there were special techniques for mounting drawings on newsprint: Impregnate it with plastic, do this, do that. So this lady goes to all that trouble over this drawing I had made, and then has my agent bring it back to me. “I think the artist would like to see how lovely it is, framed,” she said.

  I certainly did. There was another example of the direct pleasure somebody got out of one of my pictures. So it was a real kick selling the drawings.