Vision Quest College of the Atlantic graduate and artist Sarah Drummond embarks on a journey around the world – and into her own

Like many seniors graduating from college this spring, Sarah Drummond has her eye on what’s next. Not surprisingly, that includes some travel plans. Make that a full year of travel, with an itinerary of island-hopping destinations ranging from Tierra del Fuego to Tahiti, extended stays in New Zealand and Australia, and a final stop next July in Sri Lanka.

Where she’s going may sound far-flung and exotic. But for this 23-year-old artist and naturalist, the real voyage will unfold, as always, in crossing the distance between what’s right in front of her and the drawings she makes to carry living details into the world. For her proposal, “Inquiring Eyes: Natural History Artists and Island Exploration,” Drummond is one of 50 graduates across the country to receive a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship: a one-year grant for independent study, with a $22,000 stipend and the chance to see where it takes her.

Practicing the art of seeing started early for Drummond, who grew up in Florissant, Colo., a town of 54 (yes, 54) people on the shoulder of Pike’s Peak. “A rich place,” is how she describes it.

“I grew up around people interested in nature and spending a lot of time outdoors, with my family and on my own.” (Her father is a field biologist, her mother teaches, and she has one younger brother.) She also grew up drawing – “anything, everything,” the College of the Atlantic graduate says. “Granite outcroppings. Pet mice. Huge wildflowers. Birds, snakes, tracks in the snow.”

She began keeping a nature journal when she was 13 and is now on her 11th volume of this tradition she calls “a critical part of my daily life. Drawing is my attempt to capture what’s beautiful, exciting, somehow important to me. The natural world is what interests me most. Drawing is about shaping the wonder.”

In a recent interview at the Bar Harbor college, Drummond said she understands it’s a tradition charged with scientific history and potent in its consequences: the first field and expedition artists who preceded her to islands she’ll visit on her fellowship were, as she puts it, “the eyes of entire nations.” Their observations recorded not only the flora and fauna of newly discovered landscapes, but also their impressions of culture and what someone found valuable, awesome, or splendid enough to single out as a subject for visual documentation and contemplation.

Drummond is beginning her journey in London because she wants to see the original artwork of Sydney Parkinson, the young Scottish draughtsman who accompanied Captain Cook on his second Pacific voyage, at the London Natural History Museum. She wants to look at the sketchbooks of Conrad Martens, the English artist who joined Charles Darwin’s voyage of the Beagle for several months in South America, in the University Library at Cambridge, and go to Kew Gardens in Surrey, where the Marianne North Gallery houses more than 800 of this 19th century artist’s botanical paintings.

Though Drummond is certainly curious to find both what’s changed and what continues as she makes her way through these ecologically significant national parks, deserts, and rainforests from island to island, she’s clear that the purpose of her travels is neither to recreate the original artists’ expeditions nor to redraw their subjects. Instead, she wants to draw and paint whatever draws her own inquiring eyes: to pay what she calls “proper attention” to doing the work of accurate observation “faithfully” and revealing its truth to share. She still needs to make the hand-bound journals she’ll carry and pack her drawing gear (“I use big zip-lock bags,” she says. “They work well”).

“The Watson is a chance to do the thing I love most full time,” Drummond says. “I always knew that I could draw, but sketching from life made me realize I could see.”