PALIN & THE BEAR: Taxonomy of Drawing:

When the Sarah Palin looks up at the Alaskan State Flag she first sees, eight golden stars on a dark blue field, then a length of woven cloth either lifted or let down by the wind, what she most probably doesn’t see are the two very physically different kinds of drawing that enable flag. 

Benny Benson made the first as he sat at his school desk. He is the thirteen-year-old seventh-grader, who won the 1926 Territory-wide contest for schoolchildren to design a flag for what would in time become the 49th state of America. The second is a drawing every Alaskan makes every time they look at their flag flapping in the wind and most times they look up at the night sky, most times without realizing it...

This paper was first delivered as a key note speech at Drawn Out 2010 , an RMIT/ UAL conference held at RMIT in Melbourne in April 2010