Why I Spend Hours Sketching in Conflict Zones | George Butler | TED

Drawing has become one of the few moments in my life that I get to be present with somebody. It's a chance to be with them and connect, which I think is very rare in this world. My name is George Butler, I'm a reportage artist and that means going to different parts of the world, drawing humanitarian crisis, conflict zones, natural disasters and recording the stories that I find there. I spend a lot of time drawing in places that are typically very loud. Busy scenes around the edges of atrocity, and I'm just sitting and drawing, focusing on someone's eyebrows or their face, or the way that their eye catches the light. Someone's telling you this sort of heartbreaking story, and you're trying to record or relate something that you've seen in their face onto a page to best describe it. That's my role. To inform and offer dignity and understanding and connect one side of the world with the other. We live in such a technologically advanced age where we're supposed to be more interconnected than ever. And yet we have a far shallower understanding of other people that share our planet. I drew a man in Syria recently. He'd spent some time in Saydnaya prison, which is the kind of notoriously bad place. And as he talked through his story, I suddenly realized that all the things, the marks and the missing teeth and the loose hair and these gaunt eyes, were all from different moments of this story, and it sort of played itself out in front of me as I drew him and his mum sitting next to him. It kind of builds this picture of who they were. In Ukraine, in March 2023, we had arrived at a building that had been blown up by Russian artillery that morning. There was a man called Petro. He was 70 years old, and as he'd walked past the explosion in the morning, he'd found that someone's entire collection of books had been blown out of the window and were lying in a rose garden. And he'd just taken it upon himself to begin to stack the books into little piles. He challenged me and said, "If this was you, you wouldn't just walk by. If you saw a loaf of bread on the floor, you'd pick it up. These books are food for the soul." This very like grandfatherly figure, who didn't want to be on the news and wanted to wander off, who was just doing something so gentle, wouldn't ever have been imagined to exist in Ukraine as we think of it. Drawing allows me the time to find something else that is, in fact, far more human. Olga I met in Kyiv. She was 99 years old, and I found her in bed and she was very confused about why we were there. She thought that Putin was Hitler. She thought that maybe I was there to take her away from her home. And in this moment of sort of clarity, she looked up and said, "If you tell them all to be quiet, I'll tell them the story from the beginning." And we did, obviously, we were quite immediately. And she said, "I was born in 1923, in the USSR, I survived the Holodomor," which was the Great Famine, killed four million Ukrainians. She went to a collective farm with her father. War came, she was taken as a German slave to Nazi Dresden, where she worked for this one particular family. They fed her worms. She escaped with her friend, the police caught her and took her home. And she survived the shelling of Dresden. And at the end of the war, not knowing what she should do as a 20-year-old woman, she began to walk back to Ukraine with a herd of cows. She met her husband, had four children, lived another 80 years. And I met her aged 99. A couple of months, in fact, before she died. It was such a, sort of, personal and arresting moment. Drawing made it possible in that I had time to sit and listen. You get a little window into somebody's life and emotions and a situation that I would never otherwise have. And that's impossible, I think, to forget.