Video: Looking Back, Looking Forward. A sequence of Bill Hendricks’s line drawings explores maps, branching paths, and emerging patterns. Music accompanies the images, along with a message.
Maps, patterns, and finding my way
During one of my daily walks, I realized something had been quietly growing over the past few weeks.
Looking back over my life, I see a thread I hadn’t fully recognized before.
As a teacher, I wasn’t really teaching maps. I was teaching how people think. Gestalt theory, visual relationships, organizing information, recognizing connections—those ideas found their way into almost everything I taught. Site maps, mind maps, color wheels, design systems… they were never just tools. They were ways of seeing.
Now I’m beginning to notice those same patterns emerging in my artwork.
The drawings began as what I called Decision Trees. Each branch suggested another possibility, another choice, another path.
But lately I’ve started wondering if they’re about something else.
Maybe they aren’t about making decisions.
Maybe they’re about recognizing patterns.
When life becomes uncertain, my instinct is to search for a new direction. Yet I’m beginning to wonder if the path is already there, waiting to be recognized. Perhaps finding our way isn’t about inventing something new. Perhaps it’s about noticing the connections that have been quietly leading us all along.
That thought has stayed with me.
It has even changed the way I look at these drawings. They no longer feel like illustrations of an idea. They feel like evidence of a conversation I’ve been having with myself without realizing it.
I don’t know exactly where this series is going.
That’s the exciting part.
For the first time in a while, I don’t feel like I’m forcing the work toward an answer. I’m simply paying attention to where it wants to lead.
Maybe that’s what artists do.
Maybe that’s what all of us do.
We keep looking back, not to live in the past, but to recognize the patterns that help us move forward.
“Humans are pattern-seeking, storytelling animals. We look for and find patterns in our world and in our lives.”
—Michael Shermer
Source: “Chicken Soup for the Evolutionist’s Soul,” MichaelShermer.com