One of my key resolutions for the new year was to get back to life drawing every other week at the Basic Inquiry studio. It's the nuts and bolts of the game for anyone interested in drawing or painting the figure, as the artist Paul Klee has been one among many to testify:
"The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions."
When I walked in the door at my first session in January, the model was doing his own warm-up -- so fantastic, I grabbed my charcoal stick and just tried to keep up with him, one informal pose after and on top of another (shown above). Like many of our models, he was a dancer and was just passing through on his way to an audition in Germany, collecting a few bucks along the way with his effortless poses. Here's a 10-minute pose:
We artists or wannabes sit in a circle around the model's stand, and our half of the circle viewed his back for two of the three long (30-minute) poses.
When he faced our way in a final restful Zen pose, I found the front view very challenging:
and decided to concentrate on his hand.
Although I rarely stick to my plan, I usually plot out what I'll aim for in each session. Two weeks later, when we had another male model, I decided to start with smudge drawings for the 1-minute poses. It's an easy recipe: Splash down some thick smudges; then add lines for limbs.
I'd also decided to focus on hands, as I did in these 5-minute poses (with a foot, too!):
Eventually,... on to full-length views for two of the final 30-minute poses:
Not shown here is one dark and brooding head -- which even gave the model a laugh when I said to him, "I guess you never imagined that as a 20-something Japanese guy, you could be made to look like a middle-aged Italian."
I was happy to see a female model again in the early February session, and I needn't have worried about her anorexic body type. She was superb, which generally means two things -- the ability to devise interesting/challenging positions and the ability to HOLD them.
This time, I did the 1-minute poses in a technique of alternating straight and curved lines -- an interesting way of looking at the body.
One of her 30-minute poses was a lovely seated view that also gave me time to practice the difficult hand position.
Off to a bad start on the second long pose, I decided to begin again and just do her head:
Three hours of this kind of concentration and production is, frankly, rather exhausting. Through the final pose, I'm usually longing for lunch and a nap. I managed to stay awake for this last one, wondering if the model herself might doze off.
I had not thought about the exhaustive nature of this class, but I can imagine that it must be. Although this is a learning situation that every art school attendee must go through, it seems to me that it could take awhile to get comfortable with the close-up, warts-and-all nudity of the subject, the voyeur that lurks hidden in most of us poking up its head and saying, "Wow... he/she has a big ___! I wonder if I look like that..." Of course it's more likely the time limit on a pose that puts pressure on the student.
ReplyDeleteI think I have told you about my very talented college chum who took a three-week summer class in Life Drawing. It was held after the spring semester and graduation were finished, most likely because in 1964 there was still a modicum of decorum. Even so, the campus grounds crew took a special interest in keeping up the flora outside of the studio window!