A discussion on life drawing, anatomy & art has just started on the Drawing Research Network:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A1=ind…
Contributers, so far, are enthusiastically in support of observational drawing from life as a valuable activity at all levels. Well, they/we would be, wouldn’t they/we? The drawing versus no-drawing debate is probably set to continue for ever, a bit like the “painting is dead” debate. I don’t think there’s any doubt that you don’t need to be able to produce Victorian Art School style drawings in order to be an artist, and probably the academic, 5H pencil, drawing from plaster casts for a year method of teaching did enough to kill off drawing for ever. The fact that it didn’t do so shows that the need to draw, or make marks, is deeply ingrained in the human brain.
Life classes again, and this time a model who teaches Yoga. She held the pose for two forty minute sessions without a break: I tried it at home later and suffered acute discomfort over the greater trochanter of both hips (the sticky-out bony bit at the outer edge of the top of the thigh – it’s quicker to use the anatomical term). It’s seriously difficult to get the gesture of the pose correct when the body is contorted: in fact, some of the limbs don’t even look human.
The nature of the pose raises some questions about the relationship between artist and model: we’re all concerned about the model’s comfort to start with, but then get engrossed in our work and run the risk of forgetting the person on the dais. The subject becomes an object if you’re not careful – satirised nicely in “The Horse’s Mouth” by (Mr.) Joyce Carey when sculptor’s model Lolie eventually succumbs after days of posing in the nude for her husband, Abel:
“The diagnosis at the hospital was exposure, shock, displacement of the caudal vertebrae and malnutrition…..Abel’s fussing about his lump of nonsense [the stone] and the trouble with Lolie, did not, as I had feared put me off my work.” (from the Penguin edition1978, © the author 1944)
Some similarities with the alleged indifference of medics to patients? Shurely not, as they say in Private Eye.
Back to life classes after the half term break. The “proper” model failed to turn up (again – and it’s not always the same model, either) and (again) one of the tutor’s friends stood in. These “temps” are always really good, stand or sit very still and have interesting shapes, but – being amateurs – don’t take their clothes off. I don’t find drapery very exciting to draw, never have, and it doesn’t help my anatomy revision….
Still, I sat on the floor below the dais to get some interesting foreshortening, and then wandered around drawing the surface anatomy. Reviewing these last drawings today, I’m struck by the resemblance between the shapes underlying the upper arm and the landscape drawing posted earlier; how the light flows over the surface planes, delineating the underlying structure.
