I have never done life drawing. I may have drawn a pineapple at school….or at least a profile of a boy wearing a trench coat (it was the ’80s) sitting in a chair. I do have a vague recollection of the Gothy artistic types in fourth year being taken to a local college to draw nudes. I seem to recall there was a lot of snickering about it.
No, my brushes with this medium and its muses have been confined to walking past garish orange and bulgy pastel displays under plastic glass at Adult Education centres. I would feel uncomfortable and look away but could not shake the notion that someone had spent a long time staring at those parts getting them ‘just so’.
So I was extra nervous when I went to the Lorry Greenberg Community Centre on Saturday at 1 p.m. to take the Life Drawing Workshop (no cameras please).
I had to borrow my 9 year-old daughters sketch book and I was under strict instructions from her not to fill it with naked people.
Organizer Joseph Michael is one of those people that reveal in a stealth-like manner that they are fascinating. They don’t lean on a door frame and go on about how great they are. They just casually mention some fact like “I nearly died two years ago” or “I have five kids under 10 with another one on the way” or “I am an aeronautical engineer” over a three hour time period.
Joseph says the people that come to the class are of assorted flavours;
If you were outside looking in you would think us a strange bunch of people. We have engineers, students, retired people, professional artists….Surprisingly there are a lot of engineers, I think on the weekend this reminds them that they are human…Everyone has a different approach. Some are very methodical, mathematical in their approach, and then there are those of us that just get lost, we have the paper, pencil, the model, everything else goes away.
So Joseph took up the finer arts after a car accident truncated his Tae Kwan Do career. His first class attracted exactly nobody but he carried on holding them and now the non-profit group does manage to break even.
I was prepared for the worst case scenario (in my mind) of a male model but our muse was a ridiculously fit girl. I don’t know why that is better. Maybe it because of the proliferation of the female body in media, the portrait gallery, the fact I can’t draw hands let alone male bits.
Still, I found the first part of the class a bit of a rude awakening. Our model assumed three 90 second poses where the roomful of artists sketched in a flurry and in which I drew her in three separate portraits featuring three separate afflictions. In the first she sported a withered arm, the next had sizable linebacker shoulders and the last featured a 39 inch thigh coupled with a six inch one.
After that we had insanely good coffee (freshly ground beans and homemade cookies … Joseph is also Italian) and got ready for the longer poses.
It was amazing to me how quickly the discomfort associated with the fact a woman was posing nude in a room full of people wearing clothes faded away. Maybe you just never take the time to look that closely at another human. Gradually you find yourself thinking: “How can I get that shine on her shoulder?” “Perspective is stupid….makes everything look like a mistake” and “I think I need to redraw her stomach so it isn’t three feet long.”
Using an eraser becomes an oddly intimate proposition and you find yourself obsessing over the exact journey of each strand of hair down her shoulder. I have no trouble seeing how artists hanging about in garrets in Paris began to assume their own greatness was mixed up in their muse.
I spoke with our model afterward and it turns out sitting still is really, really, really, hard to do. I had a feeling this might be the case after never ever having managed it myself…not even once… not even in Yin class.
The hardest part is definitely not falling over when your limbs go numb… (I asked does that happen?) Oh yeah about five minutes in the tingling starts and then the numbness … It takes a lot of self control … I try to keep my mind on one track so my facial expression stays the same … I also count Mississippis…(How far do you get?) I don’t count to anything I just count, lose track and start again. (In this day and age with smart phones it is hard to be unconnected, how do you do that?)….I am really proud of myself, I do have to turn off my phone so I know it is off. (What about the scrutiny involved in being naked in front of strangers?) The Life Drawing environment is very non judgmental of perceived flaws, it is nothing like photography …There is nothing so humbling as watching someone photoshop a picture of you
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Here are my attempts at drawing in the Life Drawing Workshop: Do bear in mind a 9-year-old was threatening my life if I used too many pages in my attempts at verisimilitude. Also I have included the other pictures of the final pose by the regulars attending the class. There is a lot of comparing at the end. Yeah, they are loads better!
:
The Contractor’s:
The Medical Illustrator’s:
The Aeronautic Engineer’s:
The Computer Engineer’s:
oonawoods 
Holy Hannah! You’re good. I would have been drawing a variation of stick people!
The good ones were drawn by the regulars! I did the cartoony one at the top! Wanna come with me next time I go?