This longer study was done on the same day and with the same model as the drawings included in Exercise 1. Again, the drawing was done with my non-dominant hand in 3B pencil, and we had an hour in which to complete it.

This extra time gave me much more opportunity to measure, check and re-check, and also to block in some of the background, which has helped the image considerably by making it look more solid and therefore more lifelike.

The leading leg looks very long, but I measured it several times, and of course the model is slant on to me so a small amount of foreshortening has come into play.

I am enjoying the freedom that use of the non-dominant hand brings – it is not yet accurate for fine work, but I am letting inaccuracies go and just working over them, even though this occasionally results in a slight blurring of surfaces.

I have to admit a certain pride in this drawing – the face is not right, but I am confident in the proportions, and it is a much better representation than I thought I would be capable of at this stage.

All downhill now, then,………

I had joined a life drawing group in Tavistock soon after starting this part of the course and was “training up” my left hand to be able to draw, having broken my right shoulder. Life drawing was extremely new to me, and a combination of this, along with a lack of leftie fine motor skills, have made these first drawings look quite faint and tentative, despite being done with a 3B pencil.

Before going, however, I had watched a video in YouTube (sorry, details not noted down – bad practice) about proportion – the head being roughly one-eighth of the height of the body, belly-button around ⅜ down and groin halfway, so I used these to see if they were approximately right, and I think it’s worked pretty well with this model, who seemed to me to be a fairly “standard” build.

I didn’t worry too much about the facial features as I was unused to working at such speed. In the first drawing, even though the course notes said not to be tempted to draw outlines, I’m afraid I did exactly that as I only had 5 min. I also transgressed by starting with the head, as my cunning plan for establishing correct proportion meant I needed the head in first to be able to measure out my eighths…oh dear.

The next two sketches were 10 min each, so I had a bit more time to block in bits of tone to try and establish form as well as outline. I could see I had drawn the legs too short in the first of these, so made up for this in the second of the ten minute drawings by really concentrating on the legs and making sure they were correct – a great improvement, I think.

The group then went on to longer poses, and I can see that this is going to be an ongoing mismatch with this unit, in that what is possible from a weekly life drawing class is not always going to match up with the exercises. My plan therefore is to find at least some work from my life group which relates to each exercise as time goes by, combined with filling in gaps using work from images in books and online. I have done loads of reading around this subject over the course of the last 3 or 4 weeks due to my unfamiliarity with drawing people, so feel I am learning loads and experimenting loads and gaining great experience, all rather serendipitously – so will have to have periods, like this evening writing this blog post, when I just stop and look back at where I have got to so far.

• Just watched the first part of John Berger’s ‘Ways of Seeing”. His point about art critics’ tendencies towards ‘mystification’ was particularly interesting to me; I used to rely on reading the text about a painting after only a cursory glance at the image, but I do feel that as time has passed I have got much better at standing and looking carefully at a work of art and trying to pull some things out of it myself before reading the text – I do find that any mismatches between text and my understanding from the image then tend to jar, and one is then left wondering whether the critic actually does know more than me (entirely possible, obviously) or whether their’s is just a different interpretation, perhaps as a result of prioritising one feature of the image over another (as the children did in the video).
• Part 2 was very thought-provoking. I can imagine a modern-day Me Too enthusiast having forty fits over it, especially over the attitudes of some of the ladies interviewed, one of whom in particular reflected the passivity JB had talked about. I had never really thought much about the derivation of the nude as a class of painting but, if pressed, would have said that it derived from the classical Greek tradition, where male nudes were as common as females, if not more prevalent. I was therefore quite taken aback by JB’s suggestion that for “nude” in European painting read “female sexual object to be ogled at and preyed upon by men”. Now that I have been made to think about it, I can see that JB’s take on it is much more pragmatically realistic than my own rather naive, high-minded and unworldly view. Surely though, there was then (certainly is now) a class of people (men – John Ruskin?) who would buy an exquisitely drawn or painted nude out of admiration for the artist’s skill in creating an image, rather than just to lust over it? Need to watch the next episode…..
• As I should have expected, Part 3 took a different tack and looked at the traditional European oil painting as an expression of wealth, property and power, which I had previously touched upon in my research on the history of still life from the 17th century onwards (see Part 2). Interestingly, he did this time mention painting of the classical stories (including many nudes), but represented them as a set of characters and costumes (whether clothed or not) into which the purchaser could step in their imagination and live out the stories in their dreams with themselves in the title role – a power, yes, but open to anyone who has ever read a book.
• Part 4 looked at advertising, and its purposes and effects as in 1972. Over the 38 years since, the explosion in the use of imagery to manipulate people’s thoughts and actions has made the present a time to be even more aware of what is being said and implied, and to be conscious and wary of the implications of accepting suggestions at face value. One particular thing which struck me, in the context of the nude, was the amount of sexualised images which were taken for granted as the natural way of things – his sequence of adverts filmed up what looked like an Underground escalator, is exactly as I remember it used to be, with image after image of scantily dressed women, or women hanging off dominant men – and at the time I accepted this as just how adverts were, whilst not in any way applying their messages to myself, but yet not going the extra mile, as some women did, and protesting about this state of affairs. Such images of scantily dressed women still occur today, but are more balanced with images of scantily clad men, and the “message” feels different – in the words of the song, sisters are doing it for themselves.

I went on to read Eisler, Georg, 1977, From Naked to Nude, Life Drawing in the Twentieth Century, Thames & Hudson. He refers to Berger’s work but feels that the idea of the male ‘owner-viewer’ is not the whole story, suggesting that, historically, sexuality was a woman’s only weapon, and that, as the subject of a nude, she gains dominance over the patron, reducing him to the more uncomfortable role of voyeur – certainly that’s the look I see in the eyes of the feisty lady in Manet’s 1863 Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe, oil on canvas, Musee d’Orsay, Paris.

I also read the online article by Marion Simon https://quillette.com/2019/09/10/in-praise-of-renoirs-male-gaze/ , which includes a link to an interesting lecture on Youtube given by Martha Lucy called “The Trouble with Renoir. The point is made here that reactions to an artist’s work and the way it is perceived varies and depends very much on the mores of the time. Marilyn Simon’s article is interesting in particular for the distinction which she draws between her own self-image and the potential image of herself as an artist might see her, and goes on to say: “Contemporary feminism insists that men and the male gaze objectify women, thereby making men into the powerful, brutish, and oppressive monolithic force we commonly know as “The Patriarchy.” Yet the male gaze often reveals men’s vulnerable side. The way they see reveals not their power but their yearning; their desperate need for tenderness in a world that can be hard and unkind, and which turns men into cogs within the economic machinery.” I think this was a more technical way of saying what I tried to summarise in the previous paragraph!

Everything I read about this complex issue seems to send me in a different way. On a recent visit to London (see separate blog post about the London Galleries) I was extremely dismissive about the work of Kathe Kollwitz which I came across in the British Museum (it had been a long day and I was quite tired, in my defence…). Since then though, I have found myself moved to do some drawings inspired by her work (see A3 sketchbook), and was extremely interested to read about her ideas in Betterton, Rosemary, 1996, Intimate Distance – Women, Artists and the Body, Routledge, London and New York. She takes the traditional “male gaze” view, that the artist may “look at but not inhabit the body” and portrays the dichotomy which this necessarily creates for a female artist in her drawing, Self Portrait and Nude Studies, 1900, graphite, pen and black ink; although the author goes on to develop an Oedipal theory about motherhood which I am not sure I followed.

I used a set of photographs of a chap in the classical pose of “Thinker” taken from different angles to draw from – I went for a side pose, a back pose and a frontal pose.

I had some Nitram charcoal sticks as a birthday present so was eager to try them out – decided to start with the hardest H stick – this allows for quite a range of darkness from a thin faint line to something quite dark and heavy – seemed ideal for this exercise.

I used the head as the main measuring tool, working on the assumption that this was approx one-eighth of the total height of the body. I placed the building blocks of the body using simple shapes drawn very lightly, and then went over the lines to add appropriate dinks and curves before adding some shading to try and establish the 3-D nature of the figures.

I am quite pleased with the proportion of the first figure (side view), although I think he has ended up being the least “solid”. The second drawing (back view) was very interesting to draw, I don’t think I’ve tried a back yet and feel the shading is in the correct places but could stand being stronger to make the contrast of the slightly twisted-away side. I struggled a bit with the angle of the arm, but am pleased with the foreshortened left thigh, even though it was weird to draw.

The third drawing is face-on and probably the most complicated as far as the placement of the limbs was concerned. The foreshortening of the thighs again needed a lot of careful observation and is going to need much practice.

For this exercise I used a book of photographs of nudes intended for artists (Harwood, J (ed), 1989, Illustrator’s Reference Manual – Nudes, Bloomsbury, London); this particular book, which I borrowed from the West Devon Group of Artists today, contains photos of both men and women in various poses, and each pose is “shot” from 8 positions – as if you had walked around the model and stopped 8 times to take a photo.

I chose a straightforward standing position to work from, and managed to draw all 8 poses within the art group session – so, allowing for stops to chat, about 10 min or just over per pose. I am still using my left hand, which is my non-dominant hand, and today I worked in my A3 sketchbook using  a 5B pencil. I worked sitting down, which doesn’t allow for the application of the same pressure as a standing drawing as it is less of a “whole arm” movement but is more restricted to the forearm.

I concentrated on the whole body rather than the face, but used the length of the head as a measuring unit to mark in where the rest of the parts should fall – I have been working on the basis of the head being one-eighth of the whole. I also tried to draw in the rough basic shapes first before refining them by adding bumps and wiggles and I didn’t erase any marks which weren’t quite right.

When I had finished each sketch I tried to mark in the line of balance, starting at the head and going straight down – I was pleased that most of the lines of balance were fairly close to where they should have been.