I sat one evening watch a bit of a draw-along video from the RA – helpfully entitled Life Drawing:Live! –  which featured a highly agile male model. I had intended just to watch and learn for a while, but he swung straight in to such perfect poses for this exercise that I just had to grab my nearest sketchbook (A4) and pencil (2B) – yes, wherever you go in my house now, there are sketchbooks and drawing implements left lying about, which I am arguing is the mark of the true artist – and have a go. These were 2 minute poses moving on to 3 minute poses, and I really focused on getting the lines moving plus trying to maintain proportion by quickly indicating joints.

The drawing I am most pleased with is the second – I think I’ve got some good sweeping lines there which do convey a sense of movement. Actually, these were all rather more adventurous poses than we are graced with at our local life drawing group, and I enjoyed the challenge of trying to analyse them really quickly for key markers and get them on paper within a very limited timescale.

Then, in last week’s life group, we had a clothed female model, tall and willowy, and obviously a favourite of the group as they asked her straight away for a series of 2-minute “movement’ poses – which was ideal again for this exercise, although I was a bit caught out by the way she moved from one pose to the next without even time to turn over the page!!! – certainly focused the mind and the eyes.

I used an HB Nitram stick, and got more confident as I went along in actually making proper use of it towards the end and make bold sweeping marks. The first image is actually two poses (didn’t have time to turn the page) – well caught I think, but too faint and tentative. Second was better but out of proportion, legs too short.

I am pleased with the third – nice bold, committed marks and much better proportion – you can feel the movement in this one, I think.

These drawings come from my life drawing groups – they come from different sessions (and therefore with different models), as we generally only have one or two 10-minute poses per session – so they are not a sequence as such, although I have tried to show them here in date order to show progression – if any!

These two are of a male model, drawn in pencil. I did rather fear for him in the second pose as he went quite a deep shade of puce trying to hold it. Working left-handed still, I find it takes a while to hit my stride accuracy-wise; however, I am fairly pleased with the proportion with these, including the bit of foreshortening of the right forearm in the first pose, and have managed to indicate at least the darkest areas of tone.

This lady is a group member from a session where the model had not appeared and so we took turns at drawing each other for 10/15 min – clothed, naturally. I think I’ve given her rather a long neck in my efforts to show the slight slant of the front shoulder in the slumped pose she had chosen, but I think I’ve done rather better with the proportion of the legs – and again, have managed to get the darkest tones in. This was drawn with a 3B pencil.

The last two in this section are from a session with a very striking lady model – she was extremely slim and seemed to have a very long body, especially abdomen, as a result – I found her fascinating to draw as her bone structure was really clear.

Hard to get it all in in ten minutes! I was pleased with the first sketch in particular – I had done quite a bit of reading about marking in the major joints (shoulders, elbows, hips, knees) and I measured particularly carefully as her body looked so unusual to me, so I think in that first one I really “caught” her, bones and all, and still had time to add just a little bit of shading. It was I think my first go at using the H Nitram charcoal for a live drawing – this particular hard grade of the Nitram takes a bit of getting used to and I struggled rather with establishing the darks quickly; however, I think I achieved the tonal shading side of things better in the second sketch, which was a tricky pose to capture in 10 min.

Has there been a progression?- Yes, I think I’m gradually beginning to look automatically for key markers and measurements.

Rather than drawing myself…. I watched a TV programme on BBC Four on Tuesday 4th Feb 2020 called Life Drawing, which was exactly what it said on the tin – they had live models in different poses for varied lengths of time, and audience was encouraged to join in – so I did (also bullied by husband into having a go, he really enjoyed it).

One of the poses was a bearded man lying flat out on the stage in a cruciform position, covered by a cloth, and the TV camera view was straight on, i.e. feet first. It was an extremely strange angle to draw from; nothing looked like anything (apart from the feet) and I found it very difficult, getting the chest too long, which made the shoulders wrong which meant the arms didn’t join on properly…..but it really brought home to me the absolute need to NOT make ANY assumptions, but to measure properly.

Andrea Mantegna’s 1480 painting The Lamentation of Christ, tempera, Pinacoteca di Brera, which shows the dead Christ laid out in a marble slab in a pose very similar to that of the gentleman depicted above looks equally weird, and John William Waterhouse’s Saint Eulalia, exhibited 1885, Tate, does a similar thing, except in this painting the lady is depicted head-on.

I watched an interesting little video on https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/approaches-to-art-history/the-language-of-art-history/v/what-is-foreshortening which takes a look in detail at Raphael’s 1510-11 painting, The School of Athens, Vatican and considers how the painter has achieved the illusion of depth by careful placement of light and shadow.

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.