Nude Life; An Autobiography in Life Drawings

 Closing The Circle with Life Drawing

Male Model, Billy (Oil Paint,1990)

I think I used to be an artist of some sort. It seems many lifetimes before lockdown but it began in 1989 when I swapped the school tie of the all-boys sixth form uniform for a Clash T-shirt and started my Foundation Art and Design at Liverpool. I completely fell in love with it and it was a real sense of home coming to be in arts education. Suddenly my creative voice counted and I could begin to tell the story of my own life in images. I loved Art Foundation and although it was a yearlong course somehow, (back in the days of education funding and opportunity) I managed to hang on and stay for three years. During that time, the rigor of Life Drawing was a staple of the weekly structure. Often we would have a full day pose, or at least two afternoons working from either the female or male model. We learned the academic underpinning of all forms of visual practice which came from our own understanding of the shapes and proportions our bodies. Life drawing shows us how we fit into the world if we are fine artists or fashion designers, architects or sculptors.

Male model, Billy (Conte, 1989)

On first stepping into the Life Room my  experience was that I really struggled with actually looking at the model. It wasn’t to do with awkwardness about nudity (although that was a common thread with many students), it was something else that I only understood years later when reading John Berger and studied wider ideas around “The Male Gaze”. At the time I perceived the naked human person in front of me as more vulnerable in some way than the other people in the room and I felt the act of staring was a form of violence, particularly the act of a clothed male staring at a nude female. Experience of growing up in a rough area had taught me that staring can even be a prelude to physical attack so i was uncomfortable with looking hard at an other person and it felt disrespectful somehow. From that I realised that actually I never stared at people intently enough to study them and was shy enough that I sometimes would not even make eye contact with people I was talking to. It took the Life Room to first force me to actually look.

Female Model, Ange (Oil Paint, 1989)

That was a difficult lesson but once I had learned it I started to recognise my own concerns with the figure.  Looking back at my drawings from 89-91 I often cropped the figure for a sense of intimacy, used contrapposto and drama in lighting to add emotional weight and considered mark making increasingly as an expressive tool. Many of these expressive concerns were actually more to do with my own emotional background at that time and I started to see that sometimes life drawing is self-portrait in some ways. Each artist standing around the seated model chooses their own speck in the room, own view point, own materials, own use of tone or cropping or colour or line- the whole drawing becomes as much about the artist as the model.

Expressionist influenced response to Male Model
(Charcoal and rubber, 1991)

Male Model,
Body as Landscape (Oil Pastel, 1990) 

Soon I went on to study sculpture at Staffordshire. It was a very conceptual course and to my surprise they didn’t run Life Drawing sessions unless the students specifically requested them. They weren’t saying I couldn’t draw from the model, just that I needed to be clear what my work was about and if that practice was strictly relevant for me. I remember a tutor saying that I could even go to the job centre and find someone who looked right for my work and they would pay him, but very quickly I started to learn new and more abstract visual languages and by the end of degree I hadn’t drawn from the model for three years.  

I was very rusty and after that I decided to draw every day for a year – usually from friends or people sitting in cafes, which took my work in a less expressive and more graphic direction. 

Man Pretending to be Eric Cantona 
(or maybe it really was; pen, 1999) 

Eventually after a few years kicking around working in a record shop I landed the dream job. I had loved Foundation so much that I had got away with three years of it and after completing my teacher training qualifications I found myself back on Foundation as a staff member. Eventually government cuts and hostile management destroyed the course but for 19 years I had taught Life Drawing to hundreds of kids, just as fresh to it as I had been. It was the privelige of a lifetime to be able to give back. 

Those disruptive exercises like drawing with continuous line, the wrong hand, without looking or with the foot always caused hilarity and helped them loosen their grip on what they thought “good drawing” should be. I think we learn by letting go rather than grasping. 

Disruptive Exercise -
overlayed speed drawings from LIAS Zoom
(Eve-felt tip, 2021) 

Left Handed Continuous Line 
(Eve - Fine-liner, 2021)

 

All that time though my job was to analyse issues in student drawing by circulating around the easels and giving focused advice. That meant that I had many years of theoretical life drawing consideration but almost no time to actually practice it myself. When LIAS started our Zoom sessions I finally finished a thirty year journey back to actual Life Drawing and had the chance each week to draw from the remarkable Eve, The circle is complete and now I draw again.  

Ten Minute Pose (Molly - felt tip,  2020)