Rationale

From the very earliest of times, people have observed others around them and recorded their observations in different media. What could be more natural? We are all, to some extent, fascinated by the look and behaviour of our own kind. Georg Eisler stated, ‘we have schooled ourselves to see by acquiring the capacity to depict ourselves’ [1]. In other words, drawing from the life model is not only about making pictures of people, it is, perhaps more fundamentally, about honing the observational skills which underpin good draughtsmanship. The act of drawing, then, is about learning how to see. Life drawing can mean many different things to different people but most often it is about observation and recording. Fundamental to success is training the eye to look analytically, as opposed to seeing something is there without really taking it in. In the words of Perkins, ‘We think that because we have pointed our eyes at something, we see what is to be seen. But we are profoundly mistaken. We take in a scene holistically without realising how partially we are seeing, how schematic our perceptions generally are’ [2].

Once you can look analytically, you can draw. With a little guidance and lots of practice, the looking and the drawing become as one and the artist might adopt a more intuitive or emotional response to the model. To begin with, however, a conscious effort is required to analyse the ‘visual problem’, be it a finger, foot or full figure.

Those new to life drawing, or those taking it up again after a long break, should not be put off by the difficulty of the task. Everyone comes into the life room at different starting points and embarks upon a journey of personal inquiry and everyone’s drawing has value as a record of the time and the thought process which went into making it. It is also worth bearing in mind that ‘no drawing or way of drawing will provide a permanent solution to what drawing is or should be’ [3]. We can all take heart, then, from the subjective nature of drawing.

It takes some courage to enter the life room and have a go at making a drawing of the human figure. It also takes dogged persistence and determination to make a drawing evolve successfully on the page. Crucially, this process of evolution requires the need to be critically objective. This is easier said than done but every so often it is worth standing back from a drawing in progress to assess whether it is developing as intended and, if not, what amendments or refinements need to be made. This process of checking and changing is not about ‘correcting’ mistakes, rather it is fundamental to the way a drawing grows. Very often, the best drawings are ones which reveal the searching nature of the artist’s intense scrutiny of the model in an open and honest way.

[1]  Georg Eisler, From Naked to Nude: Life Drawing in the Twentieth Century, Morrow, 1977.
[2]  David N.Perkins, The Intelligent Eye: Learning to Think by Looking at Art, Getty Publications, 1994.
[3]  Mick Maslen & Jack Southern, Drawing Projects: An Exploration of the Language of Drawing, Black Dog Publishing, 2011.