The Life Room
Buoyed by the confidence gained from Betty Edwards’ book Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain, and feeling that ‘I can draw!’, the question arose of where to move next. I had a ‘wish list’ of three things that drew me regarding drawing: trees, portraits and the human figure.
Drawing bodies was something I approached with a certain amount of trepidation. My mother studied art and education at college and always felt a lack of tutoring in life drawing and anatomy had hampered her ability to draw figures, so I knew it was important. However, even copying drawings of sculptures (how far removed from an actual body can you get!) seemed invasive and in some way ‘trespassing’. It had not been the way I had been educated, encouraged or conditioned to look, and not look, at the human body.
Many artists invite you to explore the human body, in my experience none more viscerally than the Lebanese artist, Mona Hatoum, in her work Corps étranger, a video installation in which the viewer, standing in a confined space, intimately explores both interior and exterior of her body by means of video from two surgical instruments, an endoscope and coloscope. Hatoum’s purposes are multi-layered and varied, and I can’t do justice to them all here. Later, when I started life drawing classes, the tutor remarked how drawing the body is ‘a dialogue with the truth’, and Corps étranger remains emblazoned on my mind as a thoroughly truthful statement of how an exploration of the body represents both what can unite and separate human beings.
Still developing my art and drawing skills on my own and not having the courage to start life drawing properly, I set about learning to draw the body through copying drawings from a cheap artist’s anatomy book I picked up called Anatomy for artists made easy. It seemed a good place to start, and I copied the drawings in the book from beginning to end. I then did the same with Andrew Loomis’ book on the human figure, before moving on to life drawing websites. Here is a small selection…
As for ‘live’ life drawing, I went to the British Museum and sketched a few of the statues there and then attended an untutored life drawing session with a clothed model, and then a couple of tutored life drawing days with nude models. I then regularly attended untutored sessions in Brighton.
With hindsight, I should have just ignored my initial reservations concerning life drawing, jumped in at the deep end in the life room and kept plugging away. When I finally did go into the life room, though, I had put in what must have been hundreds of hours drawing the human figure. The whole experience of drawing the human figure has given me much needed confidence in my graphic skills, and certainly helped me with drawing people whether clothed or unclothed. But I think it has also helped me form a new relationship with the body both artistically and personally, and as part of journey of understanding others, myself and beginning ‘a dialogue with the truth’.
Here are a selection of figures from the life room, from online life-drawing sites, museum statues and gallery exhibitions; also, examples of clothed figures on which I hope my life drawing experience has had a beneficial effect.
