- the BODY
FIGURE DRAWINGE
ach Wednesday night for the last 11
years, I have run drop-in life drawing
classes in my studio. A few weeks
ago, I stood at my easel in the back corner of
a busy class and listened to a retired pilot in
a deep discussion with an A-level student
about the merits of coloured sugar paper
and half-sticks of soft pastel. For all their
opposing life experiences, in those two hours
of drawing they were entirely united by a
shared purpose. They enjoyed the comradery
of a shared struggle: an attempt to commit to
paper a fl eeting impression of a human fi gure.
Life drawing is described as a historical
practice by those who might exalt it as anidealised lost art and simultaneously by
anybody keen to denigrate it as outmoded.
Both camps are mistaken; life drawing
remains perpetually current.
Prior to the lockdown, the informal life
drawing community in the UK has been
growing apace, with life classes returning to
art schools as grass-roots movements,
driven by students’ enthusiasm. At the heart
of that resurgence is a very human urge: the
desire to recognise and be recognised. By
drawing another person, we bear witness to
them and our drawing becomes testament
to both our presence and theirs. In my
experience most people start life drawingbecause they want to learn to observe
better, or to make better drawings of people;
they continue life drawing because drawing
in a room full of people who are united by the
same activity makes you part a community.
Over the past four issues we’ve looked at
the four masses of the body that concern us
as draughtspeople – bone, muscle, fat and
skin – and the qualities that those masses
confer to our drawings – structure, tension,
form and a sense of surface.
In this fi nal article, I will help you pull all
of these aspects together into a simple and
connected process that aims to underpin your
observations with a clear sense of purpose.Draw Brighton tutor and best-selling author JAKE SPICER concludes his series on the
building blocks of life drawing by pulling together the lessons we've learned so far