NOTHING TO DO WITH SEX –
EVERYTHING TO DO WITH ANALYSIS

– figure drawing and the life class

I was very encouraged when a group of local Thursday painters reacted to a comment about their landscapes lacking figures. “Why not”, I asked? “Oh! They are too difficult”, they all agreed.

Drawing a figure is no different to drawing a tree, a bowl of flowers or indeed anything – the secret with all drawing is to understand what it is you are drawing. I remember at art school the young women students had a problem to draw a caterpillar tractor engine. We boys did much better, our cylinders were all in line, the crankshafts ran centre bottom under the cylinder pots etc. We knew that as boys – the young women did not.

For me as a beginner at art school, life drawing was the core subject, I believe, because when you make an observed drawing from life you must carefully observe, which develops a process of analysis of a subject. An analysis that allows you to draw what your eye is seeing truthfully. Why a naked body? As you know, artists only draw young nubile women? Come on! …. My mother was shocked when I returned from my first life class at age fifteen, “Can I have a look,” she said? She looked a bit stunned that her fifteen-year-old son had been drawing a lady well past her own age – whoops! – or is there more to drawing the nude?

As a tutor I have found that life drawing is the only subject where my students themselves knew when they had got it wrong – they could see that their drawing was just not right – and asked for help. This seldom happened with other subjects as they could always justify why they should reposition a tree, move a headland, leave out a boat or even work out complicated stems in a flower arrangement. Observed drawing takes care and concentration. A poorly observed, not well-drawn study can still look alright. Not so with life drawing. The nude, considered the most difficult, teaches us to look hard and analyse what is going on with light, flesh, muscles and bone, especially perspective and foreshortening. The human body changes totally when viewed from even the smallest different angle or viewpoint.

Our brains are so wired that we can identify every single face we see as looking different. Yet rows of bare skulls on a shelf all look much the same.  Only when the flesh is added do we see differences, no two faces are the same, and we recognize each as being different. Our brains astoundingly have this capacity, and I believe it is this same area of the brain that allows us to analyse when doing life drawing.

When drawing anything we must observe through our eye, let our brain process the image and pass that information down the arm into the fingers – to be accurately turned into line and massed tones of light and shade.  It’s not always easy, and it helps if one has been taught in a life class ‘how to see’. It is a deeper analysis than the process to copy a ready-made image from a photograph, where you see the final effect before you start. However, I believe we all have this inbuilt ability. It is not some heaven-sent skill, but true, some do it more easily than others. We all made an amazing uncomplicated start at age nine but were so often put off when we had to learn to look. As adults, let yourself have
a go.

Uninformed vocal critics who attach the idea of sex with life drawing have not helped. It always makes me cringe! Why do they do that? Obviously, they do because of the nude model. If nudity equates with sex, then maybe some people have a personal problem. I once told a visiting friend who commented on the life size nude I was painting in my studio “You would not have said that if I had been a gynaecologist.” She looked a little shocked but thoughtful. Likewise, a Scots doctor buddy visiting for the first time looked equally thoughtful and said “Lucky devil! I only got the dead ones!”  Such is life, and so I feel, fair comment. We are all human.

Now you may think that sounds a bit rude of me, but my point is that many professionals work with bodies, but it is only the artist who is actually expected to voyeur the model – that’s interesting, I think. Would you expect an Osteopath not to touch you? Worse for the life tutor in this sacred class, we can no longer sit close, as I experienced, behind the student astride the same donkey, to peer over a shoulder while drawing and explaining to show the way to analyse the pose.  Ideally the tutor must get as close as possible, and at the same angle, to draw a drawing alongside the students drawing for comparison. Pointing out where the light falls and to explain the planes of the body. I am told life drawing has almost faded out in some art schools. Is it too dangerous for especially men, to teach?  I also suspect a lack of demonstration by tutors to draw in front of a class – could the strength of their own drawing be that they were victims of such suppression?

With the advent of computers, graphics don’t require the same virtuoso skill always, although I, myself, own a drawing programme for book illustration, but I feel so-called fine art ie. professional academic art, today often lacks a solid drawing background. Hence the many installations, ‘found art’ and what a professional friend called ‘amusements’. Conversely, I recently saw film of Joseph Beuys in exhibition at the Tate Modern in London, a man I have admired since the sixties for breaking the mold and living on the edge, a great artist with a fascinating philosophy.  But Art moves on and to copy what he was creating half a century ago is hardly new work as some appear to think… but that’s another discussion.

Drawing a tent is much easier if you know where the tent poles are. The body is no different, but tent poles are hardly sexy!

Not since Greece have we had so much naked flesh on show as on our beaches but we think nothing of it – nor a nude in a gallery or a print by Rodin or Degas. However, a nude on the wall at home? Why the problem? Is it an uneasy reluctance or are we talking about something quite different. Maybe it’s simply the embarrassment of a possible sexual connotation for visitors, with a naked image in the lounge.

I am not suggesting that artists are not interested in sex – they are usually pretty average people, often more open and friendly and seldom introvert. Maybe the life class helps them to be more overt in attitude than others.  In class I encourage silence as I expect students to listen to what I have say to other students as I pass around as hopefully my comments or tips are equally applicable to all. The ‘life room’ was always sacred and usually handled in this way. The last instructed life class I attended was in 1956 – so I have little idea how other tutors teach Life – I do my thing based on my own training and very much the way I was taught. My teacher was a student of Augustus John, when he was at the Slade in the 1920’s.

On a lighter side, I introduced the model to a weekend course of about 16 mature students from local art clubs and societies. First pose, twenty minutes. A fine bronzed mature male model, one of the old school – he had been Mr Universe in 1935.  I moved around clockwise and came to white haired Lorna quietly sitting on her donkey, her drawing board vertical in front of her. Prim and proper, this usual ball of activity was quite still. Not a mark on her pristine sheet of paper. I asked – is everything OK? She said yes, I am fine. But we have been going ten minutes and you haven’t started I said. She looked at me with a quiet smile and replied, “well, you told us that Reg was 78 and had been Mr Universe. I said yes. She continued with a smile, Dougie “I am 78 as well – and I just wanted to look!” Bless her, what a lady. So fortunately, even at my age sometimes we can be turned on in a pleasant and complimentary way – there is life after 35.

I truly believe the naked human body is the best process to study drawing, understanding your subject and knowing how to deal with perspective, in particular. It combines all the essential skills to draw anything, the skeletal structure, the bundles of muscles attached to lengthen or shorten, the ability to mass tones. I try for three only: dark, medium and the white of the paper, and of course parts of the body appear larger or smaller than they really are because of perspective. A foot or hand in close-up may be much larger than a head on paper.  Of course, every teacher has their own way of working so expect many views of how and where to start.

Life drawing is very much more than a study of analysis. Sir Kenneth Clark said, “The nude is not a subject of art but a form of art”.

On your next empty landscape try to introduce a small, clothed figure walking the beach perhaps – remember it will become the point of focus or interest immediately. The essential thing is to give the overall feeling of a believable live fluid figure – maybe quite roughly painted but balanced, the weight on one, or both feet, that pensive or jubilant moment, running or just standing on a hilltop.  Winslow Homer a favourite American artist of mine who I researched years ago in Prouts Neck Connecticut was so good in combining both figures and landscape. His work is worth a look, among many. He often used a maquette doll wrapped with shreds of cloth to look like fisher women when painting in Newcastle England.

I was especially pleased with my own women on the hilltops in my ‘Massacre of the Women of Braes’, a big 2m oil in Sabhal mor Ostaig, the University of the Highlands and Islands, in the Isle of Skye, and, I believe, one of my better paintings. With little drawing, the hilltop figures were actually drawn freely around in white paint, I see the cripple woman, the pregnant one, Caillach the old lady, a young family, a girl or granny. I drew angry women in preparation for a full year before attempting the painting. All those watercolour sketches sold! (Maybe to angry women?) It’s the overall image not the detail that one hopes to achieve – the less detail the better. Of course that comes with skill, I often attempt to show form by what I call, ‘a sensitive line’. Remember painting is only drawing with a brush.

Now some landscapes with figures please – happy sketching and painting.