A muse's job

According to Germane Greer "a muse's job is to penetrate the male artist and bring forth a work from the womb of his mind". As you will know I have a deep interest in the model/artist relationship. The complex process which the model and the artist enter into, has as its product a drawing. And from a drawing one can detect whether something special is taking place within the dialogue at any one time. At 'extreme poses' we have five 30 minute poses, mostly with the model suspended 'up in the ropes'. For me, at best, something special takes place during one, sometimes two, of the five poses. Today was, I feel, and believe, quite extraordinary. I am pleased with all five drawings. But, more than this, I feel I entered a dialogue with the poses which Shelley presented to us which had a depth and a complexity which I have rarely experienced. Matisse claimed that "A work of art which did not begin in emotion, is not art". Approaching this morning's session I did have some thoughts about what I might do. I had been researching images from 'double exposure' and 'multi-exposure' photography of the female nude. Like much of my recent work it involves 'superimposition' and 'transparency', and presents the beholder with a quiz to unravel 'ambiguity' and 'morphed images'. But, what happened today? Presented with the space of a virgin white sheet of A1 cartridge paper, a graphite pencil in each hand, and Shelley settled into her first pose, something took me into an unanticipated dimension. Mark-making commenced as part of the process of my engagement with my art. Yes, I believe I can claim 'My art did begin in emotion". Shelley is a wonderful model, who quite secretly and with a real effort offers amazing poses to challenge us yet with the minimal support offered by the ropes.

Also on September 21st

........... I produced these three drawings, but I don't see them as saying anything special. Whereas the previous three did.

A Weird Fling

It is the autumn equinox at extreme poses.
My anagram approach is dominant.
"the female body.....is like an endless sentence that invites us to rearrange it, so that its real meaning becomes clear through a series of endless anagrams"  Hans Bellmer.
Bellmer's drawings have influenced me, to such an extent that the weird fling of a few years ago has now become a mainstream. That fling was an experimental departure away from seeing the pose as a simple form to be recreated on paper. I started to deconstruct the body before me and then reconstruct it through a process which became personal and idiosyncratic.
'A Weird Fling' is an anagram of 'Life Drawing'.
These are 3 of my drawings from Thursday September 21st at Paul Fowler's 'extreme poses' life-drawing in Stroud. They are 2 handed graphite drawings on A1 220gsm cartridge paper. Each pose was for 30 minutes, and our model is Shelley.

September 7th 2017 at 'extreme poses' in Stroud

We are back to our regular Thursday morning sessions at Paul Fowler's 'extreme poses' life-drawing at Pegasus Art in Stroud, Gloucestershire, England. The summer involved me attending two 3 day workshops and a single day, so I was able whilst attending to my small-holding activities to reflect on my recent experiments and explorations in my life-drawing journey. I believe I came out of my reflective mode with a fairly clear set of ideas of how I might progress my art, and with a degree of selected aspects of my process which I would with interest pursue.
However, these foci of attention are for me not describable in clear terms. In other words I am not prepared to spend my time composing an academic text, and searching for the appropriate language and vocabulary to describe what has been happening. I am quite prepared for my drawings to speak for me. "The act of painting reveals who we are. We are betrayed by what we love". These are the words of Jean Jansem, who I have just discovered and whose drawings I warm to. He was an Armenian and lived from 1920 to 2013. And, I love my involvement in my art of life-drawing. I love the anticipation of what may take place as I start engaging with a pose, with a model, with a muse, with a body, with an anatomy, with the beauty of the natural human form, by starting the early marks on my paper which are part of me exploring my reaction and my perception and my feeling.

So here are my drawings from the five 30 minute poses of last Thursday. I show them in the order they were made, and I believe there is a consistency, within and between them. If there is a common denominator then it is that they follow closely my 'anagram' approach. All parts of each pose are present, yet there has been, in each, a process of de-construction followed by one of re-construction. I have included in each drawing the key attractions of the pose. I have brought these selected parts together in a slightly new relationship to each other. This different juxtaposition of anatomical parts can create a composition and a narrative which is in fact greater than or at least different to the sum of the parts.