March 12th 2020 was my last life-drawing day at Paul Fowler's Extreme Poses in Stroud with Shelley modelling.
And so my last posting records what I did that morning.
After quite a gap of time when I got into other things, like growing my veg, like looking after my meadows, like starting the last phase of building my house (started some 40 years ago), like getting used to my isolation, like fostering a new rescue dog whose owner had suddenly died, I started to re-engage with life-drawing.
It didn't really leave me. I continued my journey, but at a very theoretical level, going back through my archive, revisiting my store of images collected over the years because they relate to, and help explain, my own experiments within which I explore my dialogue with the natural body and attempt to gain insights into my perceptual and emotional processes within the spatial complexities of the relationship between artist and muse.
After such a break I feel I need to re-introduce myself: this blog covers the period I have been doing life-drawing and the content illustrates and describes my drawings and my thinking. In some circles I am known as '2pencilbob', as illustrated below, because I do now draw with something in each hand simultaneously (usually fine-liner pens or graphite pencils).
So, the last time was March 12th. Then an email from Andrew who I have drawn many times as he models in Stroud and here in Wales, announcing that he was setting up a virtual life-drawing session using Zoom. I joined, and following positive responses from participants he set up a programme of Monday evening sessions.
I missed his next one but his prompting encouraged me to join. I did, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
I had some help from Sylvia, my wife, to link up the television to the laptop, and I set up my easel alongside the screen. [Andrew's contact details at the end of this posting]
Back in July 2009 I joined in Channel 4's 'Life Class: Todays Nude'. This was a very controversial programme as the nude was broadcast at lunch-time, long before the usual 9.00 o'clock threshold. I recall sitting alongside, amongst others, John Berger (Ways of Seeing) as he did his drawing and spoke about it at the same time. My output from the broadcasts I posted on this blog. Take a look at: '2010 February', on the side menu. This was my one and only engagement with life-drawing from the screen, until now.
The first three drawings below are of Andrew modelling (April 27th). Poses increased in time from a few minutes to about 30 minutes for the final pose.
Here Andrew assumes three positions holding a staff. I've always enjoyed placing these quick 'worm-up' poses together. One has no idea what is to come, whether standing sitting or lying, but very quickly a juxtapositional narrative emerges, both in spatial and compositional terms between the three figures, but also possibly about what the three are doing. Is this a snooker trio?
Here I am pursuing a commonly recurring theme of mine in which I seem to select those parts of the pose which attract and I bring them together in such a way that at times the new composition emphasises the essential characteristic(s) of the pose. The parts are not necessarily drawn at the same scale, but in this case they are more or less, and here we see a morphing as the two upper arms come together. Emphasis is given to 'support' and 'weight' with the right hand on the thigh, the left hand on the seat of the stool and the left foot on the rail of the stool. This description is the outcome of a post-analytical activity, as what happened during the drawing was entirely from within my sub-conscious.
In this last drawing of Andrew I was responding quite differently to the previous ones. I went straight for the part of the pose which hit me. The lower leg advanced towards me and dominated my initial engagement, and I loved seeing the fingers as the hand resting on the knee. I also recall thinking quite consciously about emphasising the perspective of his left leg as it headed towards the skirting board. I felt it important, not sure why, to include the head, and very consciously employed my rule - 'when doing a head never draw two-eyes-a-nose-and-a-mouth' (I was once advised that to include all the features of the face would so attract the eye of the beholder that the rest of the composition would take second place, and that if you didn't get the face right then this would severely distract. Also I have employed different scales to each part, and I believe this helps emphasise the essential concept of the pose, and brings some parts forward ( head and left hand) and recedes other parts (the lower part of his left leg), thereby dissolving the two-dimensionality of the surface of the A1 sheet of cartridge paper and putting in place a three-dimensional spatial engagement with and experience of the pose.
Now, I move on to the second session I joined (May 11th). The model is Antonia [again, contact details at end of this posting].
As with Andrew above we were presented at the start with three very short poses.
I had already decided (as a long term aim for my future life-drawing) that I would aim to try and capitalise on an aspect of my drawing that I had become infatuated with in recent times. It is to do with 'complexity'. It is to do with engaging with 'spatiality' by 'overlapping' and 'superimposing'. It is to do with employing the concept and the technique of 'transparency'. After this approach had been in evidence for some time in my drawing, and a descriptive terminology had emerged, particularly in conversations with my mentor Paul Fowler, I later discovered Francis Picabia ( he was with Picasso in Montmartre around 1910, and went on to develop his own cubism but with this fundamental ingredient of 'transparency'. His huge canvases could contain eight layers of drawing and his painting with the transparent properties of water colour, varnishes and oils. Whole bodies and anatomical parts at a variety of scales were interposed with architectural artefacts and animals, the narratives of which are most complex). I love his work!
But, back to Antonia and her first three quick poses. I moved across the paper from right to left. Firstly she is standing, then reclinning on the chaise longue with legs outstretched, and finally sitting facing me with her lower left lag advancing.
I am really pleased with the outcome. There is depth, space, movement. There is a confidence of line. I am using two fine-liner pens. Ink is unforgiving. You can't erase. This drawing I believe reveals I love my art, and it comes from within me, and the mark-making is an immediate response to an instant dialogue with the pose.
This is from within the same approach as described above with two of the drawings of Andrew. I seem to have focussed on selected parts of the pose. I started with the feet and the form of the lower leg started appearing up the paper. I recall I then wanted to include two other essential parts which were then lowered down into the composition, i.e. the nipple pushing into the underside of the upper arm, and the head profile. Finally I noticed the buttock and the line of her back was then included.
And so we come to the final pose. A lousy drawing, but an amazing pose.
I am including this drawing in this posting because I did it. And in my diary, which this blog is, I do include all my drawings.
When Antonia settled into this pose I was completely taken aback. I just sat there. It was the classic reclining nude. Such beauty! My thoughts bounded through a compressed catalogue of paintings by the greats who have celebrated the female reclining nude: Manet, Titian, Ingres, Modigliani, Matisse, Gaugin, Balthus, Goya, Courbet, Klimt, and so on and so on. We are all so familiar with them.
So I started.....and I wasn't going into my cubism, or my de-constructivism, or my morphism, or my superimposition and transparency worlds...….No! I would include the whole pose, I would capture the relaxed gesture, I would celebrate the beauty before me.
My mark-making is crude, the feet started on the paper but eventually the right leg seemed to disappear, her left shoulder would not rise to the status I wanted to give to it, I included two eyes, a nose and a mouth...……….. etc. Now, I know why this is not an outcome I am pleased with...….. you see, I rarely do whole poses, I have become deskilled at getting the proportions of the whole correct..... for a long time now I have intellectualised so much about my deconstructivism and my cubism and the joy of drawing different parts at different scales.
I have been there, done that, and my journey has evolved to create a particular sort of path. This blog records the experimental and enquiring and changing nature of my life-drawing. I really do enjoy entering into the unknown. I once came across a term which well defined my philosophy - 'process art'. I am not producing a product. The drawing at the end of the day is not that important to me. However, having said that I have clearly indicated that I wanted to do justice to Antonia's beautiful pose, which means doing a good drawing.
When I started life-drawing, about 11 to 12 years ago, my aims and what appeared on the paper was quite different. So I thought I might complete this posting by recalling a few of my beautiful reclining poses from those early days to say thank you to Antonia.
Andrew Buckle would be pleased to hear from anyone who would like to find out more about his programme of virtual life-drawing.
His email is: ajbuckle6@gmail.com
And please Google the name of: Antonia Purdie, to discover more about her amazing professional work as a performance artist and life model.
