Life Drawing, by Robert Barrett

While having managed to put together a personal library of books on artistic anatomy and figure drawing, this is the first book I’ve come across devoted to life drawing. That is, linking the theory to tackling the live model.

I guess where I’m pleased this book moves beyond mere figure drawing is in the following areas: a first chapter on lighting (and the minimising of light I had to cope with in last week’s class), and later chapters on light and shadow, drapery and edges. There’s one also entitled “Center of interest” which looks at ways of making the overall drawing look ‘artistic’ (moving beyond the narrowly representational sketch to something possessing more of a studied ‘drawing quality, covering composition, vignetting, narratology – what Americans would probably call the ability to “pop”, an expression which has odd sexual connotations for me).

I’ve yet to get my head around the chapter “Atmospheric Perspective” too. Five ways to use a sketchbook, chapter 14, is also very good value.  There is a good Gallery summing up the whole. Barrett doesn’t shy away either from that most verboten of subjects these days, children; surely a mainstay of the portrait market. Pages 18 through 78 summarise the constructionist approach to figure drawing and cover all that one has come to expect: gesture drawing, proportion, measurement, anatomy, hands and feet.

I’m fascinated by the fact that a lot of the explanatory drawings are done on white paper, yet almost all of the finished examples are done on tinted paper. I guess this underpins moving from a sketch using the model to a finished, detailed drawing without the model. I’m still on the hunt for kraft paper sketchbooks and large sheets of tinted paper I can make up into my own sketchbooks. It was hard to find twenty years ago and now seems even harder to find these days. There is too much “presence” for me in handmade toned paper used acrylic paint, but I may have to resort to that before long.

Given my problems with using charcoal convincingly, Barrett suggests mass and volume using something called Prismacolor Nupastel, complimented with a lot of accurate linework (the subtitle of the book is “how to portray the figure with accuracy and expression“, his bold). The examples of poses he provides links directly to life drawing  experience – exactly the sorts of poses live models will take up – so copying and emulating the examples in the book will have very direct relevance to life drawing sessions. Not all the poses are nude; many are clothed, contributing to the rich variety inherent in the book.

Drawing Class. Session 8 prep. Life Drawing/female, day 3

While these look as if they are simply copied from standard artistic anatomy plates, as they appear in any number of figure drawing books, Riven Phoenix Structure of Man course is explaining the necessary start and finish points of each muscle and how they link. I guess the only equivalent where I live would be to attend the academic lectures provided by the Julian Ashton art school.

Drawing Class. Session 8 prep. Life Drawing/female, day 2.

I know I should have DRAWN something instead of reproducing this sticker, but notwithstanding my immediate response today of remembering comrades fallen (Bibi, Craig, David in particular among an entire generation of friends and acquaintances, an entire social universe, wiped out) and the intrusion of contemporary political reality (the State granting same-sex couples the legal equivalent of dog licences in Queensland and many there touting this to be tantamount to a giant step forward in human rights) and religious reality (American Christians actually praying for the death of George Michael), progress with neck muscles and ‘character designs’ with an uncanny likeness to film director John Waters…

Drawing Class. Session 8 prep. Life Drawing/female, day 1.

In preparing for next week’s drawing class, I’m working through ‘strapping on’ the muscles to the skeleton as taught by Riven Phoenix in his Structure of Man artistic anatomy course.

I know in advance that I will have to curb my natural desires to cover the page with marks when it comes to drawing the female model. The more marks you make, the older you make the person look and when it comes to drawing females I know the teacher and my fellow students will want to see skin rather than muscle – they will not appreciate the strong straight lines and angles that work so easily in capturing the male.

Listened attentively to Germaine Greer discussing the work of Ben Quilty on television yesterday (ABC TV, Artscape): how he strenuously avoids the female and the feminine, lives in a world heavy with Heavy Metal, Toranas and bromances. Germaine was very pleased with his ability to avoid or deny the female in his work, there thus being no possibility of compromising, degrading or exploiting women. 

Focussing on mouth muscles at the moment, I “see” them everywhere: Tony Abbott’s nose, the underside of Lambert Wilson’s jaw in the film with Emmanuelle Devos entitled “Gentille” or “Good Girl”. Rather too tired to stay up late and watch Gerard Depardieu on television, his craggy features as a crazy loser (ringard) in Quand j’etais un chanteur.

Drawing Class. Session 7. Life Drawing, male.

Only two of us in the class had done any Life Drawing before. I remember when first coming across it being almost completely overwhelmed by the amount of data or stuff that had to be transferred to paper in such an excruciatingly short time. My marks were too often harsh and scratchy. It’s been ages since I did any life drawing, demoralised by not being able to identify weaknesses and knowing how to correct them. Tutors were more interested in creating a congenial social atmosphere than getting down to the serious of business of correcting mistakes. Consulting all the figure drawing standard textbooks – Hale, Richer, Bridgman – did nothing for me because I was simply unable to have the 3-dimensional content in my head. So it’s been a long time between drinks.

Having crammed a lot of the Riven Phoenix’s Structure of Man figure drawing course in readiness for this class, I was ready to give life drawing another go. I came armed with a 100-page pad of 60gsm bond paper for the gestural and 30sec/2min poses, with some cartridge paper for any longer poses. I came away from the 2.5 hour class with 28 sketches, with only 3 or 4 which missed the mark. While all the 30sec and 2min poses were under full light, three or four 10min poses were under just one spotlight. As the teacher said, the eyes do adjust! I worked through a number of different media: willow charcoal, charcoal pencils of different types. The teacher has been very strict about only working in black-and-white.

Importantly, thanks to the SoM, these are sketches I can work with: review and re-do, analyse, re-create adding in more detail. Diane Kraus demonstrated a before-and-after showing the impact of participating in the SoM course; I will drag out some of my old life drawing sketches in a similar way sometime.

They were all done sitting down at a desk, with the A2 paper propped up in front of us; previously all my life drawing has been done standing before an easel. It was difficult to hold the charcoal in a drawing hand position, as opposed toa writing hand position. All those with props (chair, table) were longer poses than the standing ones.

Here are some of the better ones:

Drawing Class. Session 7 prep. Life Drawing/male, day 7.

Others undertaking the SoM journey

In working through the Riven Phoenix Structure of Man figure drawing course, I’ve been curious if others have documented on their weblogs the same process I’m going through. ”Ferret” Steve in South Australia made considerably headway with it some years ago (http://discovering-the-structure-of-man.blogspot.com) and importantly used his doodling during university lectures to reinforce what he was learning by drawing completely from memory. I share his impetuosity to move ahead and I appreciate his precocious experimenting with distorting proportions; Burt Dodson in his drawing book for beginners tackles the figure obliquely – in terms of rough proportions, a bit of foreshortening, the recumbent figure (which is curious/interesting!) as well as deliberating distorting some aspects of the figure to create individuality. 

I notice Diane Kraus (http://dekraus.com) got to the end about a month ago and has fielded questions from others in her Comments about how long the course takes to do. Just looking at the drawings gives the impression of dry-as-dust academic drawing, which is not the case. The primary advantage in following the videos is that you can fast-forward through little bits you’re confident about and rewind to refine details; that’s simply not possible in other learning contexts, unless you’ve got a live, paid tutor sitting right next to you. The individual sessions range from 5 or six minutes to around 20, so there’s plenty of opportunity to stop and walk around the room. My mind gets numb and my fingers lazy after a few hours; I like to mix it up leafing through anatomy and figure drawing textbooks and of course, towards the end of the day, trying to ‘sum things up’ by rendering from newspaper and magazine photographs, many of which I’ve cut and saved over months and years because the lighting is good or the pose worthy of copying sometime. Diane Kraus pus the practice of drawing from photos and the Phoenix course in worthwhile context and her Etsy anatomy drawings also indicate where she’s coming from. 

Critics of the SoM approach

I bought the 5-DVD set originally and when I thought I’d misplaced the white carboard box they came in, bought and downloaded the lot from his website more recently. I noticed a lot of grizzling on BlendedNation by students complaining about prices and price rises. Typically, the videos have been pirated – even artists themselves stomp all over the intellectual property of their colleagues, chasing the primacy of the “free” (someone should critique the nexus of the Land of the Free/USA, the concept of Liberty and the feeling of entitlement in the age of the Internet demanding everything be free and without cost).

I’m appalled by people disparaging the videos’ production values where what counts is what the viewer is sketching and less on what is on the computer screen. None of the critics have uploaded photos showing their own incomplete learning. Comparisons by some critics of the course with anatomy books on the market are completely misguided because books promote rote copying, not drawing with flexibility from the imagination. You can copy till the cows come home all the drawings from books by Civardi, Bridgman, Richer and Hale drawings (I’ve bought them all over the years!), but without a teacher like Phoenix, you’ll never be able to “see” things three-dimensionally.

In terms of value for money, Phoenix’s course is roughly the equivalent of seven untutored life drawing classes at 2 hours each. There is absolutely NO WAY anyone could grasp all of what Riven Phoenix is providing via the equivalent of a mere seven life drawing sessions. I’ve attended term after term of night classes in life drawing and come away with relatively little; I’ve had teachers who’ve looked at my work and said, “You need more work on hands and feet”, and the best they could offer was an anatomy book, without any explanation about how I go about attaching a hand/foot to that particular pose I’ve drawn. Is more attention paid at proper art school? I’ve no idea. I suspect a lot of Phoenix’s critics are art school graduates who have invested heavily in their art formation and resent someone coming along offering a lot more at a fraction of the price they themselves paid.

No, the Phoenix approach is identical to that of the Renaissance where all figure drawing was done from the imagination, with rare recourse to models or cadavers. Careful examination of sketches by Renaissance artists clearly demonstrates they drew not from a model, but from their imagination; it can be dangerous to copy their ‘mistakes’. I notice in film and television and literary versions of Italian painters that artsts like Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi are shown working from live models; assuming there is some historical justification for this, it’s important to note these were early 17th century Baroque/Rococo artists and not strictly speaking Renaissance artists. I recall an excellent Russian biography of Da Vinci, linking black magic with the dangerous activity of dissecting cadavers. Like a lot of life drawing class tragics, I possess a huge wad of sketches from life drawing sessions past, all of them ready to be washed over with gesso so the paper can be re-used. Phoenix’s course has helped break the cycle of despair at my constantly making the same mistakes and never being exactly sure why.

Drawng Class. Session 7 prep. Life Drawing/male, day 6.

Today’s ‘work’, based on Riven Phoenix, Structure of Man figure drawing lessons.

A 40min ‘summary’ sketch, focussing on overlapping heads and bodies, based on a newspaper photo taken by Ed Giles of an injured protester in Tahrir Square.

Drawing Class. Session 7 prep. Life Drawing/male, day 5.

Today’s work from Riven Phoenix, Structure of Man drawing course: femur, tibia, humerus.

And today’s play: putting what I’ve learned into practice with photos from newspapers – sportsmen like Donovan Bailey, Ryan O’Keefe, Nicky Carle. These raise lots of questions about what muscles attach to which bones, so still a ways to go yet! “Pure” front views are not particularly popular – photographers look for added visual interest from contraposto or slight turns (almost to the three-quarter view). In the last sketch, I emphasised the tonality – solid back through two greys to white. I think my drawing teacher next week will try somehow to exploit shadow falling on the model in a similar way.

I like the Donovan Bailey pose, with the menacing finger pointing directly at the view, which is reminiscent of the famous sketch by Renaissance artist,  Jacopo Pontormo. I found myself subconsciously copying the trapped shapes and enrichment shapes beloved of Burt Dodson in his drawing book.

Drawing Class. Session 7 prep. Life Drawing/male, day 4.

Here’s today’s “work” from Riven Phoenix’s Structure of Man figure drawing course, with some consultation of anatomy textbooks while away from the computer monitor.

I’ve decided to work quite big – full A4-size pages – and with very soft pencils (8B, 9B) to cope with Phoenix’s level of detail and sketching style. Phoenix reinforces his drawing approach from one Lesson to the next, helping imprint the formulas on the memory. I’ve picked up some of his linguistic idiom: “invention” is the product of the imagination, not the product of direct observation; “character design” refers to cartoon characters or manga drawings, “anomalies” refers to the foundation construction which is later erased for ‘proper’ detailed drawing over the top; “organic” refers to the differences between individual bodies. The attention to the skeleton is useful because there are certain “hard” spots all over the body, no matter how much muscle or fat is packed on top. 

Torrential rain continues here for days on end; no real opportunity for urban sketching outdoors. 

After the “work”, here is some “play” based on photos in the sporting pages of today’s newspaper.

At the end of another day’s drawing, some reading: Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap having finished on television this week (I’ve been re-reading each chapter prior to each episode), I found the differences between the novel and the television series intriguing, including the very subtle twists made by Tony Ayres on the original plot. Subtle (the events at the swimming pool and Richie after the Big Day Out) because they didn’t detract or divert from the original. I liked the way that all the parents and grandparents were suddenly sensitised after that slap to the physical abuse they dished up as part of their children “growing up”. It says a lot about how we adapt, through behaviour modification, to the exigencies of human rights. Being altruistic and compassionate is not a light load, it’s quite a burden, requiring focus and concentration – what Buddhists would undoubtedly call “mindfulness”.

I’ve now moved to Michel Hoellebecq’s The Map and The Territory, which has lots of parallels with Tsiolkas’ Dead Europe (contemporary Paris, the photographer/artist, the artist and his gallerist, globalization). Tsiolkas’ protagonist is from outside Europe, so issues of identity and background are more pressing than in the Hoellebecq. By contrast, Hoellebecq’s “Jed” is embedded in Europe, but there is a deal of observation on the multicultural and globalized aspects of contemporary life in France.

Drawing Class. Session 7 prep. Life Drawing/male, day 3

More theoretical work today on proportion and measurement, thanks to Riven Phoenix’ Structure of Man…. finishing the day with a double-spread based on photos, putting the head/torso proportions from SOM foundation into practice: