Drafting a nude

I drew this picture of Eva (a 30 year-old macrame artisan from Barcelona) in my studio in San Miguel de Allende in February, 2007. Aesthetically, it works. By the rules, a body should be about six and a half heads long. This one is more like eight. Of course, it is her left leg and torso that are extended. However, this is a case where the limner can get away with breaking the rules, because Eva is reclining horizontally. If she were standing, the distortion would be instantly discernible by those with an eye for the studio style. By "studio style" I mean the vintage rules for human-figure drawing, deriving from the Renaissance obsession with mathematics and proportion. Many of the Renaissance artists cheated, using mechanical devices to reproduce their subjects exactly, as David Hockney illustrates in detail in his excellent book Secret Knowledge. But equally many, among them Albrecht Durer and Leonardo Da Vinci, believed there were scientific rules of beauty and form. Durer actually travelled to Aachen (with his sour wife) to seek a secret book owned by the court painter of the sister of the Emperor. She, however, foolish woman, wanted to give the book to her new court painter, and so it vanished from history, along with its gnomic formulae.
There's another error in my drawing of Eva: the shading behind her is not completed around her face and folded arms, thus destroying the illusion of contrast between her figure and the wall or background.
But all the same, I like this drawing because it came to me all-of-a-piece and I think it shows. Her head and arms are glamorous, while the rest of her body is all-too-human. In the contrast is some dynamism.