Model poses

Models in life-drawing sessions may be unaware of it, but they adopt poses that reflect western artistic assumptions. Henri Matisse helped to reinforce such assumptions in the 20th century. There's a photograph of middle-aged Matisse in his Granpa three-piece suit and spectacles examining a naked model that says a lot about the Bohemian artist-model relationship. The painting above similarly shows Matisse formally dressed, with a scantily-clad model. This scene is never reversed, with a formally dressed woman painting a naked man. The poses adopted by models in life-drawing sessions today reflect the Bohemian life-style: they are typically the poses adopted by mistresses or servants, submissive to their master artist. Obviously, women expose themselves naked to men most commonly in the bedroom, particularly now that central heating is widely available. But there are other traditions. Models should be thinking about autonomous poses that reflect the new reality. Some religious traditions offer postures that have a mandala-like completeness. Models should explore folk dancing and yogic poses that convey female independence.

War Artists

The US war machine only has three war artists. That's surprising, considering how thoroughly they normally cover all media, even including strip cartoon books. (In the linked picture, only an artist is able to insert Mohamed Atta where officialdom asserts he was, since no other evidence exists.)
The drawing here was sketched by Michael Fay. He told the BBC he was "inspired by the golden light and purple shadows as marines set a trap for Taleban snipers who had been shooting at them near Kandahar, Afghanistan."
Kandahar region happens to be where no fewer than eight Canadian troopers died last week, six of them in one explosion, two in the other. Does war get dirtier than this? Only an artist could evoke the "golden light and purple shadows" to describe the sordid scene he is depicting: grown men setting deadly traps for each other in a devastated village.
I met Leonard Brooks a few weeks back, a gifted Canadian water-colourist who served as a Canadian war artist in the world-war-two part of the 75-year war. He was a dutiful believer and fully embedded: he even took charge of a captured U-boat and (courageously) held a gun on its fanatical crew members.
Graham Sutherland made a more objective witness of the same war, perhaps because he depicted its brutal effects on the streets of Britain.
The Pentagon probably retains war artists to adorn the walls of its own scores of miles of corridors in its 500 bases world-wide. Its intelligence branch has plenty of ways of fixing pictures of its own, including Photoshopping them for their war-making propaganda, e.g. the "future force".

Botticelli's iconic woman

Botticelli only signed one picture, the Mystic Nativity, in which his single 'three beauties' model is replicated into a whole choir of dancing angels. Here she is in a drawing that plainly had to be attributed to Botticelli, even if unsigned. For it is she. I'd love to examine this picture closely in the museum that holds it. She is clearly talking, presumably something she did very much, although possibly not to Botticelli except when he was drawing her, because she may have been his servant and not his mistress. (Botticelli was probably gay: one of the few things we know is that he was arrested for sodomy in 1502, when his career was in freefall). Her plaits are bound at the side of the head in the manner of ancient Iberian women, who appear in the Valencian sculpture. So, it's a classic hair-do of the Mediterranean and can probably be found on the ancient mosaics in Crete and Santorini. Her bust is untypically full: the Gothic nudes of the era had little more than snake-bites. The nipples and aureoles are visible under her filmy garment, a modern touch. But her breasts may not have been drawn from life: they don't fall quite right. The artist makes her float by the device of having her hair and ribbons waving in an up-current, suggesting she is moving up and down. Her head angles to her right as if banking, and her mouth is open, perhaps in a cry of joy. She's not pregnant, indicating that she is not married and thus a virgin --- hence, perhaps, the breasts? I don't think any early Italian renaissance woman actually wore such gauzy garmentation: it's a meme replicated by Botticelli --- his signature style if you will. We'll never know who this model of Botticelli's was, (we know little enough about him) but in today's overcrowded world her figure and above all her face, are assured of immortality.