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.

The Crucifixion Expert

Pieter Paul Rubens drew a crucifixion with special expertise. In the long war between his patrons, the house of Hapsburg in Flanders, and their opponents, the Dutch protestants, there was a crucifixion or a hanging at almost every crossroads in the Netherlands. Thus are memes replicated: the holy symbol becomes reality on the highway.
Here's what one website writes about the war: "(The Duke of ) Alva's errand was to punish those who had been concerned in the disorders at Antwerp and elsewhere. For this purpose he established a Council of Troubles, which was soon called by the people of the Council of Blood. Thousands of men and women, guilty and innocent, were put to death. They were hanged on scaffolds, on trees, at the door-posts of private house. Many of them were poor; but some were the chief citizens and nobles of the country. The whole business of the land was stopped; grass grew in the markets. Every family was in mourning. And against these cruelties the people could do nothing. They had had no experience in war. They were shopkeepers and schoolmasters. The Spanish soldiers had them at their mercy, and they showed no mercy." (The Baldwin Project)
Men crucified everywhere were morbid enough, but Europe had not yet witnessed the first Great Terror, in which the revolutionary government guillotined thousands of French nobles while "les tricoteuses" knitted and gossiped in the front row of the assembled crowds. The British internment and elimination of tens of thousands of the Boer warriors' families in South Africa followed. Turkish genocide of the Armenians came shortly afterwards. The unthinkable slaughter on the battlefields of World War One followed. Then in the 1930s, the Soviets introduced famine as a political weapon, and the knock on the Kulak door in the night. "This is nothing personal, you are being exterminated as a class." Finally, the appalling debauchery of the so-called "final solution", and the complete prostration of Roman Catholicism before the madness of the Bavarian Nazis (Bavaria being Roman Catholic territory). So, you can't help wondering how the Crucifixion of their founding martyr, and its memetic use over the ensuing millennia, helped the Christians develop a fierce sense of compassion for their fellow man. The only Europeans who displayed such feelings were the on-the-ground Communists who actually fought Nazism door-to-door, instead of hiding piously behind their crucifixes.

Five minutes

Life-drawing jams always include the one-minute impression and the five-minute sketch. I'm trying to improve but I usually spend time on just one part of a nude instead of capturing the essence of the whole in a few broad strokes, as Susan Underwood did here. She also used a big drawing surface and treated it like a memo pad. The result has a zen-like finish.

Signature Portrait

Is this a portrait? A cartoon? Or a signature? Answer: it's a bit of all three: a signaitoon. The wonderfully precocious Jean Cocteau drew this when he was just 21 years old for his older pal Eric Satie. Imagine having the chutzpah to hand someone this idiosyncratic sketch, confident that it would one day be worth big money! Perhaps it's surprising to think that the composer of those delicate Gymnopedies for piano was a Sigmund Freud look-alike. But he had looked somewhat wilder 10 years earlier, in 1900. Cocteau captured him making what was evidently a characteristic gesture, pinching his pince-nez, or spectacles, on to the bridge of his nose. It would have been instantly recognisable to friends of Satie. Picasso met Cocteau and his circle in 1917 and worked with them and Diaghilev on the ballet Parade, to Satie's music. Picasso duly did his own portrait of him in 1920. It's interesting to compare the two, because Picasso much later did signaitoons himself. But his came decades after Cocteau's. Everything Cocteau did had his imprint all over it, and he didn't change styles every few years, the way Picasso did. Cocteau's last hot love affair was with Jean Marais, and get him. His confidence over the Satie sketch was warranted, because Cocteau ended his days, not dying in the gutter like Modigliani, but wearing smart suits in a nice comfy chateau in the country.

Image manipulation

These two nudes found their way on to one sheet of paper, showing how artists manipulated images millennia before computer whizzes resized, altered and pasted them on screens. In both images on the page, I portray the same model, and so the impossible is laid out before our eyes. It has been shown that Degas used the same method to place dancers originally drawn individually in his studio into groups. In fact, just about all groupings in historic art were produced in the same way. An individual (human, animal) was drawn in the studio, either directly into the group-work, or resized and added to it. You can be sure that Rubens did not gather the family of Jan Breughel the Elder into his studio to paint them all at once. Nor did Botticelli happen upon beautiful, blonde, identical quintuplets in the streets of Florence and invite them to pose for La Primavera. In this way, historic art was closer to drama or masque or tableau than to photography. The artist, in turn, was closer to a magician or conjuror, as he not only created images, but manipulated them. In the virtual worlds conjured digitally today such manipulation is anonymous and routine. In the case of my drawing, it was originally a way to save paper before I noticed its aesthetic appeal. Shame about the missing left hand.

Simulacra

Simulacra are vague likenesses, and they starred in Jean Baudrillard's 1981 book, Simulacra and Simulations. Baudrillard loved juicy disinformation, and illustrators are past masters of it. Nothing can distort and misinform quite so well as a thoroughly misleading drawing. Here's an example: on the right are shown three different skulls in profile, Caucasian, African and Chimpanzee. The African profile is faked to look like a chimpanzee's. On the left are the three supposedly corresponding faces, sharply emphasizing the vast chasm that separates in appearance the god Apollo, a so-called "Creole Negro", and a particularly poorly-drawn chimpanzee. The purpose of these images is to reinforce white racism and Imperialist overlordship. The victim here is the African: such simulacra were deployed by the Nazis to degrade Jews.
The chimpanzee skull is accurate enough, as is the human one. However, the simulacra do not include the skull of the baby chimp, which is far flatter than the adult's, reflecting the Darwinian observation that human adults have an infantilised face.
Meanwhile, the "Creole Negro" skull is a grotesque forgery, as demonstrated by this African skull found in a slave cemetary in the USA. Such racist forgeries were common at the time, and even corrupted the world of science in the notorious case of the Piltdown non-man. Note the latitude for forgery in drawing, as opposed to photography.

Sketch portrait

Don Bachardy is a master of the sketch portrait. This one of my hero, Aldous Huxley, probably took him no more than twenty minutes. It's hard to persuade a subject to stay still for much longer than that. It's always been a fantasy of mine to wear a bottle-green corduroy suit, carry a clipboard and pad, and do sketch portraits for money in Montmartre. Bachardy did the same, except around the salons of Los Angeles. (His book of portraits was called Stars In My Eyes.) Last year, it was reported he was still doing it, drawing movie-diva Angelina Jolie in Paris, the pictures to go into the Jolie collection at her hide-out in Namibia.
The sketch of Huxley was done in August, 1962, just fifteen months before his death, which occurred an hour or two after the assassination of JFK on November 22, 1963. To me, there's something wrong with Huxley's hand in the picture, and I don't mean just that it is pointing towards the tongue in which Huxley had suffered fatal cancer since 1960. Either his palm folded in a most unusual way, or Bachardy simply fudged a finger that went wrong. That, or he relocated the edge of the hand. That aside, Bachardy makes Huxley into little more than one line, from above the elbow through the narrow face to the carrot-top hair, which Huxley kept just a little long in the Oxbridge intellectual style. Huxley was very tall, and that's reflected here in the length of the wrist, which looks vulnerable. The eyes are a bit soppily done, glamourised even, considering that Huxley was nearly blind (originally from a nasty disease caught from horrid surroundings at exclusive and expensive Eton College) and normally wore spectacles with thick lenses.
Bachardy's entree into L.A. celebrity circles began when as a young man he moved in with Christopher Isherwood, another Cambridge U emigrant (like myself, although I got my Honours degree, he didn't). They were together for decades, and Bachardy has done numerous nudes of young men. His spare drawing style became his trade-mark, with shadow and line given equal emphasis. However, this sketch of Huxley is a bit of a "sell". I'm not sure Huxley would have approved, assuming he ever saw it properly.

Getting the outline right

This model I drew at a workshop in West London, England. She grew larger each time she posed. She is Brazilian and with her partner was saving up to buy a home in Brazil. I had only just begun life-drawing, and found in this session just how slow using a pencil is compared with Conte pastel. With Conte, which is a stick of solid medium, you can shade with the broad side, filling swathes of paper at a stroke. With your sharpened tip, you can pick out line and detail. But with a pencil, you just have your sharpened tip and nothing else. The shading you have to do by cross-hatching, something I had not learned then, and still have not studied.
You can see that I was obsessive about getting the outline, a characteristic I can't shake off. I wanted to express the image in a single outline before I did any other work on it. Wrong! You can do just as well by first drawing only the shading, and detailing outlines later. Here, I have not learned more than a French or Spanish cave-painter two-hundred and seventy centuries ago.

The runway nude

This nude I drew at a workshop in Richmond-Upon-Thames in England in 2003. It's a half-hour pose. The model was about 40 years of age and well-preserved in the midriff and legs. Perhaps she did not own a car and walked a lot. She also had shaved a "runway" into her pubic hair which, at the angle I was drawing her, and with her tight tummy, gave prominence to her pubic mound. I wanted to capture this, and paid attention to getting right the proportions of her legs, pelvic and stomach areas. It was particularly sensitive getting the almost 90-degree angle of her left inner thigh without the use of the plumb-line that John Singer Sargent always recommended an artist should have handy for drafting a drawing. At this stage, I had only a few months' experience of life-drawing, and I had some progress to make on chiaroscuro. I also left too little time to attend to a vital element, her hair. It should have been sketched in with wavy lines instead of heavily hatched in a lifeless way. But I have to admit that in spite of its obvious evidence of inexperience, I like the way this nude leaps off the page. Her right forearm is brave, and her lower body is wonderful --- except for the truncated right foot, of course.

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.