Drawing Naked People

I went through almost a full year without seeing the inside of the Hyde Park Art Center. Time and responsibilities had gotten in the way of any class time there, but I was bound and determined to get one last class in before I left town for good.

I’ve been playing with pastels since early fall, and I thought it was time to get some basic technique beneath my experimentation. There was one course in pastels on the spring schedule that didn’t get in the way of MDiv time or any of the other compulsory activities of the final year of a degree. “Portrait and Figure Drawing in Pastel.”

Oh my.

My inner pre-pubescent toad snickered, delightedly. “You’re gonna draw naked people!”

“Shut up!” I said, and swatted him with a rolled up pile of old newsprint sketches. “I’ll toss you in the cat’s kennel. I mean it.”

The little twerp got the message. I got over the twinge of awkwardness I was feeling and made my way to class.

Now, in truth, I prefer still life or landscape. Drawing people is hard. Bodies move. They make shapes that are hard to reproduce — lines and proportions and perspectives evade my pencils with alarming regularity. Faces are even harder. Still life stays — well — still. I can meditate on a landscape, spend serious time on a detail. When the instructor announces a ten minute pose, I might as well be back in the lecture hall, frantically scribbling down the last sentence while missing the next two paragraphs in the process (my note taking skills are, how you say, abysmal).

But, I wanted color. I wanted pastel time. I needed an art class to get my head back on straight. So, I was going to draw naked people. [*snicker* THWAP]

Now, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Scratch that. I knew what I imagined (I had, after all, failed to sufficiently gag my inner twerp). Whatever it was, our model was not it.

Helena is 60+ years of age. She walks into the classroom with a cane, and occasionally she’s wearing a foot brace. She is not what would be described as the “typical” artists model. She is, however, in good shape and she possesses the most important quality in a figure model: no sense of awkwardness. She is comfortable in her own body. That comfort is infectious. After the initial collective moment of “Holy crap, there’s a naked grandmother in the room” we students get down to the serious business of drawing.

Trying to draw a person — really draw a person, or anything else for that matter — is a meditation in seeing a person in their entirety. It is gaining a consciousness of all the parts that make up the whole, as well as a consciousness of the whole as well. Where the breakdown happens for me so often is in the translation between the consciousness of seeing and the doing of drawing. It takes considerable effort for me to escape from the symbolic/language oriented part of my brain into the more abstract. Those of you familiar with the now classic Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain will understand what I’m talking about: When one sees with the language side of the brain, one tends to draw the shorthand symbol for what one is seeing rather than an actual physical representation of what is seen.

Thus my problem with drawing bodies, particularly when they’re doing anything other than standing straight up (I can draw an eight-head-tall “fashion” figure, the result of all the theatrical design training). Once a model sits, twists, reclines, or what have you, I get lost. I can see, as the model sits, that her leg is bent at the knee and that her upper leg is now perpendicular to her hip. I can see the shift in perspective. I know the technical term for the needed drawing technique is “foreshortening.” But, as charcoal or pastel moves to paper, symbol mind takes over, wrestles with the reality of what I’m seeing, and insists on a two-head-tall upper leg in some form or another. The result on the paper is messy.

For the first few weeks of the class, this is how it goes. I try to outline the body and then fill in the color. The proportions are never quite right. I am dissatisfied with my work. The instructor wonders why I’m not taking my finished pieces home.

The breakthrough comes midway through the term. I don’t know if our instructor has sensed my mounting frustration, or if this is a regularly scheduled part of the course. “Let’s try something different today,” she says. Rather than outlining, starting from the head and working our way down, she asks us to block out masses of color starting from the navel and working out. “The belly is the center of power and gravity,” she tells us. “Look at the shape it makes in relationship to its connecting parts.” And so, I begin blocking out those shapes in a medium tone, looking at the component shapes, looking at the whole, seeing everything that makes up Helena and seeing the end product, as well. I go back and block in highlights and shadows, paying attention to shapes again.

The meditation blurs time. Before long, our instructor informs us that Helena has been sitting and we have been drawing her for forty-five minutes.

I step back from the easel to see what I’ve done. There she is.

It’s unmistakably our model. I have left symbol-mind behind and seen the pieces within the whole. With some prodding from the instructor, I touch in some more detail: a plane to sit on, a background shade to make her stand out more. It feels very freeing to realize that I can think in images as well as I can in words when I allow myself to get into the moment. Smashing the pre-ordained symbol (and isn’t art supposed to be iconoclastic?) and not worrying about technique has allowed me to sit with a person and see them as they are.

If I needed any other proof that I’d broken out of my linear/symbol-driven rut, it was the left leg. That damn bent leg. Just weeks earlier I’d drawn a similar pose, starting with an outline and working in. The bent leg in the seated position about made me quit.

Working from the inside out, from that “center of power,” had changed both the way I saw and drew. No more thinking “leg,” now my mind’s eye saw the shapes of light and shadow, the colors of flesh, and the way one line defined the next. Helena’s leg flowed into the rest of her.

I’ve been meditating lately on the intersection of language and the visual arts. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has been the major catalyst. We spend most of our lives on the language side of the brain, doing instant translations. We hear a word and match it to the programmed symbol. More often than not, when we listen to another speaking, we’re hearing ourselves in the end product, the symbol-mind taking short cuts in our processing. What if we could listen with our artistic mind, the abstract side? Rather than symbolic shortcuts, we could hear the whole person in the conversation — their context, their symbols. We often hear that language is limited and limiting, and it’s true. A word is, after all, a shortcut symbol for a more abstract concept, and the more abstract the concept, the more the word does it insufficient justice. It’s interesting to note that when the mind is working in the abstract, our synapses are firing in parallel, and while we are working on language, they’re firing in linear series. So, when we move from concept to word, the language pathway is, almost literally, too narrow for the concept that formed it (and, yes, I realize that this may not be physiologically or neurologically the case — it’s a metaphor). Whenever I hear nitpicking over language in church, I’ve started chalking it up to intellectual laziness. The symbol-mind is taking shortcuts again. We’re hearing the other, but we’re listening to ourselves (or, picking up on the synapse metaphor again, we need broad minds for narrow words). A guidebook is perhaps needed. Listening on the Left Side of the Brain. Then maybe we can stop quibbling over what the leg is supposed to look like, and see it as it is.

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