The Highs and Lows of Life Drawing

I’ve been going through something of a shift in my art practice of late. A couple of years ago, when I came back to art after quite a long time away, I launched myself into nothing but play. I went down rabbit hole after rabbit hole of mixed media and abstract art as well as art journaling and collage. I played with materials I had never thought to use before. I took found objects and altered them. I took old books and turned them into art journals. I made junk journals from envelopes, and bits of cloth, and old boxes. It was an amazing time of discovery and play and making things purely for the love of making them.

In doing all of this, I rediscovered a well of creativity and invention that had been boarded up, probably since childhood. It gave me back a self-confidence that I had not had in years and settled me into a habit of creativity that stuck, no matter what life threw at me.

Over the past year, though, I have noticed a change. Call it a personal maturation, or a solidifying of something. I find I no longer feel the same joy of discovery in throwing everything at a page in a creative frenzy. I want to slow down. I want to finesse. I want to hone my technique. So, I have started to taking life drawing and portrait classes.

Portraiture and life drawing fascinate me. It feels like one of those pillars of artistic endeavour. To be able to create the likeness of a living human that at once looks lifelike but also does not look like a photo is a skill I long to master. I am an avid follower of the Portrait Artist of the Year programme on Sky Television and have a deep fondness for wandering through art galleries looking at the beautiful renditions of peoples’ faces. I also find these two aspects of art to be the hardest and scariest to do. Taking on the challenge of representing someone on a piece of paper or canvas feels like a promise to do the subject justice by giving them a faithful representation of themselves, but, so far, my technique does not always allow me to fulfil that promise.

This week I have experienced both the fizzy joys of feeling like I was really getting something right, and the sheepish sadness of feeling like I’d got it all wrong and couldn’t possibly share what I had done with the group. The first was a portrait drawing session through Draw Brighton where our wonderful model sat perfectly still for both 45 minute sessions. Having a good chunk of time for each sitting and a very good subject, I was able to concentrate on what I was seeing and was mostly able to win the battle against my brain. This is where the fizzy joy came in. I would catch myself making a mark and feeling with my whole being that that was exactly the mark I needed to make. While the whole portrait is not an exact likeness and the two portraits do not necessarily look like the same sitter, there are small parts of each one that felt absolutely right while I was drawing. It was quite a giddy experience.

Last Wednesday, however, the opposite was true. I joined another Draw Brighton class, this time Life Drawing. We had another wonderful model who recreated the poses from Botticelli’s Primavera. There were five 3-minute sessions and then three 8-minute sessions and a final session of about 12 minutes. Perhaps it was the shorter time sprints, perhaps I was tired, perhaps my brain was getting too much in the way of what I was seeing, but I struggled. Despite the pain of feeling like nothing was working out the way I wanted it to, it was still an extremely valuable experience. Looking at the drawings now, I can see that some bits worked a little bit, and there is definitely promise, though I still have a long long way to go.

But, as the old adage goes, practice makes perfect! So, I’m signed up for more sessions and spending more of my spare time grabbing my little sketch book and looking up references to practice the lines and improve the gestural drawing. As a friend of mine mentioned, drawing is much like weight lifting. You have to build up your drawing muscles over time and as you improve, you’ll be able to lift heavier and heavier weights. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll feel good enough to enter Portrait Artist of the Year myself! Wouldn’t that be a milestone!

Until next time, happy creating!