drawing from life

Drawings from the annual Doctors and Derrières live model sessions held each year in Edmonton.

The live model sessions challenge me to draw what is in front of me and break out of habits and repetitions in the way I see and resolve a picture. It is important to return to life drawing. I can watch how the light falls on the body and each model brings their own approach to the sessions. It is just me with a pen and paper sketching the model in the present moment.  This is how I have been approaching my new work. Without a preplanned image, without expectations and filtered perceptions. It is honest and raw, even if searching with a pencil in the given moment. The final compositions will be resolved later. I discover the figure instead of inventing her,  just as I have not selected these models.

I look forward to these model sessions each year. It is an intimate experience in which someone puts trust in you and each model is unique. Each body has a history and a way they choose to stand before the artists. It is a positive, healthy view of the body and in many ways heals the accumulated anxieties within the skin because it reminds us that we all have bodies that are real and have histories on the skin and are beautiful for being here. The best results come from drawing what is in front of me instead of filling in spaces with what is familiar with my own body. I only work into the drawings when the model is present.

 

During the winter months, I set up a mirror where I could draw my own body by observation. The drawings are quick impressions and I wanted to capture dance-like gestures.

I also began a series of drawings on grey paper by candle light in front of the mirror. Others with my eyes closed. They are not so much observational but more about portraits looking inside. They are marks created from the body about the body.

These drawings are charged up and cathartic and the outcome not important. Repetitions of the same figure slowly breaks down. Similarly placed next to the person who needs to tell a story over and over because the memories from it keeps intruding the body and talking will help diminish it's presence and the need to revisit (among other reasons for sharing). But I did not create these with an audience and the self-editor is turned down. 

I had a mark making tool in one hand and an eraser in the other hand while I drew them and could not see where ink spills occurred. The erased marks leave a resonance of the things I had uncovered. The voices scatter into light created out of erased marks and traces of colour. This exercise is about letting go of stories. 

The act of drawing them every day was necessary and I would store them away only taking them out a couple months later. And on viewing them after some distance I want to cover up the noise and restore the mangled and tentative figures to a resolution. There is violence in the marks, where screaming faces, roosters with eye-feather wings, and carnivorous mermaids emerge. I put them up in my room wondering if they should be left unresolved. I'm reluctant to dictate what these emotional snapshots will become based on the associations I keep searching for while standing back in a new head space. Now I am conscious of how these would sit in front of an audience and rearrange them on the walls looking for patterns and balance. They are from the past but still cover every inch of space.