Drawing Conclusions

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I’ve posted before about my struggles with representational drawing, particularly of people. I’m much more confident with buildings, though I could certainly still use some perspective help there as well.

Enter the gentle but powerful force of nature that is Riva Lehrer, at the Comics & Medicine conference this past June in Chicago. Aside from being an amazing portrait artist, Riva is an awesome human being – kind, funny, reverent and irreverent, smart, genuine, warm, a great and interested listener as well as talker. In short, Riva disarmingly genuinely human. I quickly grew to adore her. Her most recent show, Mirror Shards, is stunning, and features, among others, this image done in collaboration with Alison Bechdel.

Riva has a terrific command of human anatomy, obviously.

Riva knew of my struggles with drawing, and she so kindly invited me to attend her figure drawing classes at the School of the Art Institute.

Gesture drawing, in fact the use of the word gesture in this context, was completely new to me. Here is my first attempt, first drawing, first day of class, a “pretest” of sorts to show where I started.

You can see that the torso is a mess, and I was clearly more focused on the detail of the facial features. I realized pretty quickly that I was drawing from the inside out, a shadow frame, without, despite being a nurse, evidence of the body’s interior.

That’s where we started, talking in detail about the architecture of the body. I was pretty okay when we drew Norbert, Riva’s skeletal model. He’s a great model, too, because he never assumes those flashy, dramatic, and frustrating foreshortened poses that the real models love to show off. Norbert is a simple guy.

In looking at the architecture of the body, we considered what evolution has done to the skeleton- both animal and human. We looked at what joints exist where, what their natural ranges of motion are, how movement of one joint impacts the others in terms of bearing the weight of the body’s muscles and organs. This is all content I knew from nursing school, but learning it in this context, as it applies to accurately re-representing the human form, that felt all new.

And this is where things started falling apart for me. It all seemed logical, and like it would all flow back together, a simultaneous awareness of interior and exterior, but thinking about drawing in this way seemed to be destroying the tiny, weak grasp I had on representing the human body in charcoal on paper. It looked and felt really crappy sometimes. And it got worse, as you can see here – unless the model this class was a fetus, which I don’t seem to recall. Perhaps I’m drawing my inner urge to crawl into a fetal position and weep. 

But I forged on. I decided no matter what, I was going to be the honey badger of drawing. I just wasn’t going to give a damn, I was going to just keep doing my drawing thing, regardless of how ugly it got or how it almost killed me. 
Riva taught about how to think when drawing – about gauging proportions, and relationships of objects in space. We learned a few tricks for measuring and comparing – how to look. And see. 

I had to miss several classes due to my mom’s brief illness and travel to Leeds, but in the classes I did attend, it started to slowly, painfully, start coming back together. 

And then I did this one, with which I was quite pleased. Certainly not perfect, for example despite being a big guy, I don’t think his shoulders were that broad. But whatever, I liked this one. 
There’s this moment we discussed in the final class, where as an artist you decide, as you look at the work you are creating based on the body you are looking at, whether your loyalty is ultimately going to be to the body as it sits before you, or to your drawing. Riva wants us to be loyal to the body, at least at this early stage. 
I tend to be more loyal to my drawings. Honey badger don’t care. 
The process of Riva’s drawing class disassembled my assumptions and approach to drawing, then painfully tried to help me reassemble basic skills. I cartooned it (admittedly somewhat unfairly, in a moment of frustration) like this… 
      
But in reality, the impact of thinking about drawing in this new way, from the inside out, has carried over to drawing just about anything. I was sketching a coat and found myself thinking about its internal structure, how it supports what is seen on the outside. The drawing actually ended up having some depth. Huh. Who knew? 
Interestingly the butcher paper from class sessions is organized in order below, and perfectly reflects the process of this class for me. At first, I’m all cocky & confident, and I roll my (thought to be) masterpieces, tuck them under my arm & trot home. The middle was a different story – folded my work, jammed it into my bag, slunk home. There may have been some crumpled on site that didn’t even make it home. But then it comes together again, and I did drawings it doesn’t pain me to revisit & I rolled them again. 

Learning is hard. Teaching effectively is even harder, and I thank Riva for her patience & skill. I have much more to learn, and much, more drawing to do. There’s a saying that feels like a lame cliche, “When the student is ready the teacher will appear” or something. I guess it might be true. Dorky, but true. 

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