The naked truth: life drawing can teach all of us a few vital lessons
No nudging. No winking. No giggling at the back. And absolutely no jokes about needing to sharpen one’s pencil. This was the gist of the lecture given by our art master to his mixed GCSE group before our first life drawing class. Anyone seen to so much as snicker would be sent to the library in chalk-dusted shame.
When it came to the great kimono-dropping moment, he was more flustered than either we or the model were, fussing with the settings on the storage heater – no goose pimples, please – and stopping the gaps in the shutters with rags.
He needn’t have fretted. Even the jokiest, blokiest boys in the class were rapt and respectful. Every life class that year was marked by a hum of concentration. Not a sound above charcoal on paper and the creaking of stools.
Never drawn from the nude? Now you can – and without the evening-class blushes. Next year, BBC Four will screen Life Drawing Live!, a two-hour “slow television” life drawing lesson timed to coincide with Mary Beard’s documentary Shock of the Nude. One wonders at the exclamation mark. It’s a bit Benny Hill and cor-look-atthe-contrapposto-on-her for my liking.
Viewers will be encouraged to sketch at home as naked models adopt a series of poses. Don’t say you can’t draw. Neither could I until I switched schools at 15 and dropped chemistry and physics for art and ceramics. I’m no Dürer but, thanks to life classes and sketchbooks, I’ve found an inky, imperfect style of my own.
Forget yoga, mindfulness, spa days, there’s nothing to match the meditation of the life room. There’s something about the courteous compact between model and artist, the dignified silence, the utter focus that banishes all other worries and distractions. Every school should teach life drawing, not only as a masterclass in self-control and the politeness due to a naked stranger, but as a lesson in vile and lovely bodies. As a teenager, painfully unhappy in my own skin, there was reassurance in each week’s unveiling of unruly form.
To eyes used to the hungry, hairless, airbrushed bodies of magazines, the defiant figures of the life class were a revelation. You soon learn that, from an artist’s perspective, the lumpier and bumpier the better. Smooth slimness is dull to draw. What you want are shadows, creases, pouches and pockmarks.
A friend who went to a life-drawing hen-do found the hired hunk unexpectedly off-putting. A paunch would have been preferable to a six-pack. She noticed, though, how the usual hen hysteria became an almost reverential hush. More Caravaggio, than Chippendales.
Uncertain students could start with lightning sketches – 15 seconds a pose, quick on the draw, as fast as your chalk will go. Or drawing blind with a sheet of paper over hand and arm, not bothering about getting it wrong or making it pretty.
There’s no right way to draw, just as there’s no right shape for a body. From the raucous curves of Rubens to Egon Schiele’s knobbly knees, the nude in all its guises and sizes has proved an enduring inspiration. To anyone who ever says they don’t think much of Tracey Emin, complaining of her tent and unmade bed, I say: look at her life drawings – scraggled, raddled, awkwardly poignant.
What more encouragement do you need? Ready, steady… disrobe.