Today's art class was a nude figure model session, which was interesting more for the class reaction (or lack thereof) than the drawing itself. When I did life drawing in high school, there was a slightly different atmosphere. The only students present had signed up specifically to practice drawing people, and knew pretty much exactly what they were getting into. Everyone was very serious and polite about it, particularly because they knew they would be turfed out the door instantly for giggling at the wrong moment.

But this is a first-year introductory class, free registration for any student of the University. There are kids in the class that have never actually taken an art class before, so having a woman stand up on a platform in dramatically lit bare skin so that we may spend 30 seconds, two minutes, five minutes, and then an hour doing sketches and gesture studies and drawing after drawing, was something about half the class had never done before. There was no specific warning in the syllabus that there would be nudity, nor in the class description, and in fact it wasn't until the start of class today that I discovered that "figure model" meant "naked," when the teacher warned us and said we might leave if we were terribly uncomfortable. I didn't notice anyone leave. I couldn't see the faces around the room clearly enough to read expressions, the lights were low and I still haven't replaced my lost glasses, but while it was certainly awkward at first everyone drew very quietly and, as far as I could tell, politely.

The teacher touched on the 'politics' of drawing nude models in her little this-is-what-we're-doing-today introduction speech. Politeness is so very important to remember, along with remembering that yes, this is a person, when she is not posing nude she has friends and a life and probably a day job and deserves every respect. Every time I get irritated at the general twitchyness of live models ("AGH she scratched her nose and now her arm's in a different place and my shadows are all wrong grumblegrumblegrumble"), I do have to remind myself not only how bloody difficult it is to hold perfectly still for minutes at a time, let alone a full hour, but also that relatively few people have the balls, literally or figuratively, to shed clothes and let a bunch of people of any age stare at them intensely. If you're doing it right, the stare of an artist at work is VERY intense. Every line and shadow transferred to paper to capture the depth and shape of a thigh, a nose, the curve of the belly. After a few minutes you find yourself losing the awareness of "this is a naked man/woman" and going into a mindset where the overall shape and shades are all you're thinking about. And then maybe you catch the model's eye as you're trying to figure out the spacing between forehead and nose, and you just have to smile or nod politely and keep drawing.

People look so DIFFERENT out of their clothes. Every time I've seen a model in and out of their street attire, I am at least a little surprised. Paunches hidden under shirts or bone-rack lack of buttocks hidden under good jeans. But I know I'd rather draw the paunchy than the skinny, boniness has such hard edges that it's even more difficult to give a sense of fullness to the body on paper.

I'm quite pleased with the second-last drawing I did, the full hour one, but for some reason I kind of lost it in the last one. Hrm. Ah well, practice makes perfect...