My work as a figure model has a hidden perk: I get to survey a number of art classes and instructors, and much like the proverbial fly on the wall, I know what’s being said in a room without the speakers realizing that I’m listening.
What is the true test of whether an art instructor is worth the tuition a student pays? Don’t overthink it here – in my opinion, it’s simply whether the student improves in his or her abilities from the start of a course until its end. I pose frequently enough for certain classes, and take enough looks at the work being produced, that I can gauge that factor pretty well. What’s remarkable is how differently two instructors can go about teaching how to draw the figure, and still elicit improvement in their students.
Case in point is a long-term assignment that I’m about halfway through fulfilling, at John Murdoch‘s Goldlight Studios in Perkasie, PA. I hold one pose for three hours every Friday while students work, and rework, their drawing or painting. It’s a ten week session, so that adds up to a thirty hour study.
To the right is the portrait John is working on, when he’s not instructing or managing other concerns at the studio. (The thing protruding from my left ear is a flower, not a hairstyle gone wrong.) I would estimate he’s spent between six and eight hours on this so far; one or two of his students, after even more time with the pose, are working so deliberately they have not yet begun to add the light and dark values of shadowing.
In contrast, a class that I modeled for last night at the Baum School of Art, in Allentown, completed a “long-pose” work of me in only two hours. Part of the difference between this class and John’s is purpose; some of Baum’s students are abject beginners and still getting up to speed with basic drawing concepts and techniques.
But another difference is the amount of thought and knowledge that are to be put into the drawing. Early in the semester, the instructor, Adriano Farinella, will tell the students to draw as if they are being chased. Don’t think, just draw. They stand to the side of the easel and extend their arm, nearly backward, to create tw0-minute blind contour drawings while looking only at model and not the paper. These produce childlike blobs but teach the students to let the image travel from the eye, to the hand, and then to the page, and to remove the brain from the process.
I won’t try to crack into any debate in the art world about which technique is better. Opportunities abound for lengthy instruction in topics such as anatomy, such as described in an archived Museworthy post about the sartorius (i.e. the tailor’s muscle), which can be viewed in the flesh in author/model Claudia ‘s pictures. The one modeling job I ever didn’t apply for the sole reason that I didn’t think I could hack it was for a Dan Thompson workshop at the Studio Incamminati in Philadelphia that ran from 9 a.m to 4 p.m., every day for a week, with the model in the same pose throughout. Thirty-five hours in just one position. Followed by a trip to the chiropractor, I expect.
Perhaps the answer for what makes great art lies in the middle somewhere, just as does the description of what continually make figure modeling so enthralling: the mixture of quick, energetic gesture poses, coupled with thoughtful, serene long poses. If nothing else, that’s what always keeps me coming back for more.
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My faithful reader Dave was good enough to respond to my request for sketches, and a writeup about what models think about as they pose. I find his words both humorous and insightful:
