Life Drawing Online in the Age of COVID
There are still no in-person life drawing sessions.
No more community drawing sessions with an ever-shifting tribe of artists, students, and other enthusiasts gathering for the ritual of drawing the human figure from life. No more costume figure classes at the art college, with models dressed as detectives and gun molls.
At least not in person.
Like so many experiences, in this COVID era, real-life experience has been replaced by the virtual. These days, I have to do my life drawing from the computer. Instead of being with another person, seeing them at a distance in real space and responding on the page with marks that capture the impressions on my eyes, I peer at a device made of metal, plastic, copper wire, rare earths sitting front of me. Online figure drawing, is a variation of something we once did in real life. It is familiar, but not the same.
These days, I have to do my life drawing from the computer. Instead of….Usually, the models are dressed in shorts, bathing suits, or they wear exotic costumes. The online groups and meetups vary in the number of participants. One London drawing group hosts a weekly online figure and portrait sessions with up to a hundred people in attendance. Last week a famous film actor posed for them for charity and over four hundred people showed up.
Today, I am drawing with a small collective, hosted by an artist/model couple out of Brooklyn. They hire models, both local and from around the globe to pose online in their Zoom room for two hours each week. This ‘meeting’ is attended by figure drawing enthusiasts of all stripe, from Chicago, Montana, Toronto, and more. There are twelve of us.
Our model an Italian, poses for us from a spare Parisian flat. He has a lean build and long hair, tied back. One of the first things you take in about a person, in the flesh, is their height. Online he seems tall, but it’s impossible to say for sure.
He has arranged his iphone so that the camera will fully frame his poses. Late afternoon shadows rake across the wall behind him.
He poses, performs, displays, center stage, alone in the room. I can’t surmise much about the setting. It feels Parisian enough. The plastered wall, a carved door jam, sloping garret ceiling and a slice of a window behind him, all looking rather French. Wrought iron railings can be seen through a slice of a window view to the side. There is a very small gilt-framed canvas on the wall. It looks like a Matisse still life, or I should say a copy of one.
Wearing only brief black athletic shorts, he sets a timer and adjusts the camera. Moving into the frame and striking a series of acrobatic, powerful poses, he contorts and coils his body into different spidery shapes over two-minute intervals. I draw.
I work with dynamic strokes, pen to paper, searching for the spontaneity I experience when drawing from life drawing IRL. It takes time, initially, to adjust to the flatness of the laptop screen and the framing of the onscreen window.
He is both real and an illusion, dimensional and flat. Initially, he is a photo. Any movement is imperceptible. As a teenager, I often drew from photos. Animals, actors, professional athletes. For a long time, drawing from photographs was drawing for me. I am now taken back those experiences.
Now he is cinematic, a shot in a film. Suddenly, his weight shifts, coming out of a pose. He looms looming forward and I become more conscious that he’s really there. He looks into the camera lens at me.
There are challenges to drawing from the screen. I start to adapt to physical distortions created by his camera. It plays with the foreshortening. Hand, arm, and leg push toward me creating a more graphic sense of space. How close to get to the screen? I can’t seem to see him! I’d better get new glasses, except that I can’t go to an optometrist at this stage of the lockdown. The wifi connection momentarily gets weaker and the image blurs. I try raising the laptop, putting some books under it. As I continue, the muscle memory of hundreds of hours of drawing in the figure studio brings me into a familiar sense of engagement. The model becomes more real, less simulation.
In one pugilistic posture, the foreshortened model leans dramatically towards the camera creating a striking, exaggerated triangularity that I might have missed IRL. But the light is too washed out, and the human form I know so well, hard to decipher. I adjust the brightness on my screen and there it is. I’m more easily seeing narrative. Less caught up in reflexive copying.
He moves closer and stands with his weight on one hip, head tipped down, easy confidence. Somehow, the light in the room shifts, bringing a dramatic contrast to the silhouette of his profile. Now I can see him. I now have a palpable sense of his presence. Then he glances up at us with a dark, secretive look.
We feel a collective chill as we try to get it all down on paper.
We are startled out our rapt concentration by the sound of a crash off-screen.
His eyes widen at something off-screen, and suddenly several heavy dark forms sweep into the view and are upon him, pulling him to the ground. There is a confusion of limbs, arms, legs, torsos. Amidst the fracas, the men, who now seem to be a french SWAT team, are cursing and hauling him up.
We are startled by the chaos, but we barely miss a beat and begin scribbling down urgent gestures in our Moleskines.
Then he is up and twisting loose. He hauls the whole party off-screen to the left. We are left with the framed view of empty space as we hear a cry. In a matter of seconds, he streaks across the screen, the men in futile pursuit as he leaps out of the open window frame and over the wrought iron railing. They lunge after him but he is gone.
Defeated, they silently turn to leave and see the laptop. One of them is in front of the screen. He peers in, seeing us. We see him. Even closer, his dark scowling eyes fill the window. A reaching hand and then nothing. Blank.
I am back to my desktop screen. Alone in my room. I put down my fountain pen.