Barenaked lady

Why on earth - oh god, why on earth! - did I decide to go to work that day in a huge, busy office... with no clothes on?

It had seemed a normal enough idea at the time, to just not bother to wear anything.  Next thing you know, I’m there at my desk, surrounded by hundreds of co-workers of both sexes, all of whom are fully and respectably dressed.  And there’s me: completely, utterly nude.  Not a stitch on.  There’s nothing I can do about it, because I can’t get home, so I’m stuck here all day like this and I’m really starting to think it’s a bad idea.   Nobody’s called the police, or a psychiatrist, or my next-of-kin…. so it’s obviously not that weird in the scheme of things, but still I feel ashamed and uncomfortable and just wish I hadn’t decided to do it.  Wish I could turn the clock back.  People are looking at me rather disapprovingly and the awful sinking feeling in my stomach is increasing with every passing minute.

I am so relieved when I wake up – although, just for a second, as I blink in the light of the new morning,  I start to wonder if I have actually done it.  The sense of regret and of shame and of being the only one who has, for some unknown reason, decided to go totally starkers amongst all her clothed colleagues, certainly feels real enough - even if (thankfully) only fleetingly.

 It had to be, didn't it?  Those early (naughty!) Ants...

...Rummaging through drawers and drawings

My first experience of life drawing was when I was 16, at college.  It was a little shocking to see a middle-aged woman of quite ample (if no longer very firm) proportions slip out of her dressing gown and stand there naked and unabashed while the class of teenage art students, all of whom were more embarrassed than she'd ever been, studied every fold and crease and undulating bit of her flesh.  She was very experienced, never moving a muscle, and told us later that while we were looking at her she was actually also looking at us and could see our 'auras'.  Some shone very brightly, she said, but she never told us whose.  She didn't even flinch when one of the tutors, in an attempt to focus our minds on our model as an 'object', placed an upside-down cardboard box over her head.  Maybe it helped to stop our auras from dazzling her while she posed.

I remembered that yesterday while going through a folder of life drawings that are a few years old now, and wondering if anything would inspire me again.  It's been ages since I've done any but, as anyone who's ever tried it knows, it's such good discipline to draw in a class environment with a real model.  Very few of the pieces I looked back through work as a whole; perspectives and proportions are wrong and my lines or textures are dull, but scanning and cropping them to keep the bits I like most seems to give them a slightly different feel and new lease of life.  I hope the models won't mind the amputations and decapitations I've given them here.  At least there are no cardboard boxes on heads, anyway...

 

Naked

I’ve realised I haven’t put any old drawings on here for a while and my strap line does mention that I’m going to be rummaging through a few.  So I’ve had a bit of a poke around and here are a handful of quickly-drawn life studies from a few years ago just in case they tickle your fancy, if your fancy needs any tickling. 

Artwork by C / Sun Dried Sparrows

Life drawing is a strange and wonderful thing.  In my experience there’s never any embarrassment or judgement on the part of artist - or model.  You get real people to study, in all shapes and sizes, of varied ages and backgrounds, and it’s a great leveller.  Really, we’re all the same in our diversity once we take our clothes off...

A certain serenity descends upon the room as you get totally immersed in your drawing, and you think about light and shade, texture and perspective -  and does that arm look right, oh and how will I tackle that difficult foreshortening…?   I love to draw sinewy limbs and pubic hair!  Protruding collar bones or curvaceous hips! You explore all those undulations and angles and crevices in great detail with your eyes and your pencil, focusing totally and solely on the naked body in front of you, so that your model becomes absolutely an object - and yet is in no way ever demeaned.

I must do some more some day.

Starkers with Straker

I do like the simple graphic covers for these 1967 editions of The Artist magazine that were given to me a few years ago.  They look quite contemporary, with their lower case titles and the sans-serif typeface, although I suppose all that’s really saying is that a lot of current design trends have been influenced by work from this era.

The magazines aren’t the most exciting or stimulating to look at, but I was intrigued by these adverts in the back pages which seem to offer something indeed very exciting and very stimulating to look at (if you like that kind of thing).

(courtesy The Artist magazine volume 74, 1967)

I love the wording in these ads.  I’m not sure what ‘affective perception’ is, nor quite how one does actually ‘kindle aesthetic experiences that merge a feeling of tomorrow with the pattern of the past’ but it does all sound rather impressive, only to be somewhat let down by the rather more basic line drawing.  Take a look at it in close-up.  There seems to be a good deal of emphasis on a nude female’s rather ample behind and a slightly strange hand gesture from the portly gent in the foreground.  I can only imagine what he’s saying…. “Hey, look what I’ve found, it’s a microcosm of the forces which play upon the mind and emotions of the creative person!  And she does have a lovely arse…”

It seems that Jean Straker (1913-1984) - Jean as in Jean Paul Gaultier, not Jean Shrimpton - was quite a figure in photography circles in the ‘50s and ‘60s, well-known for his prolific depictions of the female nude.  During the Second World War he was a conscientious objector and had a photographic career recording hospital operations (eww), but in 1951 he founded the Visual Arts Club in Soho, where he offered members the chance to participate in anatomical observations of a very different nature in the form of nude photography sessions.  (Presumably it was just the models who were nude.)  His work featured in a (then) notorious book, ‘Nudes Of Jean Straker’ (does what it says on the tin) published in 1958, and whilst he was insistent that his work was pure art and not pornographic, he had trouble convincing the authorities.  Many of his prints were in fact confiscated and he was prosecuted in 1962 under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act.  He naturally argued that his photographs were of ‘artistic value’ but, unlike Penguin Books winning the case over Lady Chatterley’s Lover for it being considered to be of ‘literary merit’, he lost.  Jean went on to campaign for freedom of expression and freedom from censorship in the arts.

One of the most interesting things I discovered about Jean’s work is that he was rather imaginative with his compositions.  His subjects can be seen wrapped in theatrical masks, amongst strange branch-like structures laden with tinsel; in one he pictures his model on a set that includes various items of ironmongery and a bed frame, whilst she wears a skirt made of chicken wire (so not strictly nude, then…)  But my favourite is ‘Nude Study 1963’ where you could be forgiven for thinking that the model is not nude at all.  She is ‘clothed’ in some kind of projection of black with white dots, which make it look as if she is wearing a dark, patterned cat-suit, creating shapes on her body and shadows around her.  The effect is strikingly modern.  (Do look it up - it's on various sites - but I don't wish to reproduce it here due concerns about copyright). Also, rather refreshingly, his prints were not, ahem, touched up. We are reminded too that this was an era before cosmetic surgery.  For all the surrealism of the sets, his subjects were very much real.