4th entry for April 27, 2010

These are two 10-minute poses below and a 15-minute pose above, which ended a lively day's worth of drawing.

Teaching is an ongoing and significant part of my creative life, and has been for over a decade now. I find it interesting how the teaching can have a point/counterpoint relationship with the work I am executing at a given time.

Anyone who has taken life drawing classes with me knows that I emphasize the importance of considering the whole picture field, and not to just `plunk down’ the image of a person haphazardly. I also have people experiment with different background treatments, because I believe the context a figure is situated into is an important part of the whole picture.

Notably, most of the drawing I am generating these days eschews any background or narrative context. Well – not entirely, because all of these studies posted here are situated in a larger meta-context/narrative: my ongoing experience of growing and developing through the experience of drawing from life on a steady basis.
Also nearly every image posted here has been carefully cropped, with an eye to a balanced relationship between figure and blank space.
(Part of what appeals to me about the aerial/circus sessions in particular is how they situate bodies into a context of athleticism and public performance/spectacle.)


But each of these studies largely skips backgrounds or storytelling. It seems that those excluded elements make their way with greater prominence into some of my teaching.

This is particularly true of a 5-day workshop that I’ll be leading at the Toronto School of Art from May 17th to the 21st. It's called `Body Politics’, and the whole point is to have models working in day-long extended poses, where props and surrounding elements make a each day a different symbolic and narrative context for a figure to be shown in.

If anyone in the Toronto area would like to immerse themselves in 5 solid days of life drawing (or day-long figure painting explorations), there is still space available.
To get more details, you can access the TSA’s website here. It is course number 1057, listed under the `Spring Intensive Courses' there.