Starting from the beginning

Last Wednesday was the first day of my figure drawing class. It was the first university level art class I have ever taken. I was confronted with many unfamiliar things that day, like maneuvering through campus with an over-sized sketch pad and drawing board, adjusting the metal easel in the classroom, and seeing a live, nude model before me. And I confronted these things with a mask of assurance, an immature act of not asking questions, not wanting to seem ignorant.

I was confronted with the familiar feeling of intimidation too, like the large blank piece of paper before me, the uncertain movements of my hand as I am forced to commit the markings of a line or curve onto paper. Then there was the fear that everyone else would be better than me, not wanting others to see my pathetic attempts...forgetting that I am there to learn, not to express some sort of natural talent.

And it was also liberating. Our first exercise was called "gesture drawing." The model changed poses every 30 seconds to 1 minute, and within that short amount of time we were to draw the whole body, emphasizing only the most expressive actions. My first instinct, of course was to draw the only way I knew how, drawing the contours of the body, creating an outline of the figure. But there just wasn't time to do that. There especially wasn't time to think meticulously about how to get it down on paper just right. There was only time to react, to take in the most dramatic movements of the pose. I had to commit within that short amount of time, and there was no worrying about how it looked. This resulted in a lot of stick figures at first.

And it was liberating. With the speed of the changing gestures, my whole arm had to move quickly from one stroke to the next. My pulse quickened and my blood rushed through my chest, into my shoulder, down my forearm, and into my fingertips. I began to break out of old ideas about drawing--or how a drawing begins--and focused solely on the most important lines of the figure. I was being freed of old concepts and entered a new way of looking at the body, of drawing the body; it took us back to the bare minimum.

The class continued like this, from fear to freedom to intense concentration. After the warm-up exercises of gesture drawing, we entered a long sustained practice of measuring the body and making markings on our page. This caused me to take meticulous measurements from head to toe, until I became utterly frustrated at how inaccurate and distorted my drawing was. It was then that I realized that it was impossible to obtain accuracy just by measuring with my pencil from a distance. No one is asking for precision. It's not supposed to be a science, but an approximation. So much of it still depends on the judgment of my eyes.

After that first day of drawing class, I went home thinking that the act of creating art is representative of life. It is about liberating ourselves from our long-held beliefs. It is about being adventurous, exploring to the far reaches of the page with dark lines, knowing that we can go back and reshape it. It is about not being afraid to commit, to start something, knowing full well that it will not be perfect. And it is about balance, about being able to move between precision and approximation.

This is going to be an interesting summer as I explore the human body with charcoals and pencils, or rather, explore art through the human form.