Life Drawings

My accepted understanding of life drawing is “direct recording of the forms within ‘things’ that are either living (people, trees, etc.) or that have come from living things (such as fruit, vegetables, flowers)”.

Because I usually work outside recording directly from natural environments (“en plein air”), much of my drawing work could be considered to be ‘life drawing’.

However, for this month’s display, I wanted to initially focus on the more commonly accepted understanding of life drawing, being usually studies of human forms (including portraits or unclothed bodies). The first 15 pieces presented in this display are a selection of life drawings of human body forms. The remaining 5 pieces presented in this display are a selection of life drawings of tree forms.

In my early twenties, I would regularly travel to an organised life drawing studio for drawing sessions. I enjoyed the discipline aspect of this type of drawing - the human figure needs to be drawn extremely accurately, or it will look/feel malformed. We all judge human forms constantly in our daily lives, and so are highly critical of such images. As part of the challenge of striving to achieve accurate representations of human forms, after drawing many full figure compositions, and not having free access to set different poses or specific angles of view, I became increasingly interested in concentrating on subset sections of the body (such as a shoulder region, or one arm, or one leg, etc.), that I felt showed the best available region of interesting form and light within the views I had.

After drawing many human models, as well as drawing many tree trunk forms outside directly from real tree trunks, I discovered that many tree trunks have a ‘similar beauty’ within their organic forms, as human models. Tree trunks would also keep their ‘poses’ for years, and not require payment for being models. The environment for drawing trees is much more open, honest, dynamic, and personal than for drawing a human model within a group situation in a closed room. I could more easily choose the views I really wanted to draw, without having to worry about interfering with anybody else’s view, etc. Over the years, I have thus changed from regularly drawing the human figure to more regularly drawing tree trunk forms. That is why the final 5 pieces presented in this display are examples of life drawings of tree forms.

The pieces in this month’s display are presented in chronological order, so that the earliest drawings from this selection (dating back to 1974) are presented first, and the most recent work is presented last. More detailed images of each artwork in this display can be selected directly by clicking their thumbnail on this page, below.

Following are small images of twenty artworks.

Click on an image, or its title, to go to a page with better reproductions and more details about that artwork.

Once you are looking at artworks in more detail, you can use the ‘prev’ and ‘next’ links (at the top and bottom of each details page) to go to the previous or next artworks in the monthly display respectively, or return to this monthly display overview page.