I’ve experienced a lot of firsts since arriving in Rome: first ruin, first palazzo, first authentic gelato, first squid ink pasta. And at 9 am on a Wednesday, my first ever figure drawing class. Luca, my professor, who has had his work exhibited in the Venice Biennale, was surprised to learn that this was, in fact, the first time I had ever drawn from a real life reference. Honestly, I’m surprised too. I’ve been drawing since before I can remember, and I’ve never truly drawn a human being in the flesh, not that I’d expected to be drawing naked women as an eight-year-old. So, I was much more shook than I thought I would be upon walking into a room with thirty students and a single woman wearing nothing but the skin she was born in. She was beautiful, but it was a lot for 9 am on a Wednesday.
Luca put us to work immediately with a thirty-minute long pose. For thirty minutes, I stared at this woman and analyzed her body from head to toe. I used my pencil to get her proportions right. I measured the size of her breasts in relation to her head and shoulders. As I was doing this: looking, measuring, making my mark on the page, and repeating that process again over and over, I thought about how I could never do what she was doing so well. No one could pay me enough to be that vulnerable, to sit in front of thirty strangers, to offer my body up to art and analysis, to be frozen in some unnatural pose, unable to release a growing swell of pent up tension into the slightest of movements. I respected this woman immensely and believed she deserved every penny in my bank account.
Throughout the class, I felt pressured to represent her in a manner that honored her confidence and beauty. When Luca instructed us to pin up each one of our drawings, I did so with a tangible air of insecurity. Afterwards, I’d sit down blushing and preparing to draw her a thousandth time.
Each pose—there were numerous—decreased in time and increased in complexity. While the detail of each drawing deteriorated, the boldness of my strokes and the expressivity of my work grew. A finished drawing, Luca taught as we worked, is not one that is the most detailed or even the most accurate in respect to proportion. A finished drawing is one that reveals something that only the artist could see in the subject.
Ciao,
Jacob