On why I started drawing instruction at the atelier

My teacher asked the other day what it was that made me decide to start getting instruction in figure drawing (after attending open sessions for a while). I had a couple answers off the top of my head, but I've been thinking about it this weekend, because there wasn't a clear answer that came to mind (and maybe there still isn't). But I like to have answers, so I'm going to try to work my way through this one.

For background (and I'm probably a bit of a broken record here), my mom put me in a figure drawing class at the local university when I was 16. The professor tried to convince me to seek out somewhere that I could learn the traditional methods of drawing and painting. He thought I could learn to draw and paint in the methods of the old masters!... Ha, yeah right! was my thought. I just didn't believe it (and I'm still not quite sure I believe it... though I want to. I'm trying :/).

Fast forward 12 years. I found the atelier I'm attending right now through a Google search late in 2014. I had just started painting (after a very long break from any consistent artistic practice) and was looking for open drawing sessions. I hadn't drawn from life in a looong time. I was a little nervous about it because I knew it would be something of a disaster ;) So my mom was in town a for my birthday, and we went together. This was March 2015.

I've shared some of these before, but here are my drawings from that first night, ha.  ;)

First impressions. One of the first things I noticed when I came into the studio was the student long pose figure drawings up on the easels and the walls. They were very realistic, so I was impressed by the amount of skill and time involved. But to me, they all looked like they had been drawn by the same person, meaning, "stylistically" they were very similar. I wasn't sure if I liked it--it was a very different approach from anything I had seen before, and maybe to some extent, it seemed like they weren't very artistically expressive or individual (now I can see distinct differences between different students' drawings, but at the time I couldn't). There was no doubt that the students were doing a good job of capturing the model's likeness anyway (the same model we were drawing that night was also up on the easels), so that sparked my interest.

As the night went on, I was curiously watching what the atelier students were doing. It was a little baffling. They all seemed somewhat aloof, and were drawing on small pieces of paper (compared to what I remembered seeing at life drawing). And after an hour or so of drawing, they were all using the same sheet of paper, and had just a few lines down on their papers, or very basic outlines of the figure at most. I had never seen anyone draw like that before. And I just wondered what they were doing? Why were they so hesitant in their drawing? Why did they erase so much? What were they trying to accomplish?

I came back to draw again a couple weeks later, clearly struggling with proportions ;)

I think it must have been on this night that I heard someone mention sight-size (maybe someone else came in to draw with instruction?), because after this night, I started trying it out. I remember looking up the basics of how to do it online (why I didn't just pay for instruction, I don't know--probably just feeling skittish. I wasn't ready to commit, and the speeches I had overheard around the studio came on a little strong, so I just kept to myself). I had come across the term "sight size" in a book about Sargent previously, but hadn't known what it meant. I don't know that I was really setting it up sight-size at this point. But I was standing at an easel and trying to transpose the figure at the same size I was seeing it (which made for some teeny figures, since I didn't know about stepping back ;). It did help my proportions some, though.

I kept watching the students (and maybe listening to other peoples' instruction) and noticed how they were drawing the top/bottom guidelines and working within those parameters. That was a major light bulb moment for me. It made complete sense. All of the sudden I could see what I needed to do, and I just went for it.

I had forgotten an eraser on the night this guy posed, but this session felt like a turning point for me. The one on the left wasn't sight size, but with the one on the right I was trying it out (from a seated position even, ha!). And actually with the one on the left, I made indicating tick marks sight size for the proportions of the face on the left hand side of the paper, and even though they were only a tiny fraction of the size I ended up drawing the face, I think it did help me to have a reference point for the proportions of the face.

This is a very convoluted way of saying that I was just slowly trying things out on my own as I showed up intermittently to draw. And I was actually learning quite a bit just from being in the environment. Honestly I was being a little careful with myself at the time, because I had just come out of a postpartum depression, and could see that this kind of training would have the potential to make me a little crazy. I wasn't ready for more crazy just yet--I just wanted drawing to be fun ;)

I was also part of a dance group that met Thursdays at the time, so I was just coming on Tuesdays when I felt like I could fit it into the week. I felt like I had been making a lot of progress just drawing on my own, but as I drew closer to the end of the year in 2015, I started feeling like my progress was plateauing. I wanted to start instruction, but I needed to finish out the year with my dance group (our performance was in January) before I felt like I could commit to drawing more regularly. And then another student came in and started instruction. It seemed like a good time to jump in, so I decided to quit my dance group and start in on drawing instruction too.

So I guess the boiled down answer is it took me a little while to come around. Not necessarily to the methods--as soon as I started to figure out what was being taught there, it totally made sense. But it took a little time for me to be in a place where I could commit (and some part of me knew that once I started, it'd be hard not to be all in).

The first night of instruction was pretty frustrating. This may not make a lot of sense, but previous to starting instruction I drew primarily from the "inside out", or working from the interior of the figure (thinking more about the main skeletal relationships for finding proportion, I guess) to the outside. But the method taught at the atelier was sort of the opposite approach, imagining the figure within an envelope and chiseling from the outside in. So flipping my brain around to see it that way was pretty difficult and took a while. Here's my drawing from that night. I spent an entire hour and half just drawing the envelope around the figure (and had a little help blocking in the actual figure)!

So with all the frustration, what is it that keeps me going? Mostly a crazy desire to be good! I don't want to be limited by inability. I feel like being able to accurately represent nature will set me free in terms of whatever I want to accomplish artistically in the future. That's an idea my professor back when I was 16 introduced to me. He asked me what my favorite kind of art was. I told him I thought I liked impressionism best, and he told me about how the impressionists were mostly trained in classical schools--even Picasso (though not an impressionist ;). And that studying realism was something that gives you command over value, form, drawing, etc., so you can use them however you want (not that I don't want to be representational or realistic in my art, because I actually do :).

So I guess on some level, I recognized this as something of value shortly after I first saw it, even though it took me a while to make the jump--it's been more of a cautious wade. The great thing is that I'm stretching like mad now. The learning curve is intense, and that's a good place to be. I had no way of conceptualizing what this stuff meant when I was 16. I thought talent was there or it wasn't, and it certainly didn't seem that I had enough of it to do anything worthwhile--classical training or not. But seeing my improvement over the past year or so has converted me to the idea that people actually do learn to be artists. It sounds silly, but that's been a life-changing realization.