Finally, the local artists consider the summer holidays over so that figure drawing sessions here can resume. Hooray!! Personally, I see no reason to stop during the summer but it appears I am in the minority on that one. 😉

So we began again. My friend Dominique was our model. At first I felt a little rusty, in the sense that I was too slow, so there were lots of good starts – for a pose that ended far too soon. As the evening wore on, the poses lengthened and I warmed up.

Here then are three keepers. My favorite is the spotlighted one above (available only in the online view). I like it because I feel that with this one especially I was able to get inside her pose and describe it from the inside-out. Yummy. The anatomy I have been learning this past year truly kicked in. It helped me to locate the important structures, to provide emphasis to the dynamic thrusts of her gesture: leaning against the wall with a protruding abdomen.

And I realized later that the importance of the intellect in figure drawing truly is outside the session. There you do your homework – so that in the moment, with the figure, you can truly let go – yet in an informed way. That’s craft. And in many ways all that (craft) has nothing to do with your ability to feel. We all feel, some perhaps more intensively than others, but when craft and feeling come together, yum, IMO that’s when the magic happens – and also effective aesthetic communication.