Life Drawings

My definition 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 directly (on-site) from natural environments, much of my work could be considered to be ‘life drawing’.

For this month’s display, I decided to focus more on the more commonly accepted understanding of life drawing, being usually studies of unclothed human body 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 activity of striving to achieve accurate representations of human forms, I found that I became more interested in concentrating on smaller sections of the body, that I felt showed highlights of beautiful form and light within the overall scene.

After drawing many human models, I discovered that most tree trunks have a similar beauty within their organic forms. 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 shaded room. I could choose the views I really wanted to draw, without having to worry about interfering with anybody else’s view, etc. I have now thus changed from drawing the human figure to drawing tree trunk forms.

The pieces in this month’s display are presented in chronological order, so that the earliest drawings from this collection (dating back to 1974) are presented first, and the most recent work is presented last. Images 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 proper 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.