'Dear Naked Stranger'

my body, every body; lessons I learned from life drawing


Breasts. Buttocks. Penis. Areolae. Cellulite. Labia. Body hair. Fat. Nipples. Wrinkles. Testicles. Our clothes do so well at hiding so much. What to do when, suddenly, all is laid bare, and we are charged with nothing but to look?


Drawn on the second day, medium: charcoal.
i. ‘rhythm and anatomy’
When the first nude model came into the studio and removed his black compression shorts, quickly and efficiently, gasps and shocked laughs echoed around the room. As with the first shock of cold jumping into a pool, we were taken aback by the sudden appearance of fleshiness. Some of us turned away, out of instinct; modesty is only learned. The instructor chuckled, unsurprised by our reactions.

I looked, and then kept looking.

This was not my first close-up encounter with male anatomy; probably not the last, either (time willing). Not having a penis myself (with zero desire to possess one in that way), there’s still a baseline level of mystery surrounding male mechanics. I stared my fill at first, trying to remember.

Within a few minutes, however, I came to the long-foregone conclusion that a dick is, in all truth, nothing too special at all (see dotted line b on graph below). My attention turned elsewhere.

The Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility - MBA Knowledge Base
“The law of diminishing marginal utility states that…as consumption increases, the satisfaction derived from each additional unit decreases.” (Investopedia) Image via MBA Knowledge Base.
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Four others were enrolled in this class at London’s National Gallery, led by portrait artist Adele Wagstaff. I was the youngest by at least two decades. On the first day, our cohort smiled uncertainly at one another, shuffling our feet and our belongings. “Blistering out there, isn’t it?” (It was 26°C; by British standards, Saharan).

In grueling HIIT session form, we stood behind our easels and did three rounds of twenty-minute sketches, or five-minute scrambles, or hour-long drawings, our incipient artistic sensibilities not yet accustomed to the tolls of looking for so long. My arms and calves ached. In these initial sketches, my light, wavering lines depicting the model’s penis reflected my inhibition; I was also anxious about doing the model any injustice via length, shape, or shade. I quickly realized that the other injustices I was inflicting on the model’s form, through proportion, space, or line, were far larger, and so capturing the exactitudes of his genitalia soon disappeared beyond my scope of worry.


Quite possibly the first drawing I did in this class. The proportion’s more than a little…interpretative, as you can well see.
The model was not overly muscular, but still, you could see the ridges of tone where light and shadow hit. He had blondish hair across his shoulders and chest, extending downwards towards his gently rounded belly. No matter what I could possibly think during the sketching process, he continued standing straight, staring fixedly at a point in the distance.


Drawn on the third day! Charcoal; different male model, poses inspired by Edgar Degas’ Young Spartans Exercising, 1860.
In between poses, the model made no movements to cover himself up. He was postulated just as he would have been while wearing clothes, leaning casually on the prop blocks, stretching out his quads, even manspreading a little, while chatting with the instructor about what was to come on the schedule. Any questions we directed towards him were asked demurely at first, eyes cast away. Art questions our arbitrary binaries: we were unsteadied by the constant shift from the model as the unwavering object of our focused attention, to just another human being in the shared room. But why not both?

National Portrait Gallery to close for three years for revamp | National Portrait Gallery | The Guardian
The National Portrait Gallery; image via The Guardian.
In between sketches, we wandered within the Galleries, pressing between droves of tourists and sweating Londoners alike to see Michelangelo’s unfinished The Entombment, and attempt replicas in our sketchbooks. Throughout the course, the live models would imitate poses similar to those oil-finished shapes in the paintings, and through the rhythm of practice, we would get closer to capturing the full figure1 of the subject.

After twenty minutes of staring, and as we began to shuffle back towards the studio, the model complimented my sketchbook iteration of Christ’s pose. We got to talking. He, like the other models (I would get to learn in time), had gotten into modelling through word of a friend. According to him, he’d first been terrified of the concept, not having felt at home in his body then. I understood the feeling. He’d been referred to a gig— and on a whim, knowing nothing else, simply decided to go for it. Since then, he told me he’d written a book2 on how transformative the experience had been for him, and how it led to a career, ongoing for several years, of standing before knit-browed students and artists alike with their pencils and brushes. And in doing so, he found himself appreciating his own body as art itself.

The Entombment (Michelangelo) - Wikipedia
The Entombment, dated around 1500-1501; attributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti. Image via Wikipedia.
ii. the female nude; social and societal permissions around voyeurism
Women’s bodies appear to me first as steamy shapes in the bathhouse. Onsens are one of Japan’s national treasures; I remember dipping in mineral-scented springs up to my shoulders, trying to keep my towel-wrapped head out of the water. Women everywhere. Sluicing away soap at the pre-onsen shower stations3; murmuring as they soaked, watching their young children from a distance; shivering as they danced back inside from the snowy outdoor pools, gripping onto each other’s arms so as not to slip on the damp floors.

The bathhouse bodies of all kinds, all sizes, all ages, lounged about like housecats. There was no performance needed about the way you walked or lowered yourself into the water; nobody gave a shit. So long as you kept quiet and respectful and considerate of everyone’s space, you could soak as long as you wanted and just be, half-aware only of the heat creeping back into your limbs, inch by inch.

Japanese Print "Naruko Hot Springs" by Kasamatsu Shiro
Naruko Hot Springs (1954) by Kasamatsu Shiro. Image via ukiyo-e.
When we met the female model on the second day, beautiful was what I thought. The model had broad, athletic shoulders; she had soft curves, and she wasn’t a size zero4.

Unlike with drawing the male model, I didn’t shrink from tracing the lines of her nipple or breast, or feel awkward watching. Naturally, having faced myself all my life, these parts are familiar to me. Fluidity is the word our Day 2 instructional booklet used; the model was a dancer, and her poses held both rigor and grace.


Drawn on Day 2; comté and white pencil. One of my favorites to come out of this class.
I found myself watching with a fascination that wasn’t tied to desire or to criticism or any of the markers we typically find ourselves attached to when considering naked people. I cannot fully say I watched with absolutely nothing from the outside world reflected in my gaze, for the stool, and the pencil, and the air-conditioning, and the coffee breath, are very much real; they may go unnoticed, but are as much of the making as anything else.

There, as she blinked, looking out in profile, as I tried to follow the curve and fold of her belly, the expanse of her thigh, the shades in her back marking her scapulae, unconcealed freckles and moles, I was entranced.


Agostino Carracci cartoon, A Woman borne off by a Sea God (?), 1557-1602
In emulation of the Carracci cartoons (as shown above), charcoal was the primary medium we used on this second day; I like it because it permits mess. You start off by scraping your stick of black across the blank page, smearing it with your hand to create a grey, foglike background. Adele then got us into the practice of squinting towards the model, in order to determine the most defined areas of light and dark, before using the eraser to sculpt away in negative.

The idea is to start seeing bodies as shapes first; you don’t even have to have a fixed image in your head at all to start creating. When we look at these masterworks, the tendency might be to spring back, hesitant. How the fuck did they do that; how could I possibly do that? Look closer; it’s all just lines, play of light and shadow. That’s all it takes to start.


Drawn the second day, charcoal only. Maybe went a little overexaggerated on the silhouette of the butt.
Female nudes have passed through periods of being marked historically taboo, we learned; one of the most famously controversial was Diego Velázquez’s The Rokeby Venus.

“The portrayal of nudes was officially discouraged in 17th-century Spain. Works could be seized or repainting demanded by the Inquisition, and artists who painted licentious or immoral works were often excommunicated, fined, or banished from Spain for a year.” (Wikipedia)




Diego Velázquez, The Toilet of Venus / ‘The Rokeby Venus’, 1647-51.
The critic Natasha Wallace discerns ‘The Rokeby Venus’ as “an image of self-absorbed beauty”; at first glance, the reclining Venus appears to be admiring herself, assisted by her winged son, Cupid. But Venus cannot be looking at herself in the mirror, because the viewer can see her face reflected in it—upon closer reflection (pun intended, perhaps; suggested by Grammarly), we come to recognize that she is instead looking at us5. There’s a timeless comfortability in the way she lounges, at ease in herself.

When we think of the female nude now, maybe pornography is the first thing that comes to mind. Bodies are more accessible than ever today. I could fit together any number of randomly-generated words in any search engine and surely within a few seconds, a video featuring people I have never met would be spit out matching these specified parameters, costing nothing but the sanctity of my portable device and my own finite time.

Voyeurism is infinitely encouraged in this space of moneymaking content creation and ‘man on the street’ videos; we are incentivized to do nothing but look, jumping from one series of flashing, fleshy images to another with minimal engagement. To that, porn is more accessible to our generation now than in any other time; addictions begin young and are commonplace. You can’t protect your kids from everything they might see on the Internet. Recording and filming without consent becomes standard practice; views and likes justify everything, it seems, just enough to distract.

Within this space of primarily parasocial engagement with others’ bodies, being held in confined quiet with just one person to consider feels like respite. The more time passed, the more we were urged to look for in our drawings. Your eye follows, again, the slope of the model’s back; three— no, three and a half head-lengths away, there’s the hill of her palm, arch of her fingertips. There’s the crease in her belly, the tilt of her thigh.


Drawn the third day; charcoal. A trio of poses by the same female model; experimenting with size and different uses of charcoal.
I see you.

iii. draw from life
Once, I had considered saying yes to the ad that called for volunteer models at my university’s art department— but only for all of ten seconds. The models were to be paid about nineteen dollars per hour: a fortune, compared to the eleven-dollar wages that characterize most of the on-campus jobs available to undergraduates. My weighing of the job’s pros/cons stopped once I considered the hard, immutable fact that these strangers would be peers, and that in itself was frightening.

In a class like the National Gallery’s, you see these strangers for one stretch of three days and then potentially never cross paths again; you don’t even have to learn their names, if you don’t want to. Within the campus bubble, even if the total enrolment number crosses the twenty thousands, there is every possibility of running into someone and have them blink back at you, before situational recognition kicks in and you realize you know their face from when you stood naked for an hour or two and let them see your ass for free.

The range of ages in the class was a blessing, in this respect. We know the mindsets and typical thought patterns of our peer group better than any other. We think we know exactly what they might think, what comparisons they could draw, kind or unkind. As a kid, I was self-conscious even in the locker rooms, opting to sneak-change discreetly behind my towel while the others held loud, full conversations wearing nothing.


L’Origine du Monde, Gustave Courbet, 1866. Image via Wikipedia.
Although we did not study this painting in the studio, I think of Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde; ‘Origin of the World’, where life came from. They call a vagina everything but what it is. Pussy, snatch, coochie, cunt, hoo-ha, vajayjay. I remember not even knowing the word for my own genitals until fifth grade— us all cross-legged on the carpetless floor, our science teacher deliberately pronouncing va-gi-na and then the whole class shrieking in shocked laughter. Even though I didn’t know what the word was or what was so funny, I felt obligated to let myself be carried by the tide of mirth. The laughing lasted for another five minutes.

Posing for strangers to see all of you, there’s a vulnerability and simultaneous defiance in the act. The body cannot lie nearly as well as we think we are ourselves capable of. The body is not bothered with our inclinations, conflicting and underwhelming, to lie and cheat as we may think ourselves capable. A body is just a body.


Drawn on day 2. Pencil, white pencil, and a little comté. I like the weight I managed to get on the front leg.
There are some days when I feel heavy in myself; when I feel I don’t truly know what I am doing in this body. I trace my fingertips over the inside of my forearm and notice the tickling sensation that arises. That is me. My hair feels as though it is making an effort to hang in my face. The sensation of doing things helps. I try to focus on what it feels like to sit outside, the wind chilling my ears and face, to feel the warm glint of a disappearing sun for just one second.

It’s been more than a month since this class, and I’ve drawn a lot since then. It’s also been a lot of fun observing bodies in public; the way they move, how functional they are. If there’s one thing I regret, it’s not asking a couple others in the class for their contacts before I departed that final day. Human encounters are so fleeting, without you even realizing.

Modelling is far more physically demanding than one might realize. Twenty minutes of not moving, limbs postured in awkward angles, is hard to bear. When I asked the female model whether it was strenuous at all, she responded yes immediately. It’s exhausting both physically, mentally. It takes a lot out of you.

At the end of each class, we’d gather around the drawings we’d done for the day and comment on the qualities we could see in the others’, as well as our focuses and takeaways from the session. Our styles were markedly different. But we had all definitely improved. (And all it took was six consecutive hours, every day, to see it!)

I can’t say figure drawing might be everybody’s cup of tea. Nor can I say I would willingly stand stark naked in front of a roomful of strangers in unflattering poses for x lengths of time. It’s a privilege to get to look, however, a privilege to create. Whatever you make is a little bit of yourself.

A chance to look at the body, your body, every body, dear stranger, and try to understand what you see. Just a little better.


‘Best Friends’, the final class drawing made on Day 3; mixed media, including charcoal, comté, and pencil. Lol we were supposed to make a composition with them all interacting with each other but I did not get the memo. Art is subjective, let’s say that.
thank you for being here and for reading all this way! here marks the end of this piece, but that doesn’t have to apply to our time together ;) …

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1
Proportion was one of the things I had never paid much attention to prior to the course— and it reflects in my older drawings, looking back now. So, one of the most helpful things I learned, starting on the first day, was the practice of taking proportional measures before and during the sketch, using a body part (most frequently, head length) for size reference. Checking and rechecking gradually became more instinctual as I repeatedly swept my eyes back and forth from the unstirring, breathing body to the lines taking shape on my paper.

2
The book (I paraphrase from what I remember of his account of the work) discusses how nude modeling itself is a form of art. The model posited the idea of body as a physical medium of art; likening his own postures and poses to the equivalent of the artist’s brush. He said that this view of his work was key to overcoming his bodily self-consciousness, and instead take pride in how his body enabled others to make their art. Although I don’t understand this idea fully (and I wish I remembered the title of the book; if I do, will update), I find it admirable.

3
It is mandatory onsen etiquette to shower and rinse oneself of all dirt and/or suds properly before entering the shared mineral pools. As someone who steers clear of most swimming pools because of the ready shamelessness it offers on sharing bodily fluids of all kinds, I’d much rather hop into a bathhouse any day.

4
As I’m writing this, I’m rechecking myself at every comma, trying to estimate whether by describing my fellow human I’m inadvertently falling into the trap patriarchy has taught us all our lives, of the need to assess each other’s bodies and our own. Although I leave them unnamed in this piece, these people are real people;

5
This is the Venus effect, discovered in 2003 by Marco Bertamini - which “highlights that most people may hold beliefs that are inconsistent with observable phenomena” (Wikipedia).

*Readings on the body I would recommend for you if you liked what was going on in this piece:

Body Work and The Dry Season by Melissa Febos

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk