Two days in the Life of a Class - with Carol
 

As Waverley Arts members will know – Friday is the day for Life Class, 2 sessions, morning and afternoon. As a member of the life class for a few years now, let me tell you more about it.

As an afternoon student I try to arrive in time for “Show and Tell” from the morning class. Everybody puts up their best work for the day for a short appraisal by Carol. But today – what a worry – how can the afternoon class possibly measure up against this! High praise for nearly every drawing – an excellent result – what lovely drawings! Oh well, just do the best we can – as usual!

Carol calls us to order right on 12 midday. “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls and others, your places please!”

Pauline (not her real name) was our model, and a great model she is. Today we are using brush pens and doing contour drawings, keep the pen on the paper and take it for a walk, hold the pen away from you with a straight as possible arm.

 Use other mediums as desired, but the brush pen must be part of your work. First several two minute poses for warm ups.

Carol moves around the room behind us, helping us as she goes. Her favorite phrases, all with a touch of humour, are her trade mark.

“For five hundred thousand dollars – which breast is the higher? I challenge you, naked, in the privacy of your own home to raise your arm without raising the corresponding breast!”

“Use your holder-upperer! (any old pencil will do). If they cost $10,000 and you had to order them from overseas you would use them more!”
 

“Can you buy jeans for this woman?”( Someone has done something really strange with the legs)

“Stand back – standing back is an investment – and its free!”

We are confronted with a seemingly impossible pose. “This goes with that at Sussan”

“Look for the shape of the negative space”.

“All improvements gratefully received – all disimprovements and the model will sue”

“Do whatever you like as long as it looks wonderful!” (Fine, think I, but how am I going to achieve wonderful?)

One of us makes an obvious mistake. “Oh, oh, you seem to have caught the virus, so-and-so was in that corner this morning and he was doing just that!”

On doing a back view. “Careful not to overdo the spine – we don’t want a zip fastener for easy access!”
 

“Look at the shape of the head – frontal lobotomies have gone out of fashion, thank goodness.”

When you correct something, do it before you erase the wrong one. Otherwise you will do the same thing. Definition of insanity: doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result .

And when Carol has corrected one of our errors “But I thought…” we say, but Carol says “Don’t think – your left brain will tell you what to do but don’t believe it – it tells you porkies. If it looks wrong it probably is wrong – do some vertical and horizontal checks with your holder upperer – what is opposite what. What does the chin, elbow, knee line up with. Use the underarm as a point of reference. See what is the furthermost point of the pose on the right – one the left – the highest and the lowest”. And then when we have made the correction we may say “Well, you wouldn’t have thought….”

Point is don’t think – LOOK!

You’d think (there we go thinking again) that we’d know all of this by now, some of us have been going to life class for many years – and we do get better at it – but we still need to go. Life drawing is the gymnasium for the artist – it keeps you fit, if you don’t keep going you’ll slip back. Carol’s little sayings make it easier for us to remember, but it’s still hard. “Life drawing wasn’t meant to be easy”.

Who said that?

Carol gives really encouraging comments all the time. “Well set on head” “Beautifully set on head” “Charming drawing” “Colours work beautifully” “Good strong drawing” “This is a very, very nice drawing” “Look how little is done to the face, but it works!”
 

Certain combinations of colours look good on certain colour papers. Because we are arranged around the room, the model faces different ways for the different poses so that we can all get a turn at “a back”!

Time’s up - we have all worked very hard – Pauline and Carol most of all, and it is time for “Show and Tell”

How have we done? Very well indeed, but who is to say whether the morning or the afternoon class did better?

Now I’m sure you would have liked some photos of all these good drawings, but I actually didn’t think of writing this until afterwards, so didn’t think to take the pix. So then planned to take some next week, you’d never know the difference!