Day Two dawned overcast and cool again. It had rained overnight and the studio roof leaked in the corner where Phoebe and I had claimed space. Unfortunately Phoebe's work of the day before was wet. But we were issued with a green bucket to catch the drips of water as it continued to rain on-and-off all day.
Phoebe flew up to Wanganui from Nelson for the course. At 17 she'd figured out she wasn't getting the art education at school she felt she needed so got her cute-little-self up to the North Island and to Marianne's class to get more skills. And by God, could she draw! I think at 17 I was still drawing horses in long grass because I couldn't draw hooves and here is this confident, beautiful young woman with line work to *die* for. She seemed confident, self assured, talented and so grown-up with the most *beautiful* face. She worked hard and drank hard if her horizontal attitude was anything to go by some days. Never late; no complaining. That's who I want to be when I grow up - Phoebe!
We started each morning in class by 9am to talk about the body, and bones, and looking at examples in art books and checking Joleen's bits-and-pieces out. It was like a mini-lecture/lesson but quite informal and really interesting. Our first model would be in the studio by 10am and we would draw until 1pm when we'd break for lunch. The afternoon session'd start at 2pm with a new model and finish at 4pm and was always the toughest to get through.
Our models for Day Two were John and Anna. I was beginning to worry I was only going to draw males when I saw John arrive for the morning session - and where my easel was I was only ever going to get the business-end of the male models. Before this course I'd never really *cottoned* onto drawing from the Male nude - mostly because of the lack of bodyfat on males, you *have* to be way more accurate and mostly, I wasn't - so my mistakes showed all the more obviously when drawing from the male body. Nothing quite like pendulous breasts and curvy hips to draw a viewer's attention away from misproportioned drawings of the female form. John was a good model and seemed to be able to sit deep within himself - deep into his pelvis or something, and keep very still. We did a lot of blind-contour drawing with him.
Blind contour drawing is where you don't look at your paper/drawing and only look at your model. You match your eye movement with your pencil movement, imagine you are drawing a line around the model with your eye rather than your hand. It's more about seeing than drawing and it's extremely physical in a slow/controlled kind of way - it *killed* my upper arm and my shoulder/back muscles - not the fittest of people at the best of times, I spent the first 3 days of summer school stiff and sore and complaining to beat the band.
Anna arrived for the afternoon session - a tiny, lithe woman, I am hard-pressed to ever recall seeing anyone as thin. She was so tiny you could see all her bones all the time. We did gesture drawings a lot with Anna and she was great at posing for them. Gesture drawings are quickly captured "action" drawings. What the body might look like reaching for something from a top shelf or tying one's shoes or walking up a step or what-have-you. I found these very difficult because you need to capture the essence of the pose in a minute or two. So it's not about thinking it's about reacting to the pose and taking the most vital impression of it. This first morning of Gesture drawings were mostly two minutes each and that was *so* not enough time. By the end of the course it felt like *tons* of time so I guess I got smarter/faster by doing having these Gesture drawing sessions sprinkled through the next few days.
Interestingly enough, looking through these drawings to take photos for this post I realise, they are some of the best i did during the course. I didn't feel like that at the time but some distance has changed my opinion.
We finished the session with a couple of longer poses. Anna really is just lovely to draw. Especially when she lay on her front and tucked her knees up. She looked perfectly natural and seemed comfortable for the length of the pose.
After class we all made our way back to where we were staying and I was in dire need of a stiff drink. My shoulders and back were still aching from the hours of blind contour drawing we'd done in the morning session (looking back now I have about a dozen of them so no *wonder* my arm/shoulder/back/legs hurt so much). By the time Pat and I got back to the flat, Mrs Bates already had a gin and tonic and Norman was lying on his tummy on the floor playing with his iPod.
I guess Mrs Bates is a bit like me in that it doesn't take many drinks to get those sheets to the wind. After a while she sloshed the comment to Norman, "Mummy's glass is empty." which seemed to be the secret command to get son off deck and to the fridge to construct another gin and tonic.
PS: all drawings are on A1 (33"x23") paper (newsprint/cartridge/sugarpaper)
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Phoebe flew up to Wanganui from Nelson for the course. At 17 she'd figured out she wasn't getting the art education at school she felt she needed so got her cute-little-self up to the North Island and to Marianne's class to get more skills. And by God, could she draw! I think at 17 I was still drawing horses in long grass because I couldn't draw hooves and here is this confident, beautiful young woman with line work to *die* for. She seemed confident, self assured, talented and so grown-up with the most *beautiful* face. She worked hard and drank hard if her horizontal attitude was anything to go by some days. Never late; no complaining. That's who I want to be when I grow up - Phoebe!
We started each morning in class by 9am to talk about the body, and bones, and looking at examples in art books and checking Joleen's bits-and-pieces out. It was like a mini-lecture/lesson but quite informal and really interesting. Our first model would be in the studio by 10am and we would draw until 1pm when we'd break for lunch. The afternoon session'd start at 2pm with a new model and finish at 4pm and was always the toughest to get through.
Our models for Day Two were John and Anna. I was beginning to worry I was only going to draw males when I saw John arrive for the morning session - and where my easel was I was only ever going to get the business-end of the male models. Before this course I'd never really *cottoned* onto drawing from the Male nude - mostly because of the lack of bodyfat on males, you *have* to be way more accurate and mostly, I wasn't - so my mistakes showed all the more obviously when drawing from the male body. Nothing quite like pendulous breasts and curvy hips to draw a viewer's attention away from misproportioned drawings of the female form. John was a good model and seemed to be able to sit deep within himself - deep into his pelvis or something, and keep very still. We did a lot of blind-contour drawing with him.
Blind contour drawing is where you don't look at your paper/drawing and only look at your model. You match your eye movement with your pencil movement, imagine you are drawing a line around the model with your eye rather than your hand. It's more about seeing than drawing and it's extremely physical in a slow/controlled kind of way - it *killed* my upper arm and my shoulder/back muscles - not the fittest of people at the best of times, I spent the first 3 days of summer school stiff and sore and complaining to beat the band.
Anna arrived for the afternoon session - a tiny, lithe woman, I am hard-pressed to ever recall seeing anyone as thin. She was so tiny you could see all her bones all the time. We did gesture drawings a lot with Anna and she was great at posing for them. Gesture drawings are quickly captured "action" drawings. What the body might look like reaching for something from a top shelf or tying one's shoes or walking up a step or what-have-you. I found these very difficult because you need to capture the essence of the pose in a minute or two. So it's not about thinking it's about reacting to the pose and taking the most vital impression of it. This first morning of Gesture drawings were mostly two minutes each and that was *so* not enough time. By the end of the course it felt like *tons* of time so I guess I got smarter/faster by doing having these Gesture drawing sessions sprinkled through the next few days.
Interestingly enough, looking through these drawings to take photos for this post I realise, they are some of the best i did during the course. I didn't feel like that at the time but some distance has changed my opinion.
We finished the session with a couple of longer poses. Anna really is just lovely to draw. Especially when she lay on her front and tucked her knees up. She looked perfectly natural and seemed comfortable for the length of the pose.
After class we all made our way back to where we were staying and I was in dire need of a stiff drink. My shoulders and back were still aching from the hours of blind contour drawing we'd done in the morning session (looking back now I have about a dozen of them so no *wonder* my arm/shoulder/back/legs hurt so much). By the time Pat and I got back to the flat, Mrs Bates already had a gin and tonic and Norman was lying on his tummy on the floor playing with his iPod.
I guess Mrs Bates is a bit like me in that it doesn't take many drinks to get those sheets to the wind. After a while she sloshed the comment to Norman, "Mummy's glass is empty." which seemed to be the secret command to get son off deck and to the fridge to construct another gin and tonic.
PS: all drawings are on A1 (33"x23") paper (newsprint/cartridge/sugarpaper)
By lunchtime the next day, I was ready to leave for Wanganui. My 
This is where we met Theresa Goodin, the organiser for the Summer School. She directed us to our accommodation and we met some of our flat mates - yes, it was my fault - I forgot to turn my freak-magnet off before I left Rotorua. Mother and son combination that seemed really odd to start with, and that initial first impression was confirmed as the days went on. He turned out to be not-so-bad in the end he just "tried" too hard as some of us tend to do. But she, she was just one of *those* people - not very bright but meddling, and controling, and know-it-all and narrow-minded. There's always one and she was it. Probably the most annoying thing about her was that she was actually a pretty decent life-drawer which just made my ability to tolerate her even more difficult - ok, I didn't even try. [I'm going to call her Mrs Bates from here-on-in - named so by a friend of mine after the mother in Pyscho. That makes her son Norman, okay? right? okay]
The student flats accommodated 6 people on 3 levels. The rooms were compact and could've done with a good scrub, but for $10/night I was the only one complaining. [I mean.. I wiped the dining table down with my new lime-green cloth and it turned BROWN!] So we gave the kitchen and eating areas a bit of a scrub and bought food from the local supermarket and made dinner and all that jazz. Pat and I went for a walk after dinner, admiring the lovely old homes of Wanganui. I'm a bit of a bungalow fan and there were lots to oo and ah at - not that they'd been renovated as such but they were originals on large flat sections and so many had just the right feng shui. We ended up walking for a couple of hours, both of us not really wanting to go back to the flat for any Bates smalltalk.
My first encounter with Mrs Bates was as I brushed my teeth in the shared bathroom before retiring to bed. She came into the bathroom and filled the second washbasin. I wasn't paying attention until she said to me "One must keep ahead of one's smalls." and there she was scrubbing her "larges" in the murky water.
I didn't sleep much that night - and for any of the nights I was there actually, but that first night was the worst. Combination of fluctuating temperatures on the top floor, over stimulation of my frustration glands [as the week went on] and an extremely hard bed. It was very quiet though. Coming from Auckland I thought Wanganui positively deserted of people and void of traffic sounds after 10pm [although Mrs B. said she couldn't sleep for the traffic noise so go figure]
and yes, I was like this the entire week with the complaining. I had to step-up my whinging by Wednesday because Pat was becoming desensitised to it and had stopped listening.
So. First day - Sunday 9th January begins with a 
The tutor taking our life drawing class was 
We started by being introduced to our skeleton Joleen - a real skeleton (real bones as opposed to cast plastic) and spent the rest of the morning drawing her - I really hate skinny models but at least Joleen was still. Our first afternoon saw us drawing Alan. We had him most often during the week. He seemed to be in his 60s but it was hard to tell - as Jeanette kept saying "he's in good nick!" and so he was with very expressive poses. Most of our models [except one] seemed very experienced and comfortable with being naked in a room full of clothed people staring intently at them.
I slipped back into drawing from life easily that afternoon. It's a bit like riding a bike in that you don't lose what you've learned in the past - I felt a bit rusty but that soon passed and the hand-eye co-ordination seemed to slot back into place at the last time I drew life models and my work reflected the level I'd attained to that point. This was not to last - in my opinion my work got worse and worse throughout the week - but my eyes got better and better. I think those things go hand-in-hand [or hand-and-eye] the better I got at seeing the more mistakes I saw.
Day One ended at 4pm and we went back to our flat to eat and meet the rest of our flatmates.
Jill had joined our little house. She was older and from Palmerston North. She said she painted abstract mostly, and belonged to a few groups and often had several projects on the go. She seemed fairly placid, and was really I guess, but there was and is a glint of wickedness to Jill. An attractive mixture of innocence and evil which went over quite well during the week. Joining me on the top floor and Pat, Norman, Mrs Bates and Jill in the house, was Leedom. She was a 20something family friend of our tutor, Marianne. Leedom was bubbly and had a voice that filled the room. She had introduced herself saying she had dropped out of law school after a year to write a novel and had stopped starting her novel to explore painting. She was cheery and ate lots of bananas. She also had a really good time on the course, she even danced between sessions. [hephalumpy but fun all the same]
It seemed that all the other flats had mixtures of courses - Phoebe, for instance, was next door in a flat full of writers and glassmakers. [and the lovely long-legged Alex but that's another story] Our flat was all life-drawers. So, I had the pleasure *cough* of seeing them in the mornings, all day AND in the evenings. Which would have been okay if Mrs Bates wasn't one of them. But she was, and so I had someone to fix my grump on.
