The Figure With A Thousand Faces:  Myths, Memes and the Life Model

(If you want to keep life drawing between classes and after these sessions visit Cumberland Lifers Drawing Group Blog  for information about life drawing groups in the Comox Valley, Campbell River, and Qualicum, with contact emails at the top of the page under the header.  As well, posters to the blog put up their own drawings and often post interesting items to do with life drawing and the figure in art.)

(Images reproduced below without permission from books and the internest are used for educational purposes and in small files that are not intended to contravene copyright)

Class One

A lot of artists and students of art, like ourselves, spend time drawing from life.  This activity, and drawing in general, helps to keep the mind, the eye and the hand connected whatever the main focus of our visual activity might be.  The human figure is a natural and obvious subject for drawing.  We are figures ourselves.  When drawing other people we are drawing and expressing our own humanity.  Humans have been drawing themselves for tens of thousands of years, and over the last ten thousand or so, certain poses have been expressed over and over.  What significance, if any, might there be to these repeated poses?  Perhaps we can partially answer this question by physically drawing and discussing a sampling of some of these archetypal poses both ancient and recent. In this four part workshop, as well as drawing from the nude model, we will look closely at the way the human figure is postured in painting, in film, in theatre, dance and perhaps also learn to see more than our model when drawing from life. Our life model, by taking significant postures, might become a conduit into the deep well of human culture and myth.

One thing I should point out before starting, is that I am not in any way expert or academic in figurative iconography or mythology.  I've simply spent a lot of time drawing from, and looking at the figure.  As well I should point out that I'm not in any way superstitious or under the spell of mythology or religion; I just find the extensive history of religous and mythological applications to the human form extremely interesting in the context of being a figurative artist.  I personally find myth and religion illogical and hard to understand, however, observations can be made, patterns seen, possible meanings found among many.  Take my observations and analysis with a grain of salt, and give great consideration to your own; please offer suggestions and observations during the classes when they ocurr to you as I will be curious to hear what you have to say about them.

Another note: Rather than just dwell on representations from figurative visual 'art' (painting and drawing of the sort shown in galleries), I always like to broaden our interests to all visual media; particularly film, television and advertising.  Modern media use all the techniques and devices found in traditional painting and drawing, and draw from the same well of human history and culture that so-called 'art' does. I believe that if you are interested in improving your drawing and painting skills, looking at film, television and print can be as valuable as looking at paintings in galleries. Below is an example of film art and fine art juxtaposed by Edmund Burke in his Varieties of Visual Experience. Having worked in the animated film and television industry I had a first hand experience of how filmmakers constantly studied and refered to fine art for ideas, style and treatment, lighting, composition and content.  There can be no doubt that fine artists also refer to film in their representations.  Below is a still from the well known 'Odessa Steps' sequence in Sergei Eisensteins's Battleship Potemkin made in 1925 and to the right a detail from Picasso's Guernica shown at the worlds fair in 1937.  We're going to have a look at how poses in the visual arts spread through time and space using artists of all sorts as vectors; the Odessa Steps sequence is a wonderful example of how a famous filmic moment has been referenced over and over in subsequent films as well by painters like Picasso.  Click HERE to see a cleverly put together sequence of clips from movies, starting with the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin, that make refence to Eisenstein's original masterpiece.

Pan's Labrinth full length trailer HERE.

Resistance/Black Power/Feminism

A different interpretation of a similar gesture; victory or truimph.

 To read an item on Tommie Smith and John Carlos, pictured above top, who made the Black Power gestures in protest at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968, click HERE.