We were all freshmen, mostly, in the life-drawing class. First-year art majors. How curious, thinking about it now—that the art department hired other college students as models. It’s impossible that they still do this. But it was true back then. Sometimes, yes, the model was the gray-haired man from the small Vermont town who brought in a walking stick as his prop, a man who was maybe a little too happy to strip down for us. But sometimes the model was another student, someone you might recognize from around the small campus, now shrugging off their winter coat, disappearing behind the folding screen to change into a robe, a space heater making a feeble attempt against the chill.
There was a wooden platform only a few inches off the ground. That was enough to divide us into the ones looking, the one being looked at. There was a lack of ceremony when the model stepped onto the platform, the room tightening around the sudden nudity. Everyone knew to be polite—even a little blasé.
First, a series of 30-second poses. Before you had a chance to really think about the nakedness, your empty page needed to be filled. The teacher called time, the model moved. Too brief to get anything down but a scribble, the roughest mass of a body in space. Then came the longer poses. This is when you started to take in the person—the real person, the real body. Like nudity in hot springs or communal baths, it wasn’t sexual, really, though that wasn’t entirely absent. The nakedness was blunt, endlessly interesting, unless it started to get boring, and then there was the curious realization that a naked person could be boring. I’d feel the switch sometimes—the moment that lines and forms would drop back into the fact of nakedness, the nude classmate zoning out on a folding chair draped in a towel, their muscles shivering a little in the effort to hold the pose. When the timer went off, they stood up, the spell instantly broken, the skin of their back red and imprinted with the texture of terrycloth.
Three hours, a few breaks. Sometimes, during the break, the model wandered around the studio in the robe, glancing at the work on our drawing boards, one of us again.
There was a drawing book that was a popular source of studio exercises, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Whatever neuroscience it invoked was flimsy, thoroughly debunked I’m sure, but the exercises were genuinely helpful. Draw the model’s face without looking down at your paper. Draw the shape of the negative space between their torso and their crooked elbow. The exercises jolted us out of the received ideas about the subject we were trying to draw—our preexisting mental image of an apple, or what a human face should look like—and allowed us to engage with raw visual information. Certain things you had to learn—where features sit in relation to each other, how the line of the neck slopes where it meets the shoulders, the difference between the body in your imagination and the body in actuality.
At the same time I was taking an art history survey. The classroom would go dark, the slide projector would whir, and there, before our eyes, the painting or photograph would appear. I loved how the images flickered on the screen, made of light. How we all looked together, with real reverence, at the work. There I learned how to talk about art—what a piece looks like, its material elements, but its historic context too, the biographical details of the artist. It was about gathering a kind of outside authority.
It was different, what we learned in the life-drawing class. The aim was almost reversed—how might we lose all our inherited ideas or misconceptions about the way a body might be rendered and really see the truth of how this particular body existed, there in that room with its stale air and big paned windows, the bare winter trees outside. It didn’t really need more explanation or context or authority—the body was the thing, and it resisted too much thinking.
Were the drawings any good? It wasn’t really about that. We tried hard, and if we got better, it was only because we got better at looking. We learned how to spend time paying attention. The plain gift of another human being, standing in front of us, made us want to meet the moment with our own effort. What was more deserving of our attention than the body? What else had stayed so eternally itself?
Those hours had such a particular quality. How time dilated, intensified in the act of looking. The classical music played on a CD player, the songs repeating. Sometimes the class would be over and I’d sit up in surprise. Other times I felt my ability to sustain close attention drain away, the minutes starting to loom, and I’d flip my sketchbook to a new page and start over, try and fail to get back my focus.
I would often think of those life-drawing sessions later: at an art school in San Francisco, in green Oregon—any time I’d drop in on an evening figure-drawing group with my tin pencil box and pad of brown paper. I’m still cheered by the persistence—of this practice, its humanness, of the assertion of something primary and essential about the body. So much is unrecognizable to me, even in my lifetime. It’s good to think about what remains.
Life class—how I wrote it in my little calendar. It’s a beautiful phrase, a beautiful idea. And wasn’t that pretty much what it was?