When my artistically talented older sister was much younger, she went to a life drawing session where she was confronted with a nude male model.
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By the time the class was over, she had a series of sketches detailing every part of the man’s naked body, except those ones.
We laughed hard when she reminded me of this ahead of the life drawing session we joined last weekend in Shepparton.
I don’t know what it is about spending time with your siblings, even when you’re in your 40s and 50s, that makes you feel, and sometimes behave, childlike again.
I can only assume it’s because those were the people you were once children with, you know, muscle memory type stuff.
While I’d like to think we’d all matured a lot through the decades, I’m glad our subject on that recent Saturday at SAM was clothed, just in case we couldn’t behave ourselves.
Melbourne’s Debra Winn, who grew up in Tatura, was the deftly talented teaching artist with a staggeringly calming charisma about her; just the kind of soul you need around you to inspire artistic expression.
Aurora was the life model, who presented wearing a ballerina’s costume and held a series of short and then impressively long poses for us while we sketched the sleek, muscular lines and shapes of her body.
The session formed part of the varied and ongoing program tied into the current Facing Modernity: Degas to Picasso exhibition at the gallery.
Debra said much of her work was inspired by the French impressionist Edgar Degas’ work.
He liked to paint ballerinas and capture the movement of their forms in his pastel drawings and oil paintings.
Having never been to a life drawing session myself before this one, I wasn’t sure what to expect.
With various charcoal sticks and a couple of different erasers we put to heavy cartridge paper, Debra led us through her techniques before setting us some warm-up exercises.
Aurora held half- then full-minute poses while we were given a time limit to match.
Then we were asked to sketch a couple of poses with our non-dominant hand.
In between each sketch, there were more discussions, more tutelage and more opportunity to move around the room to check out each other’s work.
We were all looking at the same model, in the same pose and using the same resources (besides one participant sketching on an iPad), so it was quite remarkable to see the variation between our artworks.
Obviously the angles were all slightly different, as we were all sat in different positions around the room, but styles varied significantly too.
Some people managed bold, dark lines, while some were softer in wispy grey tones.
Some had intricate details, while some were neat and others artfully messy.
Some were realistic, while others channelled similar cubism to what could be found hanging on the walls of the exhibition within the gallery below us.
Ours might not have been display standard, of course, but some of them were brilliant, in my humble opinion (which is backed by no arts history or arts appreciation qualification whatsoever).
As ‘they’ say, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, and art critiquing is subjective anyway.
What a qualified critic might appreciate about one piece of art might be the very thing a peasant like me despises about it, and vice versa.
Whose opinion is right? Well, the artist is probably going to lean toward whoever’s praising their work.
After our short sketches, Aurora stretched and got herself in the zone to pose, unmoving for 20 minutes while we all attempted more technical depictions of her.
Surprisingly, by the end of it all, my favourite sketches were the ones I’d completed quickest.
I guess there’s been many times where I’ve felt I’ve ruined an artwork because I can’t keep myself from adding more elements or adjusting things to a point it’s butchered and unsalvageable.
Setting a time limit eliminated my habitual descent to destruction.
But who’d have thought my favourite piece I took home from a two-hour workshop would be a 30-second scribble?
Once again, art and a skilled artist have widened our fields of vision.
After the class, we’re now inspired to continue charcoal sketching at our homes.
Maybe someone will pose nude for us there?
Their ‘secret’ would surely be safe with me and my sister anyway.
We’re probably still too childish to ‘tackle’ that bit (and yes, that pun was absolutely intended).
For now, I think we’ll stick to tutus.