We breathe as the ocean breathes

(Pencil on paper, by am, Life Drawing in the Fine Arts Department in the evenings at Western Washington University in the late 1980s)

"In Celtic thought the body is an echo of the soul.  It is born and dies, and in that sense is passing like an echo, but it carries within it the sounds of the eternal."

"While we may cherish our various rich religious inheritances, the essence of our being cannot be contained by the boundaries of religion.  The soul is neither Jewish nor Christian, neither Muslim nor Hindu.  It defies the limitations of any one tradition.  As the 14th century mystic Meister Eckhart says, 'the soul is naked of all things that bear names.'"
(J. Philip Newell)

Life Drawing of a Young Woman #3 (1982)

When I began to show my chalk pastel life drawings, people commented that they reminded them of color photo negatives. It occurs to me now that with digital cameras there is no negative and that soon, if not already, the idea of a photo negative will not be understood without explanation. All these early drawings were photographed by me with a Minolta 7s camera. The colors are amazingly true. Until this last year, I photographed all my work with that camera. It is light enough outside now to see that the sky is a bluish grey. I can hear light rain. I remember reading that Georgia O'Keeffe used to paint her rooms grey because the colors in her drawings and paintings appeared with greater intensity when there was a grey background. That is what happens to colors on a grey day in the Northwest.

Untitled (1982)

Although this drawing has always been untitled, it could well be seen as a winter solstice image. The classroom model was an adult male with long hair that he had clipped up. This drawing has always felt mysterious to me. It is a good example of what I call a drawing that drew itself, that has a life of its own. What I saw was only roughly translated to what ended up on the paper. Still I was pleased with the image. This is one of the few drawings from that period that was not bought or traded away for another piece of artwork. 

Today is the first morning in a long time where I have looked out the window to the east and seen blue sky for the most part, although there are dark clouds low in the sky along the foothills. This may be the beginning of winter, but, the way I see it, there will be a little more light every morning until the summer solstice. Just seeing blue pre-sunrise sky makes it seem that there is more light today. 

August through February is my favorite time of year in Washington. If I am going to be depressed, it tends to be sometime between March and the beginning of July. I'm not sure why, but I am more at peace with short winter days than long summer days.

The Golden Line (1982)

A life drawing model who was in her ninth month of pregnancy came to model for the Western Washington University class one day. This was not her first pregnancy, and she was completely at ease with herself. What was amazing to me was that as I drew her I could see the shape of the baby moving. I was not able to convey that in the drawing, though. A few weeks later she brought her baby to class for all of us to see. Some time later I received a phone call from Blue Horse Gallery, the art gallery who was representing me at that time. She had contacted them because she was interested in buying that drawing, but the drawing was not available because I had traded it for a brightly colored drawing of a very old woman which had been drawn by one of my classmates, a middle-aged woman. The classmate wanted to frame the drawing and put it above her drawing table in her studio.

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Update (December 21, 2022):  A few years ago when I was at the check-out desk of our public library, I realized that the library clerk was closely related to my former classmate who had traded her drawing for mine.  My former classmate had since died.   I asked the library clerk if she knew of a framed drawing of a pregnant woman that had been above my classmate's drawing table.  The library clerk gave me her email address and asked if I would send her a photo of the drawing.  I did that.  She didn't recall seeing it among my classmate's belongings.  I wonder what became of it.  

When I was simplifying my life and letting go of art work that I no longer had room for, I had donated her beautiful drawing of a radiant elderly woman (whom she had drawn while visiting a family member in an assisted living setting) to the dementia care residence where my friend, Linda, lived for the last two years of her life.  The hallway walls were filled with art work, both original and mass-produced.  The dementia care management was always happy to replace mass-produced prints with original art work.  After Linda died, one of her tapestries was donated to the hallway gallery.    

Life Drawing of a Young Woman #2 (1982) / I and the Village, by Marc Chagall (1911)

Although I was not conscious that I was using green, blue and orange as Marc Chagall had used them in his painting, "I and the Village," it suddenly occurred to me, while writing these words, that his painting certainly influenced me as I did this drawing so many years ago. I hadn't hesitated to draw a green woman with blue hair. 

My mother had become interested in Marc Chagall during the time I was in high school and brought books of his drawings and paintings home from the public library and shared them with me. After I graduated from college at age 32 in 1982, my father took my mother and me to New York City and Washington, D.C., during which time he took a picture of my mother and I standing in front of "I and the Village," in the Museum of Modern Art. "I and the Village" is 75 1/4" x 59 1/4 inches, much taller than me or my mother or my father! 

As I type this, my laptop rests on the large art book, MARC CHAGALL, by Franz Meyer. Marc Chagall is a continuing influence. The week that Marc Chagall died in 1985 was the week when I was visiting my parents in Northern California. A man and his wife who were in their late 80s stopped by to visit my parents and when I showed them photographs of my drawings, the man said, to my great surprise, "Ah, a new Chagall!" That, along with R. Allen Jensen's appreciation of my drawings, was the encouragement that I needed. I liked my drawings but continued to be startled when other people besides family and friends liked them, too. 

"The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep." (Marc Chagall)

Life Drawing #6 (1982-1983?)

This is the last of a selection from a series of life drawings done with pencil. For several years in the 1980s, until I took a job in a hospital as a medical transcriptionist on the evening shift, I spent every Tuesday evening doing life drawing in an informal life drawing group at Western Washington University. That was when I was in my early 30s, and it would still be several years before the beginning of my freedom from an eating disorder. Although this was a dark time in my life on many levels, when I was doing life drawing I was at least able to see and try to convey the light in other people.

Life Drawing #5 (1982-1983?)

During the informal life drawing sessions at Western Washington University, the person who was being the model would take three half-hour poses. One night I was able to fit all three poses into one drawing that still amazes me. When I pause in my writing, I can look to the east and see the waning crescent moon over the Cascade foothills. The remaining areas of open water in the cattail marsh are so still that they are reflecting the grey clouds in the predawn sky.

Life Drawing #4 (1982-1983?)

Just realized that these life drawings were not done on a newsprint drawing pad as I had stated earlier. They were done on a slightly higher quality white drawing paper pad. Because it has been a long time since I have drawn or painted from life rather than memory and dreams, and I thought maybe it was time to start drawing from life again, even if only to draw my cat, I bought a book called HOW TO DRAW ANYTHING: A COMPLETE GUIDE, by Angela Gair. 

On page 20 of that book, she says: "If you are not sure of the height of, say, a tree in the distance compared with a tree in the foreground, you can check using the "measure-and-compare" method. Use the foreground tree as your "key measure," comparing all parts of the subject to that. Hold your pencil at arm's length, elbow locked, in front of the tree. Keeping one eye closed, line up the tip of the pencil with the top of the tree and mark the position of the base of the trunk with your thumbnail. This is your key measure. Now, keeping your thumbnail in position and your arm outstretched, move the pencil to that distant tree and compare its height with the length of your key measure. You can compare the length of your key measure with other parts of the landscape, too, for measuring widths as well as heights." 

This technique is what Tom Sherwood taught us in his life drawing classes and what I found most useful in being able to draw people from life. 

 On the wall near my computer is a large postcard titled "How to Draw Geometric Shapes." It shows, in four steps, how to look at a small dog who is sitting down, a parrot's head and a horse's head in order to draw two triangles, a circle and a rectangle. As a child trying to learn to draw from art instruction books, I never made much progress using that technique of reducing the shapes and structures of animals to geometric shapes in order to build them back up into a completed drawing, and that postcard has been on my wall for years because it still makes me smile. As I was looking at the above drawing again, I remembered that the way I did life drawings was to start somewhere in the person's face, usually the eyes. I would make a beginning mark and then from there begin the measuring process. I didn't sketch in the whole person, as is usually advised, and I certainly didn't reduce the person to geometric shapes, but slowly developed a drawing that I was pleased with. The process was deeply meditative.

Life Drawing #3 (1982-1983?)

The human body is sacred and is so vulnerable. This young man is sitting on a drawing bench that had been placed on the model's platform. Behind him on the wall was a blackboard on which was written "40%." If I had had time to draw everything I saw, he would have been surrounded by people sitting at drawing benches, deep in concentration. In a life drawing class, everyone sees from a unique perspective and has a unique way of drawing. It is fascinating to walk around the room and see how many ways a person can be seen and translated onto paper.

Life Drawing #2 (1982-1983?)

As my confidence in my ability to draw grew, I began to draw two poses on one piece of paper, and so it looked as if I had drawn a pair of twins posing or maybe a "time-lapse" image.

Life Drawing #1 (1982-1983?)

This is the first of six life drawings I will be posting. They were done in an informal life drawing group that met for two hours on Tuesday evenings at Western Washington University in the Art Department. They were drawn on a large newsprint drawing pad, using A.W. Faber Castell pencils. I am grateful to Tom Sherwood for teaching me life drawing in the context of a small community class sponsored by Bellingham Parks and Recreation. I had always been able to "draw," but in his class I learned how to really look at what I was drawing. He showed us how to hold out a pencil at arm's length and make measurements, so that a drawing had correct proportions. It was a simple tool that made all the difference in the world in my life drawings. I am also grateful to R. Allen Jensen, in whose classes I began to do life drawing using chalk pastel. R. Allen Jensen's voiced appreciation of those pastel drawings was a turning point for me in that I realized my drawings "said" something to someone else. The pastel drawings were bold and colorful, more like paintings than drawings. In a class critique, another student said, in a way that I felt was dismissive, that my drawings worked mainly because of the strong color. I took what I thought was negative criticism to heart and did a drawing with black pastel chalk in a similar style to the colorful pastel drawings and brought it in for the next critique. I still laugh when I remember R. Allen Jensen's words, "Well, obviously she has nothing to say in black and white." I'll be posting "Nothing to Say in Black and White" soon.