This past Saturday I was invited to join a “life drawing” session.  This was a new experience for me.

Live drawing is when artists get together for a couple of hours to draw and sketch.  What makes it “life” is that they are sketching live humans who are posing, and posing in the nude.

The one I went to had two people, a husband and wife, doing the posing.  They would strike a pose and then hold it, without moving, for whatever length of time the leader of the session called for.  In our case, they did several poses for just 2 minutes each to get us all warmed up.  Then they did a few for 5 minutes.  Then finished with a few for 15 minutes each.  They did a different pose each time.

Now, I know you may be wondering why did I get invited to a gathering of “artists”.   Good question.

The quick answer is that I was driving a real artist to the event, and was asked to stay even though I have absolutely no experience in drawing.  I have never drawn with pencils before, at any age.  Sure a few doodles on the side of my papers, but nothing even approaching using a pencil to draw a human being.  No way.  As far as I know, I have no artistic talent whatsoever.

They handed me a sketch book and a pencil and eraser.  I took a seat with a table in front of me – my eyes wide open.  Really wide open as I looked ahead, just 20 feet away, were a man and a woman, totally naked, in a pose that was dramatic, at least to me.

And then, after a couple of minutes of drawing on my sketch pad, I would turn the page and start again, looking at the couple in another somewhat dramatic pose, at least to me. The other artists in the room seemed to be hard at work, acting like this is normal.  I, for one, was sighing and saying to myself “wow, this is something else”.

But, surprisingly to me, as time passed, and as poses changed, and as I flipped my sketch pad pages, I found that I relaxed and calmed down.  In fact, I really calmed down.  I began to get into the experience of trying to capture what the pose meant to me as I used my pencil to draw lines.  But I did not feel that I was drawing an object or a figure.  No, I felt like I was composing.  Like I was creating something, even though ostensibly I was attempting to draw a likeness to the pose in front of me.

Bottom line, the experience became almost meditative.  I did not want it to stop.  I enjoyed it.  And I lost track of the fact that I have had no drawing experience or training.  I just started to use my pencil to capture what the pose suggested in a way that was particularly mine.

Now, there were challenges to be sure.  For example, feet and hands.  I had no idea how to capture them, so I really did not try to do so.  The other challenge in particular for me was the head and face.  As difficult as that was for me, for some reason I seemed to be able to capture with just a very short line or mark here or there an expression.

Having said all this, there was no comparison between the drawings and sketches that the real artists in the room did and the ones I did.  Here is an example of what one artist did.

here is my effort. 

And here are some other examples of my efforts.

Shall we say “a work in progress”…

A reminder to us all that sometimes doing things that are totally outside of our comfort zones can be an enlightening, at times rewarding experience.