Life drawing - understanding form

I discovered that I could do a single course in Fine art in my second year of my Social Science degree so of course I enrolled on this. I did Drawing 1 in 1989, this thing that changed the whole way I saw the world! I’ve never been so excited by anything, any kind of learning in my whole life. It was exhilarating!

Life drawing changed my life and the way I looked at things. I realised I had gained some sort of power over the way I could interpret what I saw. I wasn't just the liberation of realising that I could put to paper the person in front of me but that I could capture something of their character their physicality, their humanity.

Form, volume, contrapposto, these are academic, formal terms but once you understand them you can suddenly do something with a pencil, a piece of charcoal that you could never have imagined possible before.

Form

Understanding how the limbs attach to the body, the hands and feet to the limbs, the angle of the neck and head in relation to the torso. These things are hard to learn and take considerable work. You learn how to look so intensely at the person that you see through to the muscle, the skeleton.

Volume

Giving that form volume, its space in the real world brings the person to life, changes them from an outline into something the exists in the world.

Contrapposto

"An Italian term meaning “counterpose,” it refers to a now-canonical stance in which a figure stands with their entire body weight supported over one straight leg and lets their arms fall in opposite directions to create a natural-seeming twist in the torso."

This is what gives the person weight, physicality. Standing firmly on the floor, sitting squarely on the chair. A natural stance that shows the real distribution of their body weight around the central pillar. Gravity, gravitas, real humanity.