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Why We Draw
by Peter Steinhart Reading Peter Steinhart's The Undressed Art: Why We Draw one discovers the importance of the naked figure and that "everybody, male or female, young or old, is valuable, desirable and has something to offer." A drawing becomes a part of the human spirit, that desire to risk realism on the page. It is an impression of a gesture, a sense of connection to something as ancient as the human figure drawn by Athenian artists. Steinhart feels the muse in describing the drawing process, which he personally embraces, and of which he says, "It has to come from within. When the drawing is not going well, it's more like a brain dysfunction than a fall from grace." In this impassioned book on drawing and the world of the studio, he writes, "Drawing is not something you do perfunctorily. It's something you can do only if you are attentive. And practice is one of the things th at keeps one attentive." It is flesh that inspires drawers, and Steinhart takes the reader not only into a daylong session of working models, but back in time to connect the modern drawer with ancient Egypt or Greece, where realistic portraiture, according to Pliny (Roman natural historian of the first century A.D.), was the highest ambition of art. Steinhart connects the reader to the fleshly art of Greek painters such as Zeuxis, who "had his name embroidered in gold letters on his garment and paraded around Athens like a modern prizefighter walking into the ring." Zeuxis sounds strangely familiar in our own flesh-oriented world, and he might have easily roamed around Times Square before it was sanitized for tourists. "The Greeks thought spirit and body were one, that the gods appeared as mortal men and women and that some human forms were more nearly divine than others," Steinhart writes. "Zeuxis is remembered for lining up a procession of naked girls and choosing five from which to assemble, feature by feature, an ideal figure." A renaissance for drawing studios and guilds of working models appears to be taking place on the West Coast in the San Francisco Bay area, where Steinhart himself has spent many hours drawing. Four times a year the Bay Area Models' Guild promotes this ancient art of portraying the naked body with a marathon session involving many models. "One of the chief attractions of the event is that you get a variety of bodies and characters to draw. There are slim-hipped young women with dancer's legs, overweight women with double chins and ponderous stomachs, pale, muscular college boys and middle-aged men whose jawlines are disappearing." More than eighty artists can be seen clustered around any given tableau of flesh. "'A figure holds within it the mysteries of energy, articulation, growth, mobility, organic construction, and unity... the qualities of living things,'" artist Edward Hill states, while Eleanor Dickinson puts it in more spiritual terms. "'The human body is the best image of the human soul.'" Maybe that is why drawers flock to such marathon sessions, or spend hours in the studio drawing a single figure -- even if it's not a perfect body, or the stomach is ponderous, and the sagging breasts don't resemble anything seen in Hollywood films. Of the figure, the face is the focal point, and the most difficult for a drawer to capture. Steinhart recommends the modus operandi of Leonardo da Vinci, who advised the artist to carry a notebook at all times, and "to memorize types of facial features, for example ten different kinds of noses, so that when drawing a stranger in the marketplace one might pull the subject's nose from one's memory and thereby save time." The gazing involved in such looking is an art in itself, and the author speaks of van Gogh as an example of a world-famous gazer. He would rush up to a peasant and stare at him, or watch him work in the field. The intense, manic-looking face of an artist like van Gogh must have frightened off many peasants -- or ordinary people. But faces contain everything, Steinhart says. "They are expressive of all human emotion and all human experience. We look into them to judge one another's character."
Steinhart himself began carrying a notebook years ago, to explore character through drawing faces. He explains how he draws in public, furtively, in bars or restaurants or airports. He will select the face of someone whose attention is diverted elsewhere and begin his drawing. He makes quick, sweeping glances, always trying to avoid "the stare." Working in airports, "people are crowded close together and have to avoid one another's gazes. They are tired and want to sit down. They have to stay put or lose their seats and then have to struggle again with their carry-on luggage. They are more often than not traveling alone and they are not talking, so their expressions are bedded down. The food in airports is terrible, so they're not eating, and that keeps their jaws still. For years, I filled small sketch pads with the faces and sprawled bodies of my fellow travelers." Sometimes his subject catches him in the act of drawing and will acknowledge his work with a smile. After that their expression changes, the eyes and head move, the drawing is over. In his chapter "What Happened to the Models?" the reader meets thirty-five-year-old Merav Tzur, one of the supermodels working today, "a tall Israeli-born woman with high cheekbones, dark eyes, pouty lips and a calm, almost regal dignity." He conveys to the reader the electricity in her movements "as she peels off her boots, blue jeans and knot top and stands, thinking a moment, eyes downcast, back straight, stomach flat, her small, firm breasts and broad shoulders silky under the spotlights." She performs five two-minute poses, the first of them with her "holding onto a rope, leaning outward toward the artists, ankles crossed, her weight vanished, her body twisted at the waist, her eyes downcast but her gaze intense." He talks of the "enormous tension in her pose, but with her long, strong body, also enormous grace and poise. The nudity, the silence, the unfocused gaze are all erotic, but they are overwhelmed by her dignity, her power, her self-control." It is a triumphant moment to imagine, and Steinhart sets the scene wonderfully in stripped-down, careful prose. As a drawer, Steinhart is struggling to see in a new language. Everything depends on the line, he says, and it has to be true. He writes, "I know I'm thinking, but what I want to do it in a way that language cannot describe. I want to let the unraveling line push all the burdens of the day out of my head." In other words, he is looking for an altered state. "All the time, I am trying to get an impression of the gesture, the mood behind it, the sense of connection I feel with it. And I'm thinking about where it will go on the paper, where the center of the interest will be, how the trailing limbs may draw attention from the corners of the page back to the face or whatever is the center of the drawing's focus." "There's no bigger rush," says Ann Curran Turner, an artist interviewed by Steinart. "All of a sudden it's beyond you. You have no control over it. And there's nothing more exhilarating." This 'high' experience Steinhart explores further in biochemistry terms. Drawing, for some artists, is encouraged by the chemically induced sensations of pleasure they receive from the act itself, producing serotonin and endorphins. When he delves deeper into right-brain/left-brain theories and how neural cells transmit impulses in a few hundred milliseconds, Steinhart takes us perhaps too far from the milieu of the studio -- and the working model's flesh. But despite these forays into science, The Undressed Art: Why We Draw will inspire non-artist readers to take up pencil and sketch pad and view the human figure differently -- and for veteran drawers, will permit them to read about what they may have felt or practiced in their own studios. The joy that Steinhart has given to the making of this book is easy to imagine. Like those drawing lines, sometimes heavily or lightly shaded, in a lyrical, curvy, graceful and powerful style, he brings readers -- and lovers of art -- "a picture that envisions humankind in a fresh and promising way." --Russell Thorburn Russell Thorburn teaches poetry in Upper Peninsula schools of Michigan. His book of poetry, Approximate Desire, was published by New Issues Poetry Press (1999). He was awarded an NEA that same year. His latest book of poetry, Damaged Radiance, has been inspired by classic films such as "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold." Editorial Note: All quotes, unless otherwise identified, are from the reviewed book itself.
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