The Observer, Sunday 21 June 2009
Life drawing is undergoing a boom in Britain, and it will soon be coming to our TV screens. Budding artist Louise France extols its joys.
Full frontal nudity! On Channel 4! Before lunch! You can imagine the knee-jerk reaction already but a wonderful new series on daytime television makes for some of the most unusual, thoughtful programme-making you're likely to experience. Meditative, slow-moving, repetitive - Today's Nude is everything that most television output isn't, and all the more magical for that.
Five half-hour episodes, each devoted to drawing or painting the naked figure, each starring just two people: the artist and the model. The conceptual artist Alan Kane has persuaded five very different "tutors" to take part: John Berger, Maggi Hambling, Gary Hume, Humphrey Ocean and Judy Purbeck. It was, he says, "a big ask" and not all of them jumped at the invitation. While Berger thought it the most original idea he'd heard for a long time, Hume, who had not done life drawing for years, was unsure. Hambling said she'd much rather do something about painting the sea but Kane coaxed her round.
Hambling ends up sketching a beautiful black model, Matthew Oghene, his back muscles rippling like sand in the desert. She's so taken with him that she gives him an affectionate pat on the tummy. "Life drawing is like a love affair," she says. "Hopefully one that doesn't end with a broken heart."
It's strangely compelling viewing. Mostly the camera is on the model, who does not move while the artist, out of view, sketches the figure and muses aloud on technique. Often they're simply silently working, the only sound the scratch of charcoal on paper. Nothing much happens (the phrase "watching paint dry" comes irresistibly to mind) but in a way everything happens - at the end of each programme you see a drawing or a painting that hadn't existed 30 minutes before. You may even, if Kane has his way, feel compelled to put down the remote control and draw the model yourself while you're watching.
"Life drawing has a reputation for being nerve-racking," he says, recalling his first life class, aged 17. 'It's a daunting prospect. It's the hardest arena to step into. A tough subject. People looking at what you've done. A tutor who may tear your work apart."
The programmes are a way of demystifying a practice that artists have grappled with for centuries. In advance of the broadcasts, there will be drop-in classes in London, Glasgow, Bristol, Manchester and Southampton where the public can have a go themselves, free of charge.
In my experience, life drawing is exquisite torture. I took it up five years ago, at 37, having abandoned art at school when I was 12. Before my first lesson I had serious second thoughts. Why was I putting myself though what was sure to be a public humiliation? The small room, stuffy with nervous adrenaline, was packed with focused 19-year-olds who all appeared to be there just to top up their portfolios.
I didn't even know how to put up the easel. When the model walked in and slipped off her dressing gown, striking a series of one-minute poses, I was floored: "Bloody hell. Do they not ease you in first? A discreet elbow, maybe a little bit of knee?" For five minutes I looked everywhere but the model until I realised that that really was not the point.
I wanted to give up after the first lesson but my friend Jane, who had been to art college, persuaded me to go back. I took to bringing my drawings home and pinning them up in the kitchen until a plumber came round and looked taken aback. Now I tend to shove them in the loft. I'm not sure I've improved. Occasionally I'm so frustrated I've been brought close to tears. Sometimes I think, Yes! I've got it! I am Michelangelo!, only for the tutor to point out that the left foot is so far away from the left knee it might as well be in the room next door.
"Every shape is worth enjoying. It's all a good bit," says the avuncular Humphrey Ocean as he dabs his paintbrush into muddy browns and pinks, and I realise that this is not only good advice for a life class but a most excellent approach to life in general too. Indeed, there is something about all the programmes which goes beyond the high white walls of the art studio. A meditative way of looking at the world, a knowledge that nothing is wholly right, or wholly wrong, that nobody is perfect. "I have a problem with necks," says Hambling. "Perhaps because I haven't got one myself."
"Don't think the model in your drawing has to look like someone their mother would recognise," says Ocean, and I feel like hugging him.
For me, life drawing is the one chance I have every week to stop, to look. However badly it might be going, my brain empties out, swoosh, like water down a plug hole. Afterwards I walk home and the world looks new, as if it's just stopped raining and the sun has come out. Everyone should try it. Today's Nude is a jolly good place to start.
• Life Class: Today's Nude [was] on Channel 4 from 6-10 July at 12.30pm. But the TV show can still be found online on YouTube.
TEXT: The Observer
