Fight Night

Sketches from a muay thai bout I saw last night. As you can imagine, these were very quick sketches!

  

Bett

Some drawings from a recent session at Spring Street Studios.

In the movies, when they depict artists studios with live nude models, the models are almost always really fit, beautiful people, Aphrodites and Adonises. In reality, you get all types. At the places I go to draw, it's more likely to be someone old or fat or scrawny or just ordinary looking than a conventionally attractive man or woman. There are a few places I've been that seem to mostly hire burlesque dancers as their models. These are usually 'drink and draw' type sessions, which are as much a social outing as a drawing session. One guy who ran one once told me that he'd like to hire a wider variety of models, but the people coming wanted to see hot girls. Personally, I've found that most of them, while physically attractive, don't make very good models for live figure drawing.

This woman was pretty hefty, but she was a pretty good model. It's actually fun to draw heavy people. The way their weight hangs, the flesh bends and folds, is interesting to draw. And it's a challenge, too, because we are so inured to seeing a certain type of figure in art and media and advertising, that to have to draw such a different body type requires real observation. You can't simply rely on your preconceived notions of what the figure is as a shortcut in your drawing.

West 88th Street

This is a pen-and-ink drawing of the brownstone where my parents lived when I was born. I did it as a Christmas present for my mom. That's 4-year old me with our dog, Clyde, and our black cat Panther Puss in the apartment window. This building is in the Upper West Side, less than a block from Central Park. Hard to believe that in the early '70s, this was not a desirable location!