The flawless body paradox - The more perfect the body, the less interesting the drawing became.
Here’s what a few years of life drawing taught me about bodies, weight and shape - another angle on something I’d already spent twenty years looking at through a camera.
Bodies get talked about in terms of confidence, representation, acceptance. All true, all worth saying. What drawing added was weight, gravity and mostly character.
There was an old boxer who used to sit for us - built like a wall, with a beer belly sitting on top of it. Muscle and gravity in the same body. Perfect for big, loose circles. That’s when I understood what those two words actually mean. It changed how I thought about every body I’ve drawn or photographed since.
Life drawing gives you two ways to find that. Very short poses, meant to stop you thinking - no time for detail, a direct line from eye to hand. And long poses, where you measure, measure again, commit to a line - probably the wrong one - and then the model moves anyway. My tutor, Dolph van Eden, always said that was the best part: change your sketch, adapt. He was right. Eventually there’s a real human being on the sheet of paper, not just a shape.
The one thing I had no control over in that room was the light - whatever the tutor, the space, the time of day gave me. In photography I get to build it myself, find the exact position where everything resolves into shape.
But the thing I’m actually chasing hasn’t changed. Not a flawless body. Not a category. Weight. Gravity. Character - whether someone is mid-movement or simply lying still, whatever size or age they happen to be. The boxer taught me that first. I’ve been looking for it in every body since.
