It usually starts with a series of dynamic gestures, one-minute poses so named because the goal is to capture the movement. There’s a routine: A model poses on a platform surrounded by students at easels or in chairs. By the time I took my first life drawing class at 17, I was hooked and, in the decades that followed, I took classes at various schools when time allowed. It’s one of the few activities in which I truly feel like I’m “in the zone.” As a kid I relentlessly drew Astro Boy, my favorite TV cartoon character, which made me an anime fangirl decades before Pokémon. My first model was not nude and not even human. Who are these people who bare all to a room full of strangers? How does it feel to pose under unforgiving lights as students mentally measure the distance from your clavicle to pubis? I often wonder what it takes to do a job most know little about yet is essential to rendering the human figure in art. Yet these men and women - old and young, all shapes, sizes and ethnicities - whose bodies are exposed from every angle, whose nude images grace my walls, remain unknown to me. That’s because my passion is figure drawing, so I rack up a lot of hours staring at unclothed adults. Over the years I’ve scrutinized, squinted at and visually dissected every inch of easily more than 100 naked humans.
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