(A long-winded post follows, but I want to mention first that anyone looking for figure drawing instruction in the Toronto area take note- the TSA's Spring term starts April 19th, and I'll be teaching intro Life Drawing on Saturday mornings, and advanced Life drawing on Wednesday evenings for more details, check here)
On the Tuesday night it was a bit of a change of pace for me.
As has been discussed a ways back in this blog, I am cognizant that eroticism and sexuality are a component of bodily experience. And life drawing in general strives to keep those elements well in the background. But as part of the broader spectrum of how bodies are represented and understood, they play a part.
I have always felt that one of the good things about life drawing is the project of seeing a broader spectrum of beauty, of bodies and of contexts than those we get from more general media. but I also feel that there is room to generate imagery in art that opens the dimension of erotic representation in honest ways.
The Keyhole sessions are a local Toronto project that aims to be a `racier' alternative to standard life drawing. In their promotional material they suggest that the sexual dimension of the modelling is much more explicit, in contrast to "your Grandma's life drawing session". Nothing `stuffy' about their place, they say. Up til now I had only heard about it second hand.
On a tip from Z- I went to check out the Tuesday session there. D- and M- were the models, and both work in the adult film industry. I was curious to see how people who make a living at presenting themselves in a sexual context would be in a life-drawing situation.
I was anticipating a bit more of a boisterous experience than I actually got - the woman hosting the session was very pleasant, and people there were also anything but the trenchcoat-clad heavy breathing crowd of old men one might associate with it as a venture. An even split of men and women, mostly urban, most on the hip/arty side of the equation. The crowd was genial and chatty before, after, and during breaks.
I had a fond historical connection to the space it was held in, as the Toronto School of Art used to hold its life drawing sessions in the same Great Hall space that the Keyhole people now use. (I actually used to monitor a drawing session in the room, back in the late '80's). It is a beautiful building at Queen and Dovercourt that they are in, and it was fun to be back there.
The session is a bit more of an immersive experience than some- lights are lower than many studios, which makes it harder to see nuances of the drawing (but can be a freeing thing, too). There is a playlist of music for the night - club music and things like Madonna's `Erotica' which give it more of an event feel, a little like sketching at a mildly kinky fashion show. Models typically get kitted out in ornamental rope harnesses,which adds to the fetish-y feel. The models that night also had high heels on. (Drawing the women with heels was triggering memories of my teacher, Robert Markle, who frequently depicted burlesque dancers in heels in his work)
As for the posing, people posing for extended periods are people posing. Some of the poses they did together had a bit more of an S & M feel, but apart from that most of the poses taken weren't too far off the beam of a standard drawing session. What made it seem different to me was the contextualisation of costume & music more than anything else. That and facial expression: I'm not accustomed to models holding an open-mouthed, ecstatic look, which I associate more with adult books & movies.
People drawing behaved in essentially the same way as they do in any drawing session. At the post-feminist TSA we discourage people from describing people in `objectifying terms' - i.e we should be talking about models' work, not their figures. (I'm wondering though that nowadays perhaps we are at a place where complimenting someone's looks is not de facto demeaning or a reductive gesture diminishing their other capacities...it's tricky)
Physical appearance was more a subject of discussion that night. Certainly the women modelling fit the mold of preferred age and body types for our society.
The studies here are mostly in the 10-minute to 25-minute range. I enjoyed the challenge of the distracting environment and the patterns the rope created, and fitting two figures proportionately into a single space. But in the end most of the two-figure studies are images of people going through the motions of looking sexy together. For me, there was far more frisson drawing D- and L- together a few months back at the AGO, where there was a real intimacy present (see entries for November 2nd).
The 25-minute pencil study of D- from Tuesday was the sole one that for me had some emotional charge. She was just sitting, no special outfit, but the fact of her looking in my direction, and her expression were the most intense, made moreso in an environment where regarding someone in a more erotic context was more condoned.
If you're interested, you can see more about the Session here at the Keyhole website. They do a thorough job of documenting their events.
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