Sculpted Away From Secure Certainity
It was not
until the summer of 2012 during a residency in New York that I, as an Art
student, had the wonderful fortune of drawing from life. We had a live model
who posed nude for us, twice a week.
After that first life drawing experience of having gone through hopeless frustration at not being able to gauge the life in front of me to fairly good progressions in later drawings, it sunk in to me that I had been through 5 years of undergrad without a single nude life drawing class. In fact, we only ever had older men and women model for us, decked in turbans and layers of sari. It would have been good if it had been a part of the study, and not the concentrated whole. What is this stigma against nude modeling for art in India? Or is it only in my imagination? But if it is, then why did we not have a SINGLE such study in 5 whole years?
After that first life drawing experience of having gone through hopeless frustration at not being able to gauge the life in front of me to fairly good progressions in later drawings, it sunk in to me that I had been through 5 years of undergrad without a single nude life drawing class. In fact, we only ever had older men and women model for us, decked in turbans and layers of sari. It would have been good if it had been a part of the study, and not the concentrated whole. What is this stigma against nude modeling for art in India? Or is it only in my imagination? But if it is, then why did we not have a SINGLE such study in 5 whole years?
When I took a few more classes in
London, I couldn't help observing, during the breaks, how the students were careful not to take photographs or look at the model in a way
which would make her/him uncomfortable. And I could not help but think how it
would have been in India. And I am sure
we would have behaved well and mature enough. Probably. In the past, when artists worked in the ateliers, and even now in the west, nude figure studying is a prerequisite for any ‘serious’ painter to study and grasp anatomy and human lines.It is not all rosy in the West as well; there have been various periods along history where different countries have reacted differently (or rather indifferently); and in fact women artists were not allowed to draw from life, either a man or woman, since it was said to bring down their morals. (Why do I feel this strangely is leaning more towards a patriarchal supremacy?)
Anyway, drawing from life is a more western mode
of study, something that does not echo with our culture. (or so it is made to seem.) We do not (should not) see anyone,
man or woman, nude unless we are married to them. If you are seen nude by a whole group, who then venture on to study and
draw different parts of you from different perspectives, and then show those
drawings to god knows how many other people, you can be rest assured that you
will not have a respectable life henceforth.
An insane clip from the movie robot comes to mind (I cannot restrain myself from quoting it here) – there has been a fire and a lady is stuck (nude) in her bathroom. Rajnikanth, the robot version, actually saves her, and since he is not aware of ‘culture’ or ‘respect’ or ‘honor’ or any such ideals, he brings her (away from death, away from the fire) to the safe area where everyone is standing. My goodness, she is not wearing anything. Forget the circumstances, forget the fact that she is alive, but blare on that she is nude! Of course, her mother bangs her chest at the cruel twist that had spoilt her daughter’s destiny (she, or in fact anyone present there, are oblivious to the fact that she could have lost her life, for god’s sake). The distraught daughter, hardly thankful to the savior, cries in utter hopelessness and runs in front of a moving truck and kills herself. And the most pathetic part is that the audience is made to believe that it was absolutely right.
An insane clip from the movie robot comes to mind (I cannot restrain myself from quoting it here) – there has been a fire and a lady is stuck (nude) in her bathroom. Rajnikanth, the robot version, actually saves her, and since he is not aware of ‘culture’ or ‘respect’ or ‘honor’ or any such ideals, he brings her (away from death, away from the fire) to the safe area where everyone is standing. My goodness, she is not wearing anything. Forget the circumstances, forget the fact that she is alive, but blare on that she is nude! Of course, her mother bangs her chest at the cruel twist that had spoilt her daughter’s destiny (she, or in fact anyone present there, are oblivious to the fact that she could have lost her life, for god’s sake). The distraught daughter, hardly thankful to the savior, cries in utter hopelessness and runs in front of a moving truck and kills herself. And the most pathetic part is that the audience is made to believe that it was absolutely right.
(Grow up India, grow up!)
What was I thinking? In a country where the mass is fed such debased ideas and where death is better than being seen nude (you don’t get it? who the hell would have married her darling!), I could not hope for a proper ‘nude’ anatomy study. I had been studying in a ‘culture’ where unanticipated cleavage shows make the headline news. But no more on our ‘Indian’ ideas and ideals, because I am really tired of them; but to cut a long story short, the more I studied art and art history, and the more I learnt about the progressions in the depiction of human body through the ages, the more my frustrations grew.
I have been cheated of something which, as an art student and an aspiring painter, I should have had a complete hold on. No wonder all my earlier attempts in depicting dance and movement and dancers were so ridiculous that I had almost given up.
They are not very strong now either, because the foundation is lost. And it does not matter how many anatomy books you tirelessly copy and how many nude pictures from the net you source incessantly and trace out; the experience of drawing from life is irreplaceable.
What was I thinking? In a country where the mass is fed such debased ideas and where death is better than being seen nude (you don’t get it? who the hell would have married her darling!), I could not hope for a proper ‘nude’ anatomy study. I had been studying in a ‘culture’ where unanticipated cleavage shows make the headline news. But no more on our ‘Indian’ ideas and ideals, because I am really tired of them; but to cut a long story short, the more I studied art and art history, and the more I learnt about the progressions in the depiction of human body through the ages, the more my frustrations grew.
I have been cheated of something which, as an art student and an aspiring painter, I should have had a complete hold on. No wonder all my earlier attempts in depicting dance and movement and dancers were so ridiculous that I had almost given up.
They are not very strong now either, because the foundation is lost. And it does not matter how many anatomy books you tirelessly copy and how many nude pictures from the net you source incessantly and trace out; the experience of drawing from life is irreplaceable.
This unfair
void in my journey also does make me think from the other side of the creation-
what does a model feel like? The very few I have had a chance to speak a little
with are immensely proud, because they feel they are helping an artist, they
are helping art. Without life drawing models, you cannot imagine what the wonderful Venus of Velazquez would have looked like or what Goya’s Nude and clothed Majas would
have been like. You take the aesthetic enjoyment and leave the banality aside
eh? Very clever!
So, I am not given a chance to learn
is it? Well, nothing can stop me from having an experience of being an art
model.
I was lucky to have shared my MA
studio with Abeer Elkhateb, an artist from Baghdad. Contrary to the usually expected journey
of an artist from realism to abstraction, he had started with abstraction,
studying the scripts of Mohenjodaro civilization and using their shapes to create
compositions, and then moving on to beautiful, realistic descriptions of love
and joy. He is as passionate about his art as passionate can get, along with
its lovely quirks and eccentricities; and one day, I found
myself asking him if he could do a nude
sculpture of me.
The same
evening we started off. It was going to be simple, just a plaster cast, which
could later be cast again in bronze or any other material.
I was
uncomfortable in the beginning, to say the least. It took a while to let go of
‘shame’, or the idea of ‘shame’. A few minutes into it and all that remained
was the intention to get a simple and comfortable posture (we decided on a
sitting one), and make sure that I could stay there for a long time.
Modeling for sculpture is definitely more intimate than modeling for painting, but even as the cold plaster was applied on me and I felt the chill sink in to my flesh, I learnt that all our ideas of ‘shame’ and ‘honor’ and ‘culture’ are built upon us, fences created around us to bring some sort of order and security to our lives. Of course we need them, but to what extent? Should they be more important than what we honestly seek in life and knowledge? Should they at least not be circumstantial? What exactly are we all holding on to so tightly that we do not realize how many journeys and lives are being suffocated?
This is one of the reasons I do not trust any of the ‘systems’ that we humans have created around ourselves, but more on that in a later blog post. To finish this one on a cheerful note, never had I felt so free, so liberated as I had after the cast had been taken off. Since it was my first experience and I was not used to having thick plaster over my face for such a long time, I did have a fainting spell towards the end but thankfully it was after the plaster was enough set to not be damaged.
Modeling for sculpture is definitely more intimate than modeling for painting, but even as the cold plaster was applied on me and I felt the chill sink in to my flesh, I learnt that all our ideas of ‘shame’ and ‘honor’ and ‘culture’ are built upon us, fences created around us to bring some sort of order and security to our lives. Of course we need them, but to what extent? Should they be more important than what we honestly seek in life and knowledge? Should they at least not be circumstantial? What exactly are we all holding on to so tightly that we do not realize how many journeys and lives are being suffocated?
This is one of the reasons I do not trust any of the ‘systems’ that we humans have created around ourselves, but more on that in a later blog post. To finish this one on a cheerful note, never had I felt so free, so liberated as I had after the cast had been taken off. Since it was my first experience and I was not used to having thick plaster over my face for such a long time, I did have a fainting spell towards the end but thankfully it was after the plaster was enough set to not be damaged.
And every time I look at the picture of the cast, I swell with pride. I have become
a sculpture, and the transformation had been brought forth by an amazing artist. I can be obnoxious enough to say that I am now a piece of art,
literally!
There I sit,
immortalized :)
P.S - I recently came upon this fascinating fact relating to Goya’s beautiful Majas that I want to share. They are one of the most controversial paintings of the art world. It was widely speculated that the artist, who had had an affair with the enchanting Duchess of Alba, had made her eternal in these works. However her family had been quite intent on keeping itself from any association with the works; and in 1945, her descendants actually had her grave dug up so that they could measure the skeleton’s proportions and compare it with those of the figures in the paintings, so that they could perhaps prove that it was not her. It proved inconclusive though, and the puzzle is still not solved.
Heheh :D
(Source - The world of Goya - by Richard Schickel and the editors of Time Life Books)
P.S - I recently came upon this fascinating fact relating to Goya’s beautiful Majas that I want to share. They are one of the most controversial paintings of the art world. It was widely speculated that the artist, who had had an affair with the enchanting Duchess of Alba, had made her eternal in these works. However her family had been quite intent on keeping itself from any association with the works; and in 1945, her descendants actually had her grave dug up so that they could measure the skeleton’s proportions and compare it with those of the figures in the paintings, so that they could perhaps prove that it was not her. It proved inconclusive though, and the puzzle is still not solved.
Heheh :D
(Source - The world of Goya - by Richard Schickel and the editors of Time Life Books)
More food for thought -
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