Recently, a friend of mine commented that she couldn’t understand how human beings could draw other human beings. It wasn’t a comment reinforcing some archaic moral stance about nakedness, although there is still an element of this pervading society, but that some people have the perception and skills to do so and others do not. Having drawn nude forms all of my life, I have always accepted the practice as normal. The desire for human beings to draw [paint, sculpt] other human beings goes back to the beginning of time and in artistic academic circles the skills required are what separate artists into two groups – those that can draw [serious artists] and those that can‘t [pretenders]. We may never get away from this state although for many artists, drawing from a nude model is entirely irrelevant to their practices. However, as an activity, it continues unabated with any number of studio locations offering models.

Just to see if anything had changed, I searched my bookshelves for Kenneth Clark’s The Nude. It was written in 1956 and my copy still has the price of 12/6 printed in the top corner. That he felt compelled to write it at that juncture probably illustrates the divide that was less than apparent at that time between nudity and nakedness. Since then, an entire industry revolving around nakedness/pornography/titillation has shown no signs of abating and artists have continued to toil away with pencil, pastel, ink and paint in cloistered spaces.

As he pointed out in the introduction, nude models can be anything but epitomes of Greek excellence of form and in many ways, prettiness is a drawback. What contemporary artists favour is lumpiness, fleshiness, elongation and sharp lines deriving from prominent bones and yet, the nude as a vehicle for artistic expression has largely disappeared. Any symbolic manifestation of any number of psychological states expressible through the nude form has fallen by the wayside other than artists using themselves as models – Jenny Saville comes to mind.

Is it that there is nothing left to say or that the human form no longer has the capacity to express anything other than personal anguish? All of those artists retreating into abstraction might suggest that indefinite, ambiguous emotional states, the search for self-discovery, either outweighs the confronting honesty of working from the naked human form or that much of the art world no longer sees drawing human beings as relevant. The world beyond the studio has of course determined that nakedness and nudity are both vehicles for exploitation, reinforcing that bodies are sacredly private entities. The world has to an extent traded the moral dimension of original sign for one of separation from our animal origins. Procreation, nakedness and death as subjects are to be avoided in these PC times lest someone is offended. Kenneth Clark saw a higher purpose, but times seem to have changed.

What struck me though in being part of this drawing class was not that the activity was taking place or that a bunch of artists found the whole idea of offence passe but what I can describe only as a programmed response. Each artist was drawing an outline around the figure. Such boundaries are the differentiation between tonal or colour areas as perceived by the brain and outlines as such don’t actually exist. So, why do we choose to render those boundaries as lines.  What is the mechanism that determines such a choice? It could be that outlines are the result of the media we use. Pencils and pens produce lines by their very nature. Or is could be something quite different. In drawing an outline, artificial as it may be, the artists are separating the figure from its immediate environment and in the process, themselves from the world beyond the studio

I can recall a sentence from a book where the artist talks about a thigh ‘crying out’ for an HB pencil. However, one line of logic says that there is a pre-programmed response that an outline has to be drawn in order to understand the world, that such separation is the result of humanistic ideals. As a species we believe and accept that we, as the more developed of the animal kingdom, need to celebrate the fact of our difference. In fact, when it comes to drawing animals we tend to concentrate not on the outlines at all, but on the fur or skin patterning. If humankind looked more like zebras say, than the largely hairless mammals that they are, then outlines might not suffice.

The ancient Greeks validated the idea of isolating the human form in a quest to identify ideal beauty and of course there has always been a whole industry devoted to sex and beauty but in contemporary times artists, perverse lot that we are, honestly prefer to draw something that is not idealised and after three hours in a life studio, the model has become part of the furniture anyway.  But separating the nude form from its environment has little to do with ideals of beauty and more to do with the way humankind sees itself.

So, is there still room for working from the nude? The only figure painting I’ve seen recently was either gender or racially motivated and from memory none of it involved nude forms. Perhaps attaching gender, racial, social or political issues to the nude form is the only way to justify the whole enterprise.

However, in 2018 a nude by Australian artist Lisa Yuskavage on the cover of Vault magazine in Australia was censored and the fuss over a couple of square centimetres of flesh attracted incredulity from the arts community. Described by ABC Australia as “a painting that shows a pregnant woman with her breasts exposed in relation to a selection of fruit, painted in these pastel tones,” its fate was to have the nipples covered before publication. The more lifelike a nude is, the more controversial it seems to be. It serves to demonstrate how ill at ease we still are with the naked form, particularly when we can’t separate ourselves from the subject on show. And just what is it about nipples that causes so much angst?

The life drawing class I attended last week had a sign on the door telling anyone that entered that there was a nude model inside should anyone be offended. If the entire class had been naked [a bunch of elderly, misshapen bodies ravaged by life], I could understand the warning, but an attractive blonde perched on a stool – hardly.