As a part of its adult art courses, the Harwood Art Center hosts weekly open-drawing sessions with a live nude model to promote artistic learning through in-person observation of the human body.
Julia Mandeville, chief programs officer for the center, said she hopes the open-draw sessions will help artists and models feel more accepting of the human body.
The sessions are a great way for practicing professional artists to refresh their live drawing skills as well as expand their artistic rosters, she said.
“Anybody who is trying to build that fundamental skill portfolio for art really needs to be attuned to (the human form), and anything that makes us more comfortable with ourselves and with other people is beautiful,” Mandeville said. “When we create environments in which it can be respected, we are really doing a great service.”
Using models is a fundamental skill for artists to practice, she said. “It is probably the most profound exercise that one can do to create a strong relationship between the eye and hand,” Mandeville said.
Dorothy King, moderator for the open draw sessions, said it is important to understand the proportions of human anatomy through the practice of drawing in live sessions.
“Proportion is the fundamental core of drawing the figure,” King said. “It is important to observe the real object in order to understand the three-dimensional perspective and the effects of lighting.”
The open-draw sessions allow participants to express their own interpretations of the human form through their desired mediums, she said.
Understanding the human figure can form the basis for many fields of application such as portraiture, illustration, sculpture and even medical illustration, she said. Katie Neeley, one of the many live-figure models for the open-draw sessions, said every person attending has their own unique purpose for coming.
“Some of the artists may be very serious and are studying anatomy,” Neeley said. “Some may be UNM or CNM students who take figure drawing at their schools but need more practice.”
Jaxon Sorby, a junior psychology major, said the open-draw sessions are accessible and cheap, allowing for him to fulfill his independent artistic endeavor of producing comics.
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“The human body is one of the most difficult things that an artist can draw because there are all these subtleties,” he said. “I can integrate this with my characters and cartoons since I have that structure to fall back on, an understanding on how flesh and bones work.”
Nudity in itself is a purposeful bareness, and in the case of the open -draw it is an artistic purpose, he said.
“They call it artistic nudity, not an artistic nakedness. Naked is bareness, a vulnerability,” Sorby said.
People will always hold contrasting opinions about bareness because it is a topic integrated with each respective culture in a society, he said.
Mateo Rocha is a freelance reporter for the Daily Lobo. He can be reached at culture@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @DailyLobo.
