Drawing Movement

Whereas drawing from a posed figure is hard enough to do properly, drawing an actual moving human (or animal) is something else again. So off I went to a Dance Drawing Workshop at the University of Surrey (Guildford) to see if I could pick up some skills.

Having found the place (eventually, not quite controlling the Tourette's), and having missed most of the the jolly introductions (1 leader, 1 model, 6 punters) we were straight into the deep end. After a run through of a piece of dance, which I found slightly incomprehensible without its music, we then attempted to draw a skirt-swishing passage from it. My sketchpad at this point looks like a 1 year monkey has played with it: just squirls on a page. Arrgh!! I was trying to speed up the 2-minute gesture drawing technique but it wasn't working. It was either my lack of speed, or more likely my insufficient memory for moving objects.

Getting shallower, or perhaps throwing in some buoyancy aids, we then looked at smaller and smaller sections. First of all a shorter run from the same piece, and then some improvised elements. It seemed were were on a breaking-down/decomposition path rather than a building-up/integration path. Maybe that's for us to work on at home.



Click on image for bigger size (on Flickr).

At one point we got to a highly structured practice, where the model would, slowly, hold a pose, move, hold the next pose, and repeat in a loop with four states (video). This would correspond to three or four "postures" of tai chi (which, incidentally, would be really good for this sort of drawing exercise). After a while, I got into the rhythm. I could glance up when she was still, draw when she was moving, and then catch up for the next of the sequential poses. By missing out one of the four, I had enough bandwidth to work on three of the four poses, on a single page. So this felt like an interleaved set of quick drawings, rather than drawing movement as such. This was to do with my way of cheating, as I could have equally have tried to draw the moving arcs not the static nodes.

I think my best images of movement came from an African sequence, done in red chalk. The model repeated a ~20 second loop for about 15 minutes, and got a good workout in the process. It was such a joyful dance so there was a lot of happiness in the room at that point, which helped enormously with the drawing.



There were also some conventional held poses to round off the day. I'm not sure I really wanted these, and anyway had a hard time interpreting the model's form in her black clothes. Clothed models, whatever next!? We finished off with a Degas style number (stretching on the floor, lots of lacy fabric), held for 20 minutes (no picture of that, but you can imagine it better than I can draw it).



A very interesting experience, well organised, with a nice group of artists attending. Writing about it now has made me think about levels of movement in a different way (yes, I drew myself an annotated diagram), and started me on thinking about tactics for drawing them.