ArtClub hosts Life Drawing

On the night before Halloween, Imperial’s resident Art Club hosted the second of the society’s biweekly life art session in RSM 1.47, a lecture theatre that can be described as one of the most comfortable in the university.  Focusing on the life drawing, this session lasted two hours and involved making a variety of sketches and drawings of a nude model in a variety of poses, the complexity of the subject making this one of the more challenging activities the club hosts.  The organisers, materials postgraduate and society president Zahir Thebault in addition to the secretary, the biochemistry third year Elsa Phillipon, welcomed the attendees in the first 15 minutes of the event, ensuring everyone had a seat and materials. The event was ticketed at £2 for members and £5 for non-members - a significant reduction from last year’s £10.  

As the event started, the room filled up with over forty seated participants circling a large, empty space in the center, offering everyone ample space and a good view to study the model. Participants were given a choice of pencils, charcoal and coloured crayons in addition to a rubber and some A2 pages to work on. Zahir kickstarted the event with a lesson to help everyone get a bearing for what they were about to draw with a short video he had made. In this video, Zahir pointed out how starting off with straight lines could let an artist get a better grasp of the details in a face before progressing to finer details. He went on to note that the easily recognisable nature of the human face and body makes life drawing ‘probably one of the hardest things in art’. 

 After the short lesson, a nude model entered the circle with a chair, posing in a variety of ways, with and without the chair, for times that ranged from one-minute sketches to five, ten, and fifteen minutes to allow for more detailed images. The model, a woman from outside the college, was no stranger to posing for life art, having assisted in events like this many times in the past. After all, posing for life art not only requires enough patience and stamina to stay perfectly still for up to 15 minutes at a time, but also a significant amount of courage with exposing the entirety of their body for a crowd of unknown people to study. 

The participants of the event varied greatly, ranging from those who were completely new to the world of art to those who already had great experience in the subject.  There were a variety of reasons for the new people joining; some wanted to ‘try something new’ while others heard about the society through friends and decided to join after looking at previous events. One member commented ‘I was quite nervous because I’ve never done life drawing before, but it wasn’t so scary’. Others were rather surprised that the subject of the art would be nude (our editors included) although by the half-way point everyone had managed to settle in. Another, more experienced, artist would go on to tell me their reason for joining: ‘for me, art is my biggest passion’. Generally, it seems that while virtually all the artists there were very talented, there was still a welcoming and relaxing atmosphere for everybody involved. 

The Art Club has successfully run two of these sessions and does not plan to stop. The first session, part of the Union’s ‘Give It A Go’ scheme, on 16th October and this one were ‘well attended and went really well’, according to Zahir. ‘It looks like our experiment of running them ourselves is working.’ Zahir continued, as these sessions are the first taught by the Art Club, not by an external tutor. ‘We’re looking forward to running more throughout the term and next year. We have seen some really nice work done by some very talented members and amazing attempts by complete beginners so we’re very happy’.  

Interested readers are encouraged to check out ArtClub’s Instagram page @ImperialArtClub for news about the next life drawing session.