FIGURE DRAWING AT THE ACADEMY

       Since its inception in 2013, The Vienna Academy of Visionary Art offered Figure Drawing classes every Wednesday afternoon, also open to the public. For many years, I was responsible for running these sessions ~ posing the model, arranging lights and music, timing the breaks and offering advice on the students' work. 

       We were fortunate to have an enthusiastic group of regulars from outside the Academy, and our models were extra-ordinary - actors, dancers and musicians who enjoyed the ambiance of our sessions and gave their all.

       Usually I prepared a pose for the model beforehand, and we worked out the physicalities of it together, going so far as to search for a certain motivation and feeling. They often held the same pose for over two hours, with breaks every 20 minutes.

       I started exploring a variety of working methods, usually crayons on toned paper, with white chalk for the highlights and a brown or sanguin crayon for the shadows.

       Over the years, I came to love those Wednesday afternoons, a period of calm and concentration in my busy week...

       There's an art to constructing the figure, searching for the underlying bone structure and respecting the rules of proportion while still trying to create a graceful line that captures the essence of the model.

        Sometimes the half-completed figure looks better, because too many pencil strokes can overwork a drawing. Meanwhile, there's always the race against time to create a finished, balanced drawing...

       When I studied painting in Vienna for a year in 1989-90, I attended Figure Drawing classes, usually at the Wiener Kunstschule. It was a more intimate setting than die Akademie der Bildende Künste, where we sat in the Anatomische Saal in circular benches far from the model. 

       We often had an Obdachloser (homeless person) as a model, who made me think of St. Anthony in the desert. I only wish we had more time ~ usually 20 minutes for a pose, maybe another 20-minute session if we were lucky. When I ran my own Figure Drawing sessions at The Vienna Academy of Visionary Art, I kept aiming for longer poses, though the students sometimes protested saying "I don't know what else to draw..." For me, the opportunity for deeper concentration and greater observation of detail is a delight.