Our Life drawing exhibition
Twice a month on Saturday I would attend a life drawing session with ten other people. We are called the Saturday Life Drawing Club (SLDC).
This year, we decided to hold a little exhibition at the RJ paper warehouse during the Singapore Art Week 2023.
The warehouse is an unusual place to hold an exhibition. However, I like this old industrial feel - somewhat rough but friendly.
We had an opening well attended by friends. Throughout the week, the exhibition was opened by appointment only as the space is a working warehouse.
The Opening
Life Drawing works
As I was into hand-made folded books, I decided to make an A4 size flag book about my thoughts on life drawing. A flag book is basically a book with an accordion spine. Pages are pasted onto the “spine” facing one way or the other in one or more rows.
With May’s help, we chose a selection of drawings from the two years of life drawing sessions I did with SLDC. The book looks like this:
Thoughts on life drawing
When C invited me to her drawing group I found myself thinking, how would life drawing help my practice? Do I really want to draw humans? But I decided to do it anyway because I don't have the answers.
For a long time I sketched with a pencil. Taking care to get my fundamentals right, I drew proportions and shapes as true to reality as possible. I know I was getting better and was glad for it but I wasn't satisfied. Is this all there is to life drawing? I thought I was missing something.
Then S said to me, try colours. So I did, and the drawings became radically different. Colours were a trigger for me to use different materials and to experiment with everything. Suddenly, I had a newfound joy in life drawing. The limited time given to each pose and the many decisions that needed to be made while drawing means that my lines were becoming less structured and more intuitive. There is a kind of freedom in frenziedly drawing within a limited time. Sometimes I get excited by the possibilities of a pose, the materials that I am using and the ideas popping out of my head that I literally sense a high. Yet, this same freedom to draw without apprehension is also reined in by the lack of time. The result is drawings that I would have never thought of making on regular days. Happily, they become references for me when I run out of ideas on those regular days.
I understood that inspiration does not materialise from nothing, especially not from sitting at my art table by myself. I believe that they have to be collected from happenings around us and ruminate in the mysterious workings of our brains before breaking out as a eureka moment. So, I constantly remind my introverted self to get out there and learn something, a new skill, a story, an experience. Life drawing is one of the activities I make myself go to.
Slowly, I started to find that the life drawing group is not just about drawing the human figure, it is a social activity. At this group, the Saturday Life Drawing Club, the members generously share their works, thoughts and ideas. Sometimes, we even try out each other’s concepts and styles without worry. This gives me permission to build on the ideas and experiments of others and try them out very quickly and many times as is the nature of life drawing. It is something that I could not have done on my own. And they all build up as materials for inspiration.
I also had a few A3 sized works up against a column of stacked paper and a “life drawing zine” hanging from one.
