The Body as a Landscape

I made this drawing during a life-drawing session in London in 2021. The model was sitting on a bed, and something about the pose immediately caught my attention.

In these sessions, poses often last eight or ten minutes, sometimes even less. There isn't much time to plan. You have a sheet of paper, a model in front of you, and just a few minutes to decide what interests you.

I'm not particularly concerned with capturing every anatomical detail. Instead, I look for those elements of the pose that offer the greatest expressive possibilities. Sometimes it's a shoulder, the position of the feet, the angle of an arm or the way the body bends in a particular direction. It happens almost instinctively. I see something that interests me, and I follow it.

In this drawing, it was mainly the shoulders and the relationship between the upper body and the legs. I wanted to emphasise those tensions and allow them to guide the drawing.

I like to think of the human body as a landscape. A territory of lines, angles, movements and tensions that can be explored and transformed. I'm not trying to reproduce everything I see, but to find something expressive within the pose, something that goes beyond its immediate appearance.

The grey-blue dress becomes a dense area of overlapping lines, contrasting with the warmer ochre of the arms and legs and the orange of the face. The feet introduce another movement, with their angular positions and differently defined outlines. In certain areas, a thin layer of white acrylic partially covers the drawing, allowing some of the underlying marks to remain visible while others fade into the paper.

The bed is suggested through a few simple lines, just enough to establish the surrounding space. Beds and domestic interiors have appeared repeatedly in my work, and I'm often interested in the relationship between the human figure and these ordinary, familiar objects.

I never returned to this drawing after the session. Sometimes I take sketches back to my studio and continue working on them, adding colour or developing the surrounding space. But this time, I felt that everything I wanted from the pose was already there.

Looking at it now, I can still recognise those first few seconds of observation and the instinctive decisions that followed. That's what I particularly enjoy about life drawing: discovering, within a very short time, another way of seeing the human body.

A Landscape Within, 2021
Coloured pencil and acrylic on paper
50 × 35 cm

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