Is Life Drawing the Same During COVID-19? / September 7, 2020 by Theresa Kneppers

Is Life Drawing the Same During COVID-19? by Alice Mcleod-Bishop

“The exercise of drawing from life brings out the individuality of the artist in the man”[i]

This collection of life drawings aims to examine how artists can use technology to overcome the constraints of the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020, and how this has affected the practice of life drawing and the drawings themselves. Life drawing was an integral aspect of Bomberg’s teaching and he valued how one can learn to depict a subject through drawing them from life, moving the artist and the subject to gain a full perception through different physical perspectives of the sitter; it is considered by most artists to be a valuable practice in learning how to visually depict a subject.

Alice Mcleod Bishop life drawing sketches.png — Sketches done from life

Given the social distancing aspect of managing the pandemic, and the encouragement to stay inside with little to no contact with other households, life drawing in the traditional sense is somewhat an impossibility. However, video-calling technology (Facetime, Skype, social media ‘lives’ and most commonly Zoom) has enabled people to have some normalcy in some aspects of life, and people have hosted virtual life-drawing classes to continue their practice.

Alice Mcleod Bishop Life Drawing.png — Left, via Zoom; right, from life

This collection of life drawings demonstrates the difference between drawing sitters in person compared to drawing the same people via Zoom. I found that in drawing via zoom, I struggled to really grasp an accurate perspective of my sitters, and I found it hard to make my subjects look like themselves in their bodies, in comparison to drawing the same sitters in person. When drawing them in person, I saw more shading and shapes, thus making the drawing itself and the drawings more interesting.

I also found it difficult to capture my sitters’ essence and understand how to represent the ‘Spirit in the Mass’ in the subject, particularly when I compare that experience to drawing my sitters in person. While I am close with both subjects, it was hard to portray some evidence of their selves in my works over Zoom, and the drawings seem decidedly flatter and colder when observed in comparison to drawings done in person. This is likely because one’s physical view of the sitter is 2-dimensional, and thus it is hard to gain a full perspective of the sitter from various angles, something which Bomberg defended when it came to his life drawing classes.

Overall, the experience of life drawing and being able to gauge a person’s essence was unmatched via Zoom. Drawing over a videocall felt far more like drawing an object as a still life rather than drawing a person. Using Zoom felt incredibly impersonal and stilted, whereas life drawing in person makes it easy to capture the Spirit in the Individual. Despite this, I was able to maintain my style and stylistic approach to life drawing and enjoyed the experience. If one can practice life drawing in any capacity it still has value, especially during a pandemic; it allows you to connect in a time where people have become so unnaturally disconnected.

Thank you to my lovely sitters.

[i] (Bomberg, quoted in Buchowska ‘teaching art in post-war Britain: the case of the Borough Group’, p. 115)

The Spirit in the Mass in Dorothy Mead’s Paintings / August 26, 2020 by Theresa Kneppers

by Alice Mcleod-Bishop

Dorothy Mead (1928-1975) joined the Borough Group in 1946 as an original member of the group which was dedicated to portraying David Bomberg’s (1890-1957) Modernist teaching methods and his philosophy known as the Spirit in the Mass, until the group’s dissolution in 1951. The notion of Spirit in the Mass was primarily about the connection between art and wider life, where he aimed to capture someone as they are in the world rather than as a subject. He understood the ‘self’ as a conditional relationship in consideration of its surroundings, taking into account the artist’s perception of the subject, as well as the phenomenology (the experience of experiencing something) of the subject – to capture what it is like for the sitter, landscape, cityscape etc., to be and exist as itself rather than solely the artist’s depiction of what it might look like at face-value. The idea of mass specifically relates to the synthesis of thought and feeling: the artist must assume ignorance about the subject whilst not being ignorant, and show the world as we see it, as uncertainty. Bomberg believed that modernist drawing is seen “as a deliberate distortion of optical truth”[i], and thus one must be classically trained if aiming to distort; yet if the artist is concerned with how things ‘feel’, then what they draw will naturally be a subjective and therefore distorted view of reality.

This is what drove Bomberg to teach his anti-establishment methods, which in turn meant he was met with distaste and disapproval from the contemporary art community and was not recognised as a legitimate teacher. His views were widely misunderstood due to the lack of clarity surrounding his ideas and the somewhat confusing way in which they are worded in the Bomberg Papers. Contemporary critics and teachers failed to ascertain what Bomberg’s philosophy entailed, and to this day his teachings are confused by many[ii]. It is highly difficult to truly grasp exactly what Bomberg aimed to portray in his classes and what is the Spirit in the Mass; it seems that only those who were his students managed to understand Bomberg’s revolutionary methods and accurately capture what Bomberg perceived to be the Spirit in the Mass.

One of these students was Dorothy Mead, who was especially dedicated to Bomberg’s methods and was forced to leave the Slade art school because of her allegiance to the British Modernist artist. Bomberg’s influence on Mead is evident in her paintings, particularly her depictions of bodies, figures and landscapes: stylistically, Mead’s work is reminiscent of Bomberg’s post-war paintings, using thick expressive brush strokes and dark colours to portray a sense of the subject and its essence, an idea that was integral to Bomberg’s philosophy. It is difficult to delineate precisely how far Mead was able to capture the Spirit of her subjects, since we cannot know in detail her relationship with what and who she painted, nor how far she allowed her subjectivity to distort her reality. One can assume with some confidence however that she aimed to exact the Spirit of her subjects through her use of colour and the presentation of form in her works. In her 1955 work Portrait[iii] (left), she uses bold yellow and blue brush strokes over a dark red and brown background to create the suggestion of an anonymous sitter. Compared to her undated self-portrait titled Self-Portrait[iv](right), it is clear she perceived herself quite differently to her sitter in Portrait. The use of duller colours and more succinct brush strokes in Self-Portrait might suggest she had a less-than passionate view of herself, while the vibrant, even violent feel to Portrait implies a potentially tumultuous or impassioned view of her unnamed sitter. This short comparison highlights how Mead attempted to portray her perception of her subjects and thus how she interpreted Bomberg’s philosophy of the Spirit in the Mass; the different stylistic techniques in her depiction of herself compared to that of her subject is evidence of an attempt to capture the essence and phenomenology of the individual.

[i][i] Roy Oxlade, Bomberg Papers: The Spirit in the Mass, a commentary, together with transcriptions of various previously unpublished notes, p. XIV (introduction), Royal College of Art, 1980

[ii] Cliff Holden, Bomberg’s Teaching – Some Misconceptions, p.3, 2004, Cliff Holden

[iii] Dorothy Mead, Portrait, 1955, Borough Road Gallery Archive

[iv] Dorothy Mead, Self-Portrait, (undated), Borough Road Gallery Archive