Friday, February 26, 2010

Good Naked

Hello Everyone,

A while ago, my friend and I were getting vegetables at the grocery store and we found that one of the employees who was busily rearranging the produce looked familiar to us both. After a bit of rumination, we realized that he was one of the models our department uses for figure drawing sessions. It’s awkward enough encountering people out of context, but with models, there is an extra level of confusion about how to behave. In most cases, you don’t know this person at all well (which is why you didn’t know he worked at the local Kroger), but you’ve spent two or three hours looking intensely at him. You may or may not have learned his name, but you know that he has freckles on his back and that his knees are knobby. He almost certainly doesn’t recognize you and it feels far more voyeuristic than an actual figure drawing session. It’s like being on the transparent side of a two-way mirror; you have an unreciprocated amount of knowledge about him.

Figure drawing is one of those aspects of life here that is completely normal to the people in art school, but, I imagine, totally foreign to the layperson. So in case any of you are considering a career change what with the recession and everything, I wanted to share a few figure modeling tips I’ve come up with in case this is an option for you. As another friend said recently, “There’s good naked and bad naked.” So here are ten suggestions for how to be “good naked:”

1.) Choose interesting poses. Make the students see or understand the human body in a new way. Be aware of how you look to each of the students in the room. Your position should be equally interesting from all angles.
2.) That being said, choose only positions that you can hold for the required amount of time.
3.) Before beginning, take time to learn what the students and the professor want to get from the exercise. The discipline of the students and the materials they are working with can determine the poses you have and the length of time you hold them. At one session I went to, there were a number of animation students so the model did several “emotion” poses, including humor and anger. It was quite disconcerting to have a nude man laughing hysterically at you for two minutes only to change suddenly to snarling and clenching his teeth, but I did get some interesting sketches.
4.) Pay close attention to your hands, eyes, mouth and feet. They are especially prone to twitching, but they are often the very parts that students focus on, so it is imperative to keep them in a stable position.
5.) Props can be useful in demonstrating how the body interacts with various objects, but simpler is probably better. The emphasis should always be on your body, not on the fancy helmet you’re wearing or the plastic sword you happen to enjoy wielding.
6.) Keep quiet. Unless it’s clear that the students and the professor are fine with it, chatting is distracting to both you and the students.
7.) Unless asked to do so, avoid making eye contact with the students. It not only is distracting, it breaks the necessary pretense created in these sessions that the human being drawn is not a person to interact with the way we normally would, but an object to study visually.
8.) Anything you reveal can and will be drawn. Tanlines, straplines, tatoos, and piercings are all fair game for students and while they can sometimes be interesting accents, they just as often divert attention. You may be a model, but this is not the catwalk -- glamour or style must take a back seat to showing the body in its essence.
9.) Take breaks, either to stretch or warm up, when necessary. If a pose is too difficult maintain even with breaks, it’s not worth it. One model I’ve drawn enjoyed challenging himself by getting into unusual positions. The most memorable was when he did a headstand on a stool which was in turn atop a table. While this was indeed a creative pose, the problem was he would concentrate so hard on not moving (partly so that he would avoid plummeting to his death) that he kept wincing and emitting these wheezes each of which could have earned hurricane names. It was like a senior citizens’ gymnastics meet crossed with a Lamaze class that had gone very, very wrong.
10.) Most importantly, understand your own body and be confident in its visual strengths. What is unique about it and what will students likely enjoy when drawing you? Larger ladies, for example, are particularly fun to draw because they tend to have more curves and soft shadows.

Finally, a word to those of you who might think figure drawing would be incredibly uncomfortable. It can be if the model is “bad naked,” but usually it is fine. Despite the few exceptions I’ve mentioned here, I have benefited greatly from drawing the human form and am able to understand it and therefore draw it better each time I do.

Have a good week,
Sarah/Mouse

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Laundry Day

Hi Everyone,

You no doubt will be glad to hear that doing my laundry is at least a semi-regular event in my life. As you know, there are many stages in this process: sorting the clothes; figuring out which washing cycle you want to use (I’m still unsure why having your clothes “permanently pressed” is an appealing option to anyone); transferring the wet clothes to the dryer, etc. My favorite part of the process is cleaning the lint filter on the dryer. I love how the lint clings to itself. I love how in one simple gesture, the screen is clear, ready for the next time (I was also one of those children who considered it a privilege to be chosen to clean the white board at school). I love how the color of the lint depends on the exact makeup of the batch of clothes being dried.

And yet, my feelings couldn’t be described as purely rapturous. In my opinion, there is a panic-inducing aspect to this task which darkens my otherwise joyful experience. The fact is, every time you dry your clothes, they become slightly thinner. The more lint there is in the filter, the closer your clothes are to the end of their useable lives; in effect, laundry day is a harbinger of finality.

Many moments in life -- and perhaps all of the most meaningful ones -- produce in us this bittersweet reaction of simultaneous enjoyment and regret. It’s why in general, we have a harder time with birthdays the older we get. It’s how we can miss good friends even before we part with them. I remember listening to the “Toys R Us” jingle on TV when I was little and becoming as despondent as a five-year-old could be to hear, “I don’t want to grow up, I’m a Toys R Us kid.” I felt an overwhelming conviction that I had to enjoy my childhood while I had it. Peter Pan had the same duel effect on me, and many occasions still do: finishing an especially good book or course in school. All major life events -- graduations, weddings, even births -- are all joyous times, but precisely because they are considered “milestones,” they mark an irreversible progression through life. We pause at such moments not only to celebrate them but also to recognize their passing.

This is the conflict between “living in the present” and recognizing that eventually the future will not contain the specific goodness we are presently experiencing. On the one hand, there’s the mentality that that is expressed in a Les Miserables song: “At the end of the day you’re another day older . . . one day nearer to dying.” On the other hand is the mentality expressed in a song from the musical Rent, “There is no future, there is no past . . . There’s only us, there’s only this . . . No other road no other way, no day but today.” To live following only one of either of these philosophies is to limit oneself. Of course, as with most things, moderation seems to be the key. When I have a limited amount of time to live in a place, I will often count down the number of days I have left there. Some of my friends have said this would distract me from enjoying the time I do have, but I have found that if I think ahead to how much time I have left, I am better able to return to the present eager to experience it thoroughly.

So the other day, when I did my laundry, I paused to recognize the fibers which had fallen in the line of duty, so to speak, but I didn’t let my somber thoughts take away from the fun of cleaning the filter. Plus, I was pretty excited to have clean socks again.

Have a good week,
Sarah/Mouse

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Laughter as a Second Language

Hello Everyone,

This quarter, I am continuing to work as an ESL (English as a Second Language) tutor for the international students at SCAD, and the tutoring sessions have become the highlight of my week. In general, the students are bright and eager to learn. They are also HILARIOUS, but only sometimes intentionally. I was made to realize the other day that though we spend lots of time laughing, very rarely if ever is it because someone has told a joke.

The subject of jokes came up because one of the Chinese students asked me to explain what English speakers mean when they say “Knock, knock.” I described how this is one of the classic formats for jokes in English. I gave the few mediocre examples I could remember which garnered a correspondingly mediocre response. We discussed other common joke formats, like the Lightbulb or my personal favorite (if only because of its ridiculousness): the Yo Mama. The students listened politely and offered the occasional light giggle, but having been in enough situations where I was trying to understand someone in another language, I recognized this as an oral indication that they were following what I was saying rather than guffawing heartily because they found what I was saying funny. I felt myself wanting to adapt a well known proverb: You can lead an ESL student to a joke but you can’t make him laugh.

Part of the problem was that I am not a stellar joke-teller. (If stand-up comedy is genetic, I think it is clear which sibling ended up with that gene. My humor is probably better described as sit-down comedy -- maybe it’s the height difference.) But mostly, I realized, the students simply didn’t have the range of knowledge required to understand even the most elementary joke. It wasn’t just an issue of vocabulary. They have to understand that what I am saying is intended to be humorous. In order to do this, they have to be aware of a number of cultural cues (everything from the classic setup: “Hey, did you hear about . . .” to the more subtle preparation we give through intonation and body language). To make matters worse, many jokes rely on sarcasm or wordplay of one sort or another. ESL students tend to be rather literal, a trait which is both charming and apt to massacre most jokes you can think of. It’s no wonder that people often say you know you are fluent in a language when you can make and understand jokes with native speakers.

However, just because we don’t tell jokes doesn’t mean we don’t laugh during our sessions. In fact, I think the funniest moments in life are never planned, and I certainly couldn’t plan for the hilarity that comes up each week! The highlight this week was when two students and I were talking about age and the various stages of life. I was acting out some of the vocabulary to make it more interactive and I got to the word “toddler.” I said, “Ok, it’s someone who walks like this,” and I toddled around the room a bit. One student said, “A fat man!” I said, “No . . . someone younger.” And the other student’s eyes lit up excitedly. She said, “Oh! A disabilities child!” (Politically correct language is not their forte.) Clearly I need to work on my toddler impression, but when they finally guessed it, we all had a good laugh.

One of my favorite memories from when I was in France was when a friend and I were at a cafe. She and I began laughing a bit about something or other -- I think it involved a Werther’s Original, if I’m not mistaken. A lady sitting nearby heard us giggling and began to laugh as well. I’m positive she had no idea what was so funny, but it soon turned into one of those moments when the why is completely irrelevant and the laughter itself is self-perpetuating. When it comes to communicating in another language, you get so used to not understanding and not being understood that laughter is a bit of a conversational oasis. It acts as a lingua franca, allowing you to connect with someone when you might not be able to otherwise. I’m becoming increasingly aware of how laughter not only arises from communication, it also leads to it.

Have a good week,
Sarah/Mouse

ps: As a final reminder, this will be the last week I’ll be sending out these mass emails unless you’ve let me know that you’d like to continue receiving them. I’ll be posting them online on a weblog if that would be a more convenient way of viewing them. The link is http://www.mouseinthesouth.blogspot.com/.