Journey Without Maps

At the life-class, Gail is baffled because I've praised her drawing. It isn't accurate, by any means; the proportions are all wrong and her line is erratic and sometimes awkward. At the table next to her is Howard, whose work is praiseworthy for more obvious reasons. It is consummately skillful; faithful to the model's pose and executed to within a hair's-breadth of realism. But what does that realism amount to? The model is flesh and blood and skin and bone; an infinitely complex mass of tissue and microbes. Can Howard draw pores on the skin or every hair on the model's head? And what about spatial depth? How can Howard show that when all he's got is a stick of graphite and a sheet of flattened cellulose to rub it on? Gail, who intuits the limitations of the exercise, uses the life class as a springboard. For her, the model is an opportunity to make a picture from the collision of person, pencil and paper.

Call what Gail does 'abstract', if you like. Howard is uneasy with the term (although he may be quite happy listening to Bruckner ) and attempts to depict what he sees with as little margin for error as possible. With that in mind, it seems to me that while Gail is going on a journey, Howard is content with making maps.

At every life class, whether we realise it or not, we make a decision about what we're going to do with reality. But what is that reality? When Picasso was challenged on the subject, he asked his interrogator what he meant by 'reality' and for answer, the man produced a photograph of his wife from his wallet.

'Why is she so small?' asked Picasso.

If we want to get a grip on realism, perhaps we should look at what really happens when we gaze at the model.

Light from the sun strikes the naked body and some frequencies are absorbed by the pigment of the skin while others are reflected into our eyes. At the back of our eyes, on the retinas, a total of 126 million 'rods' and 'cones', laced with millions of photosensitive cells, convert the sensation of yellow, green and violet light into a chemical that creates electrical impulses in the brain.

Sounds pretty abstract to me.

Back at the life-class and without a map, Gail is constantly getting into one scrape or another. Howard, on the other hand, is never lost but one day, when he's made the perfect map, perhaps he'll go on a journey too.