Key points on Meyhew's 'The Naked and the Blind' excerpt

• Life drawing as images and life drawing as a practice
• Figurative representations
• Gender and sexuality
• Art images conform to the dominant social modality of figurative representations
• Gender bias, misogyny and violence in the images
• Life drawing as symptoms of a misogynist culture
• The practice of life drawing as a specific set of techniques in order to reduce the representation of women's bodies to empty surfaces upon which meaning can be inscribed
• Assumption that the artists and viewers are male and that all models are female
• Male centre spectatorship
• Collectively performed process of figurative spectatorship and responsive mark making
• Contemporary practice of life drawing often uses the life model as a pretext for executing an internalised ideal or representation of what a naked figure should look like
• Highly contrived set of stylistic conventions
• Academic life drawing
• Controlled mark making
• Copying from classical images and casts
• Copying
• Stylistic conventions
• The history of life drawing classes has been explicitly concerned with training students to generate a figurative representation based on what the knew, rather than what they saw
• The naked model functioned less as a source of visual information, then as a theatrical deice to contain and control the pedagogical theatre of the academy.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 - 1988)

"Jean-Michel Basquiat was a Neo-Expressionist painter in the 1980s. He is best known for his primitive style and his collaboration with pop artist Andy Warhol." - retrieved from this link

Notice Basquiat's childlike style, the linear quality of his work and the graffiti elements? He stylises the human form, creating cartoon characters reminiscent of stick figures or doodles. His work is very colourful, bright and vibrant. He also uses quite a bit of black in his work. There is a lot of linear patterning in his work, similar to the dysgraphic scribbles of children. There is something very distorted and disrupted in his work, as well and it being increasingly unskilled. 

What is Neo-Expressionism?

• Neo-expressionism is a style of late-modernist or early-postmodern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s.  It is characterized by intense subjectivity and rough handling of materials. Neo-expressionism developed as a reaction against conceptual art and minimal art of the 1970s. Neo-expressionists returned to portraying recognisable objects, such as the human body (although sometimes in an abstract manner), in a rough and violently emotional way, often using vivid colours.  - retrieved from this link

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What is dysgraphia?

In order to get a better understanding of dysgraphia, I looked it up on Google to see what information I could find on the web. I found some interesting information, such as it being an issue with coherence, organisation and expression.

"Dysgraphia is a condition that causes trouble with written expression. The term comes from the Greek words dys (“impaired”) and graphia (“making letter forms by hand”). Dysgraphia is a brain-based issue. 

For many children with dysgraphia, just holding a pencil and organising letters on a line is difficult. Their handwriting tends to be messy. Many struggle with spelling and putting thoughts on paper.These and other writing tasks—like putting ideas into language that is organised, stored and then retrieved from memory—may all add to struggles with written expression. "

Retrieved from this website

 Some interesting examples of dysgraphic writing:

Retrieved from this link

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Notes from the 1st day of class

Key words

• Mimesis = the imitation of representation
• Dysgraphia = distortion and disruption
• Deskilling = unlearning what you know

Dysgraphic life drawing on the first day of class - part 1

This class was meant to challenge how you draw, why you draw and what you draw. The message that I took away from the class was the more awkward and terrible your drawings are, the better they subvert the traditional ideals surrounding the drawn human form and, as a result, the better they really are. 

We were looking at dysgraphia - distorting and disrupting the traditional established ideas of what life drawing should look like, deskilling and unlearning what we know. I really enjoyed it and found it to be a breath of fresh air. Instead of being hung up on proportions, correct anatomical structures and perfect drawings, we broke away from what is considered to be skilful mimesis or methods of drawing that are based in academic skill. 

These were 1 minute poses which were drawn using a variety of techniques, such as  recording the model's pose using short lines, then long lines.

These were some more warm up drawings, in which we explored the model's pose through looking at negative space, continuous line, drawing with the side of the medium and drawing without looking at the page.

For another warm up, we were told to tear out the model's pose using butcher's paper. Quite interesting and fun!

This drawing was done over several poses, in which the model  changed positions several times and we had to draw the change in her body. Interesting to get a feeling of movement and animation. I could imagine a stop motion using this technique.  

This one was drawn using a variety of techniques, such as drawing with two hands at the same time, drawing then smudging the charcoal with the other hand and drawing without looking at the paper.

This drawing was meant to juxtapose the traditional skilful mimesis with a dysgraphic counterpart. The second drawing, done with my non dominant hand and without looking at the paper, was meant to explore the awkward and unnatural aspect to the pose.

This was a ten minute pose in which the model was in a corpse/ neutral pose. We spent a while drawing the model naturalistically and then closed our eyes and worked with out non dominant hand.