Three Practices Together

In my own experience, I have put three practices together: life drawing, figure modeling and giving workshops in both. I can work best with any of these when I am working with all three, chiefly because each involves the other two, especially—and for me, this is best—when love and respect are involved.

One of the things I learned when I taught grade school was that I could
not teach people properly unless I had learned to love them as
individuals, discovering from them something that was special about each
of them. To my surprise, this was amazingly easy. There was one
problem, though; there were a few of the students I wasn’t able to
like. Somehow I realized that characteristics I did not like in these
students were characteristics I didn’t like in myself. That way, these
characteristics became easier for me to accept in other people, as well
as in myself. As models, we need to communicate what is special about
each of us; the job of the artist is to discern and record it.

1/07/2010