Undressed Art Why We Draw

Chapter One Allure Eleanor Dickinson's line is lively and lyrical, a flute passage from Vivaldi, confident and sunny. It flows from the end of her felt-tip marker in curls and ribbons to divide form from formlessness, to mark the places where light glances and clings, to define the subtle curves of life. It is a remarkably supple and observant line, full of information, full of understanding of how a wrist curls or a finger bends, broad where shadows collect, finer as light intensifies, broken and invisible where light dazzles. It comes into a kind of miraculous life, born from the tip of the pen bold and finished, yet continually moving, continually revealing and describing: the back of a middle finger folding delicately away from the light, rounding down and darkening to the fingertip, then turning sharply where its contour meets the last knuckle of the index finger, now thin again in the light, down again to the index finger's rounded tip. By and by, a hand-or its contour-has appeared on the paper, and to my eye it has the exact proportion, the weight, the texture, the strength, the experience, the life of the hand across the room. The hand across the room belongs to Yoshio Wada, a small, seventy-eight-year-old Japanese-born man with stooped shoulders, strong sinewy legs, close-cropped gray hair and a red and weeping blind eye. He is seated on a faded beige divan that angles out from the wall of what used to be the dining room in Dickinson's 120-year-old San Francisco home. Behind the divan are cloths and draperies pinned to the wall to provide a backdrop for the model at Dickinson's weekly drawing-group sessions. Wada is lit from one side by three floodlamps clamped at various heights to a stand. His right side is washed in yellow light, his left fades into shadow. The seventy-eight-year-old model is nude. He is not seductive, not in any way Rabelaisian. His body has a seriousness, a dignity, a flawed but compelling humanity. It tells a story. As a young man at the outset of World War II, Wada had been interned with his family in a series of relocation camps in the American West. He had hoped to become an artist, but his drawing materials were taken from him. At the conclusion of the war, he was deported to Japan, where he had no family to take him in, and for two years he wandered the streets of Tokyo, looking for food. Eventually, an aunt who had remained in the United States arranged for him to be returned to California. He enlisted in the United States Army, but he was not permitted to touch a gun, so he became a medical corpsman. After that, for thirty years he worked in San Francisco as a hospital orderly. In his sixties, he took up watercolor painting. Unable to enroll in local art schools, he began modeling, because it was a way to eavesdrop on the instruction art teachers gave at those schools. Without knowing any of his personal history, the six artists who form a ten-foot semicircle around Wada are busily drawing his pain, his determination, his glacial patience and battered wisdom. Dickinson lifts the marker tip from the paper, sits back and looks at the drawing. At seventy she gazes through alarmingly big eyeglasses-lenses the size of tea saucers, behind which her eyes are searching and impassive, perhaps the eyes of a surgeon. Shocks of dyed white and red hair drop over one side of her forehead, small exclamatory marks above an otherwise unconfiding face. She dresses in gypsy mode, favoring full-cut, dark-colored prints and the sturdy, comfortable shoes of one who works standing up. She is not given to lavish smiles or quick laughter. She doesn't offer unbidden opinions. She conveys the impression that all her attention is directed outward, that she has no self-consciousness at all. It is a characteristic I think I see in other artists in drawing groups, and I wonder whether it expresses a kind of selflessness or, just the opposite, is a mask designed to cover an overly sensitivSteinhart, Peter is the author of 'Undressed Art Why We Draw', published 2005 under ISBN 9781400076055 and ISBN 1400076056.