Kimon Nicolaïdes and the natural way to draw

Because I have been involved in teaching art for so many years, every now and again I like to look at how other art teachers have framed up the process, especially when it comes to the traditional elements of drawing, such as working from the figure. Kimon Nicolaïdes is someone who still has a lasting legacy and if you have attended evening classes in life drawing, or have attended some sort of preparatory course such as a foundation or access program, I'm pretty sure you will have been asked to do at least one of the exercises he introduced. 

The natural way to draw is still in print

The 'natural' way to draw is an interesting phrase in itself, it suggests that there is an unnatural way to draw. As we are all creatures of nature, I find it impossible to imagine a way of drawing that wasn't natural. I suspect he really means 'more in tune with' or 'working with and alongside your materials' or 'allowing your feelings to direct your actions'. 

Gesture drawing and contour drawing are seen as the two main planks on which Nicolaïdes' reputation as a teacher rests. He also felt that drawing well had nothing to do with technique or an understanding of aesthetics.  It was he said all to do with: "a right observation of the world".

He insisted that students had to discover what right observation was by themselves, and that the art teacher’s job was to teach them not how to draw...but how to learn to draw.

If you break Nicoliades' approach to drawing down there are three basic areas and as you work your way through his exercises, what I'm sure he was aiming for was to enable his students to gradually synthesise these three approaches. Contour, gesture and weight are the three elements that he uses to enable a student of life drawing to tackle energy, mass and surface. But it has been pointed out that the weight drawing exercise is often under used, this of course leaves the contour and gesture drawings without gravity and mass, people going for the excitement of surface energy, without coming to terms with the need for presence, solidity and gravitas.  Like everything else, a proper approach to an understanding of the figure requires an awareness of the entanglement of approaches available. You will always find contour in gesture drawings, gesture in drawings exploring weight, and weight in the development of drawings about gesture. I have touched upon some of these issues in my post on cross contour drawings, but mass is also something you can deal with tonally as well as by using certain very low points of view. 

Set out below is Nicoliades' first exercise: You can work your way though all of the exercises by using this link. 

EXERCISE 1: CONTOUR DRAWING

Materials: Use a 3B (medium soft) drawing pencil with a very fine point (sharpened on sandpaper) and a piece of cream-colored manila wrapping paper about fifteen by twenty inches in size. Manila paper usually comes in large sheets which may be cut into four pieces of that size. You may use, also, the kind sold as ‘shelf paper’ provided it is not glazed. Fasten the paper with large paper clips to a piece of prestwood or a stiff piece of cardboard. Wear an eyeshade. Do not use an eraser until you come to Exercise 28.

Sit close to the model or object which you intend to draw and lean forward in your chair. Focus your eyes on some point — any point will do — along the contour of the model. (The contour approximates what is usually spoken of as the outline or edge.) Place the point of your pencil on the paper. Imagine that your pencil point is touching the model instead of the paper. Without taking your eyes off the model, wait until you are convinced that the pencil is touching that point on the model upon which your eyes are fastened.

Then move your eye slowly along the contour of the model and move the pencil slowly along the paper. As you do this, keep the conviction that the pencil point is actually touching the contour. Be guided more by the sense of touch than by sight. This means that you must draw without looking at the paper, continuously looking at the model. Exactly coordinate the pencil with the eye. Your eye may be tempted at first to move faster than your pencil, but do not let it get ahead. Consider only the point that you are working on at the moment with no regard for any other part of the figure.

Often you will find that the contour you are drawing will leave the edge of the figure and turn inside, coming eventually to an apparent end. When this happens, glance down at the paper in order to locate a new starting point. This new starting point should pick up at that point on the edge where the contour turned inward.

Thus, you will glance down at the paper several times during the course of one study, but do not draw while you are looking at the paper. As in the beginning, place the pencil point on the paper, fix your eyes on the model, and wait until you are convinced that the pencil is touching the model before you draw. Not all of the contours lie along the outer edge of the figure. For example, if you have a front view of the face, you will see definite contours along the nose and the mouth which have no apparent connection with the contours at the edge. As far as the time for your study permits, draw these ‘inside contours’ exactly as you draw the outside ones.

Draw anything that your pencil can rest on and be guided along. Develop the absolute conviction that you are touching the model.

Student Contour Drawing: Let the lines sprawl all over the paper

This exercise should be done slowly, searchingly, sensitively. Take your time. Do not be too impatient or too quick. There is no point in finishing any one contour study. In fact, a contour study is not a thing that can be ‘finished.’ It is having a particular type of experience, which can continue as long as you have the patience to look. If in the time allowed you get only halfway around the figure, it doesn’t matter. So much the better! But if you finish long before the time is up, the chances are that you are not approaching the study in the right way. A contour drawing is like climbing a mountain as contrasted with flying over it in an airplane. It is not a quick glance at the mountain from far away, but a slow, painstaking climb over it, step by step.

Student Contour Drawing
Draw without looking at the paper, continuously looking at the model

Do not worry about the ‘proportions’ of the figure. That problem will take care of itself in time. And do not be misled by shadows. When you touch the figure, it will feel the same to your hand whether the part you touch happens at the moment to be light or in shadow. Your pencil moves, not on the edge of a shadow, but on the edge of the actual form. At first, no matter how hard you try, you may find it difficult to break the habit of looking at the paper while you draw. You may even look down without knowing it. Ask a friend to check up on you for a few minutes by calling out to you every time you look at the paper. Then you will find out whether you looked too often and whether you made the mistake of drawing while you were looking.

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There are lots of interesting issues that emerge from Nicoliades' approach, for instance the relationship between touch and sight. As he points out, "When you touch the figure, it will feel the same to your hand whether the part you touch happens at the moment to be light or in shadow". However I might argue that we only begin to realise what we see when we can verify  perception by linking touch to sight. Also where is that edge of the actual form? The surface of a human body is one continuous topology and it has no edges. Lots of interesting questions about how we perceive arise as soon as you try to unpick what he is trying to do. However what he provides is a framework within which you can work and this is perhaps the most important thing. I personally find his way of working far more engaging and life affirming than the realism or constructional approaches to life drawing.

The approaches to life drawing that emphasise realism often use the Charles Bargue Drawing Course, which was devised in the 19th century and which guides students on how to copy from plaster casts, how to study and work from great master drawings and which finally gives instruction on how to draw from the life model. These three areas of study are usually blended in with other methods taken directly from French Academy teaching materials. There is an emphasis on training how to see. (Note not questioning it, but giving ways to shape what you see, for instance you are taught that by copying shadows you can arrive at a much more satisfactory observation of a figure, than by filling in outlines.) These courses emphasise technical mastery of traditional art materials and aim for success in 'realism', i.e. skin tone should be accurate, proportion correct etc. Most of the drawing is taught sight size, i.e. one to one size correspondence which leads to accuracy in measurement. 

The approaches that emphasise constructional methods use more sculptural drawing techniques. There is an emphasis on three dimensional awareness and how to use this to construct figure drawings. For instance tonal analysis using cross hatch techniques, planar construction or the simplification of continuously moving organic forms, so that they can be rendered more clearly within various perspectives. This system often works in layers. For instance in the first stage you make perspective boxes of say the pelvic girdle and trunk of the body, then on top of that you place drawings of bone structure and musculature, and then on top of that the formal distribution of human body shapes as understood from models. The classic textbook that sets out the constructional method is George Bridgman's 'Constructive Anatomy'. It is still available, try the Dover Anatomy for Artists' paperback. 

Lots of guides exist which you can use if you want to take on board these systems. My own approach is very post-Cezanne, which is basically to become lost in the puzzle of looking, but of course when I was a student I used several of the approaches set out above, each one helping to gradually build up a series of philosophical positions which for myself became intriguing entries into image making.  

See also

Life drawing Some reflections on what was to be the last of the life drawing sessions I was ever to teach at the Leeds College of Art.

Is drawing a language?

Cross contour drawing

A very good 'how to' video that uses gesture as a key aspect

Drawing and philosophy part one This earlier post also covers similar ground and links to art schools still teaching the above methods. 

Hans Hoffman and his approach to life drawing

The practice and science of drawing by Harold Speed

Using tone

Texture

Drawing and mindfulness 

Drawing exercises

Drawing it all together