In prehistoric days, drawings of people were rare and only schematic because realistic renditions of the human form were forbidden by powerful religious taboos. Egyptian artists were not free to realistically portray the human figure either. The rules that governed them required the head to be cast in profile, the shoulders and chest depicted frontally, and hips, legs and feet shown from the side view. That's why Egyptian figurative work always looks strangely flat and contorted. But since the time of the Greeks, artists have focused on ways to realistically capture the human form in oil, wood carvings, and bronze, marble and clay statuary.
Today, few artists are content to merely portray the human figure with photographic accuracy. The pursuit now is to capture the mood, character and the inner spirit of the muse or model. And this is the very essence of the Dr. Sketchy experience. The Dr. doesn't just provide models for participants to draw, it casts them in roles that exaggerate easily-identifiable emotions for artists to render.
Last Friday night, for example, Dr. Sketchy SWFL provided two models for artists to sketch. The first was Alexandra Holmes, a regular Sketchy muse and aspiring actress who attended and worked at Barbizon. She started modeling when she was all of eleven. Now eighteen, Alex will be going to school in Washington State in February. "I love modeling because of the different personalities and emotions you can portray," says Holmes. For Art Walk, Alex assumed the persona of the fresh-faced, wide-eyed "Alice" from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. She fully embraced the role, staring up incredulously throughout the course of the evening at her antagonistic counterpart, Cat Smith.
Smith played the part of the Red Queen. Also an actress, Cat used her experience on stage and screen in and around New York to perfectly evince the strict, formal symbol of cool sexuality who taught young Alice the fine points of chess, and in so doing, planted the seeds of her own undoing. But as Smith's Red Queen stared down on Alex's Alice with disdain and unshuttered malice, it was hard to imagine the innocent-looking Alex turning this River Cat into her pet kitten.
And therein lies the brilliance of the Dr. Sketchy experience. By assuming pre-ordained roles and play acting parts, Sketchy's muses afford artists of all skill levels the unparalleled and unprecedented opportunity to observe the facial expressions, bearing, and nuanced gestures that together convey the personality, character and spirit of the person they are attempting to capture on paper.
While a neophyte might try to capture the entire scene in the scant five minutes the models hold their pose, seasoned artists set a narrow focal point, concentrating during one pose on the eyes, on the mouth during another, and on the set of the model's shoulders or frame in yet another pose. Within an hour's time, sketchers will have ten or twelve chances to fathom and record the ways in which people express their thoughts, emotions and hidden feelings on both a conscious and subconscious level.
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