Life Drawing

"Rachel" from life drawing class 1996.

18" x 24" Nupastel on paper

by Cynthia Oliver

I am fascinated by people. I am drawn to watch their movements and their interactions. I observe and assess. I am as interested in the form as I am the action. Peoples hands, their faces, their poses, all tell a story that I want to know.

I will listen in on the most mundane of conversations. Not my own mind you, but the conversations of the those around me. I listen in on the conversations that are none of my business, the conversations that I am supposed to be politely disengaged from. I am unashamedly one of those people.

I have been known to be out with my husband at a restaurant, and instead of focusing my attention on him, I am watching our neighbors. I am fabricating a history for the couple that has been eating and drinking at the corner table in silence, barely making eye contact. Or for the man who appears to be a weekend father, trying to make up for lost time with his nearly adult aged kids by taking them out for a lavish meal. He's talking too big, and smiling too much. The kids are looking bored and slightly hostile. I can barely pay attention to my own evening for being distracted by the lives of others.

I watch people. I remember watching one young boy with his parents, and he was using his middle finger to scrape repeatedly at the thumbnail on the same hand. There was a world of tension in that movement, a world of anxiety. I could see it in his hands, and the way he watched his parents as if knowing, but hoping against hope, that no matter what he did or how he did it, it would be all wrong.

Today, I was at the neighborhood coffee spot, waiting for my friend to join me. I was listening to the couple at the table next to me. They were young. Twenty-something. Lean, healthy and hip looking. A woman entered the shop. She was wearing black mid thigh exercise pants and a lycra tank. There is a gym nearby, and this is a trendy, healthy, biking/hiking kind of neighborhood - so her attire wasn't unusual, but her weight was. This woman was middle aged, average height, and couldn't have weighed 100 lbs. The woman sitting at the table next to me commented to her boyfriend with a note of a contempt, "Look at the old anorexic who just blew in the door. It's great to be home, isn't it?"

I began to take the measure of the woman I was formerly only listening to. Now I was weighing her attributes, determining her age, education, social status and income bracket. She was taking this anorectic woman's inventory, and now I was going to take hers. I wondered what it was that made her disdain this thin and fragile woman. I wasn't interested in the woman who appeared to be in self imposed ill health, but with the young woman sitting next to me. I wished I could ask her, "What is it about the anorectic woman that is illustrative of your being back home?" and "Why the tone of disdain?" But if I asked her, my ill mannered eavesdropping would be exposed. Instead, I made up a history for her. I made up a story that would answer all of my questions and satisfy all of my curiosity.

Life drawing class was like that for me. A daily session where I got to be an overt observer of another human being, and to create and tell a story with Nupastel and impunity.