The Body

Autumn Wyatt

The Extension of the Body

After studying the body for the entire semester, I wanted to produce a project that explored the body in the many layers in which it is taught in a drawing class. When drawing the body the initial step is to present the body as a solid form with curves and straights. This is the outside layer, what everyone sees when looking at another human being. Drawing the body, however, gives an artist the opportunity to look at more than just the surface. An artist dissects the body in order to draw it with the right proportions and the right volume. The artist must understand what is inside the body in order to draw what is on the outside. This is the idea that I wanted to pursue while making my final project. For my final series, using tracing paper that measured approximately 9x12 inches, I created 16 drawings. Four drawings make up one piece within the series, meaning there are a total of four pieces in the series. Each of the pieces is made up of an ink drawing of the body, a red and blue watercolor of the muscles, a yellow watercolor of the bones, and a green watercolor of the circulatory system. The four drawings are all painted in the same body position in order to show how the different layers of the body would be positioned and appear if they were be seen individually. I drew a total of four body positions to present a range of positions. The subjects of my series are dancers. The reason I chose dancers is because a dancer’s body combines beauty, strength, and flexibility, making it easier to see the muscles, bones, and veins when looking at them. When creating this piece, one of the main artist’s I looked to for inspiration was Edgar Degas. Degas is famous for his paintings and studies of ballerinas. He considered their movement and attempted to capture the expression of dance through his paint or pastel. He studied these dancers and, rather than drawing them exactly as they appeared, he drew the expression of their movement. This is why in my piece I did not draw the layers of the body exactly the way an anatomy book would present the body, anatomically correct. Rather, I imagined that if the body were moving the insides of the body would appear more abstracted because they were moving. On the other side of the spectrum, however, I drew the body to appear as if it was frozen in time, capturing the gesture and the position of the body as though it was giving the artist the opportunity to study it. I developed this idea for my final series because I wanted to create a project that amassed everything I had learned about the body and everything I had experimented with for mediums during this semester of life drawing, turning it into one solid project.