A Place To Draw Blood Laughing

In one of our nude beach outings last month, a bunch of people got into a discussion about body types. This was a fairly obvious discussion to get into, surrounded as we were by naked bodies of all iterations. Eventually a theory was put forth that people automatically categorize those they see into specific body types.

The professor, who was lounging on a blanket at the time, looked at me. Simultaneously, I looked at him. We exchanged a silent nod, and then smiled.

“Yea, um,” I said. “Artists don’t actually do that.”

The professor (who teaches art) chimed in. “There’s an alternate understanding of visual relationships.” Obviously he sounded smarter. His nickname is the professor, after all.

I’m thinking about this conversation now in relation to the recent posts May and I have made about pretty men. May is a pretty man. I find him extremely attractive. But only vaguely is he “my type.” I have some generalized preferences, but in the end, I don’t have a type. And curiously, I think this kind of thinking stems directly from how art is involved with my life.

I started drawing before I can remember. I know this is so because my parents saved all my drawings for me to look at later. (Why do people do this? They saved everything. We have a whole filing cabinet full of my crayons.) But unlike most kids who can draw when they’re six but not when they’re sixteen, I didn’t grow out of drawing. I could always draw.

But then, even though I could always draw there was a specified starting point when I began to educate myself about drawing. Seven or so years ago I began taking classes. I read some books. I fought like hell to get into a drawing class as a college freshman that I would never have been allowed to take if I hadn’t been as talented as I was. The class was taught by a short dumpy man, bitter, balding, who would wear brightly colored ties and tell us stories about eating in diners with Jackson Pollock. He never uttered a word of praise in his entire class, he was vicious tearing into people’s motivations, and he could break sight into shape and line like a child hitting windows with a baseball bat. He was also a famous professor, in demand, brilliant, and had no qualms in showing it. I was a little bit in love with him.

I might have been a little bit in love with him because he was the first person to say this to me out loud: “You’re going to look at the world differently, and you’re going to do it all the time. And,” he would sometimes add, “you’re going to work to do it.”

This was the year I consciously recognized that I was redefining my visual relationships all the time. Not just in class, not just with a sketchbook in my hand. This was also the year I came out as bi. It was the year I joined the public scene. Are these things related? Bisexuality, at least, makes a lot more sense to me when beauty conveys itself in abstracts rather than gendered archetypes.

When you first start to draw, a common practice is to create an image of a face. Your face, maybe. So you draw two eyes, and a nose and a mouth, you give it some hair and ears and a line that encircles the head, and then you sit back and start thinking why the hell it looks nothing like you.

Similarly, you could draw your own body. If you’re a woman, you draw a head atop a neck, with shoulders and arms, breasts, waist, legs, feet. Again. Nothing like you.

Then you start thinking about how the pieces fit together, and the way that the creases in the skin can be echoed by your pencil on the page, and how shapes superimpose themselves.

This is the thing I learned very, very quickly as an artist: Holding a preconceived or stereotyped notion of body image is the fastest possible way to fuck up your figure drawing.

When I look at faces I see lines and shapes. I see cheekbones in relation to eyes in relation to the spacing of the forehead and the chin. When I look at bodies I see planes and angles and negative space. I see details, curves, and intersections. I find these elements more interesting, and in many cases much more attractive than specific body parts or specific adherences to aesthetic codes.

Seriously, would you like to help yourself break down the cultural imprints of stereotypical imagery in your brain? Learn to draw.

What does this mean for me? For one, it means that the people I’m attracted to look very different from one another. It means that I have never had a lover or partner I did not find aesthetic pleasure in. It feels slightly as though I’ve expanded my conscious perception of beauty as reflected in human aesthetics.

It also means that the thought processes in my head seem to work differently than those around me. I like different kinds of pornography. I point out different people on the street. I notice quirky details, and then notice myself noticing them and wonder if that’s the artist in me coming out.