Experiments in Contemporary Life-Modelling

The Art of the Life-Model came out of experiments into contemporary life-modelling practice initiated by Nina Kane through Cast-Off Drama and WILMA - Women Into Life-Modelling Arts.

It is a community arts 'drop-in' held at Leeds City Art Gallery, UK and explores works in the gallery's collection using drama, drawing and art history. It is funded by Leeds City Council and delivered through the Leeds College of Art & Design's Dept. of Community Education. The course was established in 2002 and has been devised, developed and delivered by Nina Kane since.

The workshops are model-led by Nina and often host visiting models / performers / performance artists. Nina is an experienced lecturer with 12 years professional life-modelling experience. She is a theatre performer, director, academic and a committed community arts activist. Central to her practice is an understanding of life-modelling and life-drawing as interdependent activities - ones of creative, mutual, exchange. This understanding has formed a central part of the sessions' ethos and practices. Recognising the conventional imbalance in the hierarchy of artist-model working relationships, however, she actively intervenes in the exchange -challenging, questionning, experimenting, inviting empathy and dialogue - using her body and the social (drama-based) space of the life-drawing arena as a laboratory.

There is extra information about this course and its activities on Cast-Off Drama's blog.

NEWS:

From Summer 2007 the course is developing from a 'drop-in' to a free-of-charge 10-week modular course (non-assessed) giving students an opportunity to explore the themes in greater depth.

Embodying the Other: Pedagogic and Performative Strategies used in The Art of the Life-Model 2002 - 2007 by Nina Kane (copyright) is now available for researchers, performers, life-models and anyone else to read (commissioned by Leeds College of Art & Design Research Board). Contact artofthelifemodel@gmail.com for further information. A public presentation of the above will be held at the Leeds College of Art & Design on January 30th 2008.

Workshop programmes -

Drama-into-Drawing - from 12th January - 15th March 2008, Leeds City Art Gallery, Saturdays 1-4pm

Performance Art & the Model - from October 2nd - Dec 8th 2007 - Tuesdays 5-8pm

Model Biographies - April - July 2007

For any queries contact us at artofthelifemodel@gmail.com

Archive texts:

1. From list compiled for International Woman's Day exhibition March 2007:

Some Women Models, Artists, Performance Artists, Photographers, Writers and Sculptors studied on The Art of the Life-Model course in recent years.

Marina Abramovich…Eileen Agar…Elizabeth Siddal… Dolores…
Tracey Emin…Lottie Stafford…Anais Nin…Betty Rea… Isabel…
Fanny Cornforth…Betty May…Lucy Boyce…bell hooks…Meum…
Lucia Noguiera…Jananne Al-Ali…Elizabeth Butler…Vita…
Christine Borland…Lila Nunes…Dora Maar…Elizabeth I…Amy…
Alison Saar…Amrit KD Kaur Singh…Rabindra KD Kaur Singh…
Susan Hiller…Frida Kahlo…Suzanne Lacey…Maria Izquierdo…
Amina Peerbhoy / Sunita…Mary Keene…Lubaina Himid…
Beryl Cook… Zineb Sedira…Delaine Le Bas… Tacita Dean… Yoko Ono…Raphaelle de Groot…Tamara de Lempicka…
Lee Miller…Lucy Madox Brown…Mary D Webb-Robinson…
Helen Chadwick…Anya Gallaccio…Frances MacDonald…
Ana Maria Paecheco…Margaret Mackintosh MacDonald…
Alison Lapper…Gillian Wearing…Elizabeth Murray...Mary Jones
Kuhne Beveridge…Ella Von Werde…Rosa Bonheur…Orlan…
Barbara Comyns…Tilda Swinton…Shirin Neshat…Sutapa Biswas
Anne Brigman…Dorothy Una Ratcliffe…Mona Lisa…Gwen John
Paula Rego…Estelle Brown…Mary Cassatt…Matilda Shields…
Julia Margaret Cameron…Anne Ryan…Ellen Frazer…Alice Gray..
Annie Miller…(Louisa) Ruth Herbert…Clara Stephens...Keomi…
Jane Burden / Morris… Julia Jackson…Madelaine Smith / Wardle
…Edith Waugh…Ellen Smith…Maria Zambaco…Mrs Egley…
Alexa / Alice Wilding…Georgiana MacDonald…Aglaia Coronio…
Marie Spartali Stillman…Anna Mary Howitt…Alice Keene…
Emily Hunt…Rebecca Solomon…Emma Sandys…Sophie Gray…
Catherine Madox Brown…Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale...
Evelyn de Morgan…Kate Bunce…Christina Rossetti…May Morris
Frances Ludlow…Effie Gray/Millais…Mary Hodgkinson…
Margaret Burne-Jones…Emily Andrews… Emma Hill/Ford…
Eustatia Davy…Tryphena Foord…Joanna Mary Wells…
Emma Watkins…Cecilia Kramer…Sarah Kramer / Roberts…
Antonia Caiva…Joanna Mary Boyce…Georgia O’Keefe…
Fanny Waugh / Holman Hunt…Gwen Salmond/Smith…
Marthe Bonnard…Sonia Boyce…Faith Ringgold…Henrietta…
Berthe Morisot…Artemisia Gentileschi…Queen Nefertiti…
Nan Goldin…Angelica Kauffmann…Guerilla Girls…Jemma…
Paula Modersohn-Becker…Mary Kelly…Tina Modottii…Saskia…
Kathe Kollwitz…Cindy Sherman…Nicoletta Comand…Madonna..
Winifred Roberts / Nicholson…Nathalie Gontcharova…
Vanessa Bell…Virginia Woolf…Nina Hamnett…Amanda Barrie…
Marilyn Monroe…Maggi Hambling…Christina Smith…Nellie…
Dorothy Hodgkin…Karen Ingham…Henrickje…Millie Kramer…
Nellie Pickering…Mrs Epstein…Nellie Smiles…Peggy…
Dorothy Parker…Ruhula…Carol Ann Duffy…Vera Cunningham..
Anita Peerbhoy…Christiane de Mauberge…Marion Monay…
Elisabeth White…Diana Spencer…Lauretta Hope-Nicholson…
Valerie Hobson…Katherine Anne West…Kitty Garman…
Alexandra Williams-Wynn…Anne Dunn…Celia Paul…Rose Boyt
Esther Freud…Sue Tilley…Leigh Bowery…Jenny Saville…
Isabel Lilian Gloag…Ethel Walker…Dora Carrington…
Mrs Siddons…Emma Hamilton…Nell Gwynn…Rose Pettigrew…
Connie Gilchrist…Emily Scobel…Laura Knight…Ella Naper…
Mary Alford…Paulina Bonaparte…Euphemia Lamb…
Marguerite Kelsey…Dod Proctor / Doris Shaw…
Dorothy Dene…Lizzie Willis…Nan Condron…Betty (Esther)…
May Spencer…Jane XXX (Lilian Ryan)…Patricia Preece…
Sylvia Gosse…Petra Gill…Barbara Hepworth…Alice Edwards…
Kathleen Woodward… and the many other nameless, transient, forgotten, collaborative female artists throughout the centuries who have created figurative art.

How many of the above names do you recognise?

What can you find out about the lives of the above and the contribution each has made to art history?

Celebrate Women’s Art! Happy International Women’s Day!

(C) Nina Kane

2. Texts from exhibition ofworks produced collectively to a structured formula led by the model-tutor: ‘Inheritance’: Collective Works by Student Members

The Art of the Life-Model is a weekly drop-in course held at Leeds City Art Gallery. The course is model-led and combines drama, life-drawing and looking at works in the Gallery’s collection. The sessions explore the diverse roles of the life-model in the making of figurative art, investigating the hidden history of the life-model through practical experiments into arts-making processes. Centrally we recognise the life-model as an active creative agent in the making of fine art, and see life-drawing and life-modelling as interdependent art forms.

The works exhibited result from an experiment into collective arts-making. Each picture has been worked on by different artists over a series of weeks. As the course is a ‘drop-in’, the (exercise as a whole) created continuity linking one week’s group of students to the next, with the process being directed by the tutor who is also the model. (Individually, however, each work represents a working journey shared by different students occupying the same space in a room, working from the same model on the same picture - but on a different day! The only point of communication between the artists who created these pictures was the odd few notes left by some, and the marks of the work itself) - extra.

On the first week of each project, the model-tutor reconstructed a pose – the former being Antonio Canova’s ‘Venus’ (1822), the latter being Ivan Mestrovic’s ‘The Reader (Dorothy Una Ratcliffe)’. Students made drawings and paintings from the model for twenty minutes. They attached a piece of paper to it recording their hopes for the future direction of the picture and returned the work to the tutor.

In subsequent weeks, the model-tutor reconstructed the pose for twenty minutes at each session. Each student chose a pre-worked picture at random, located their position in relation to the model’s pose and continued the work of the image. They were invited to make strong choices for the progression of their ‘inherited’ work and think about what that particular picture needed. At the end of the twenty minutes, they added their comments to the sheets. A photo was taken at each stage of the pictures’ development - some of the photos are displayed here for viewers to track the ‘journey of the image’. All students were encouraged to work with their picture as their skills allowed and in ways they thought best, however, in the second project the model-tutor gave suggestions on what parts of the picture the artists should ‘progress’ that week. As with the notes left by the previous week’s artist, it was left to the students’ judgement whether they followed the directions or not. The second project’s works developed more ‘stylistic cohesion’ than those produced on the first – this could be in part due to the model’s directions, but is equally likely to be due to a growing confidence with the technique amongst ‘regulars’ and more time spent on the works (11 sessions as opposed to 8). Students present at the end-of-year ‘drop-in’ were given the task of ‘curating’ the works for exhibition, adding ‘finishing touches’ as they thought necessary.

The experiment focused on the nature of ‘inheritance’ in figurative image-making, underlining the reality that the works we see in a gallery space are rarely the product of a solo artist’s creative output or vision. The project sought to prompt awareness of the model’s role in shaping arts work, the collective nature of guild traditions, of Renaissance studios/schools, and the input of restorers and curators in ‘maintaining’ a work of art. Citing mural-painting, cathedral-building and stain-glass window-making as immediate examples, the project prompted life-drawing artists to engage with a figurative history that reaches beyond the C19th paradigm of ‘1 artist + 1 model = 1 finished canvas’, and to recognise the diversity of life-drawers’ working traditions. ‘Inheritance’ aimed to explore the fragmentary, time-durational and process-focused nature of life-drawing - ‘There is never enough time’ is a common refrain! It sought to explore the tradition of the ‘antique’, the model’s ‘inheritance’ of traditional poses, and the historical nature of repetition in the shaping of the body. The challenge for both artist and model was to not start each session with a blank sheet, but to be open to ‘inheriting’ another’s ‘marks’ and to commit our skills to furthering a work of indeterminate and multiple creative ownership. Centrally, it emphasised the life-drawing space as a site of negotiation, conflict and empathy.
(C) Nina Kane 2004 for The Art of the Life-Model