Each week, a moment of calm and connection in figure drawing sessions BY TINA SOLKI
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oft scrapes echo through the slowly filling room. Drafting desks are rolled around, adjusted, hung flat, or hitched high, accompanied by quiet chatter in various corners. The desks settle in a ring around a center platform where the model—Babs New, a regular—idles, still enrobed, waiting for the session to begin. Most Fridays, from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., Georgetown’s Department of Art and Art History hosts free, open-access figure drawing sessions. The only thing a prospective artist needs to bring is themself and the willingness to get their hands a little dirty. Charcoal tends to get everywhere when you’re engrossed in the work. Figure drawing is the practice of sketching the human form from real-time observation. A model, typically nude, shifts between poses intermittently, while artists are tasked with drawing what they see. It’s easier said than done— while figure drawing is uncomplicated to practice, it is understatedly difficult to master. However, the goal of these sessions is not to master the art form; it’s to learn. The sessions flow in 20-minute intervals, with poses that gradually increase in duration as the afternoon proceeds. We begin with 30-second warm-ups with little to no warning between switches in pose. Smooth Brazilian jazz fills the space as the artists quiet and Babs disrobes, taking their place in the room’s center and assuming a languid, splayed-leg stance. Their back is to me, and I squint at its contours briefly before bearing down on my page.
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THE GEORGETOWN VOICE
The first pose is always the roughest. My first sketch, vine charcoal on gray newsprint, is stiff, disproportionate, and more significantly, headless. Focused on the angles of their legs, I barely make it to Babs’s neck before the timer rings out, and they take to the floor in an articulated squat. The urgency of the 30-second poses forces artists to work in looser, more expressive strokes and to see the figure as one larger form rather than its individual elements. To sketch in these conditions is to abandon any preoccupation with style or detail. It’s a paradoxical practice: by loosening the reins on their process, artists enter a headspace where control comes more easily, without the whiteknuckle tension it typically implies. As Andrew Kim (CAS ’25), an art minor, put it, “After the first couple times, you just kind of turn your brain off and it’s like, ‘Okay, there’s an arm. There’s a leg. There’s this muscle and that muscle.’” You learn to accept that you can’t agonize, micromanage, or mete out a course of action moment-by-moment. It’s a very Georgetown kind of lesson to learn, and it’s part of what makes the space so distinct for art students and non-artists alike. Seated across from me is Marisa Stratton, who runs the sessions. An adjunct professor in the Department of Art and Art History, Stratton is young and easygoing—you’d be forgiven for mistaking her for a student, as her
energetic demeanor conceals the practiced grace with which she guides the sessions forward. In the years before COVID-19, figure drawing sessions had existed on and off at Georgetown, but they had disappeared completely by Stratton’s first semester here in spring 2023. It had been her initiative to revive them, convinced of the value they’d bring to the campus’s relatively small and underserved community of artists. “I knew that in order to build community you need a space outside of the classroom,” Stratton said. “It really just requires one faculty to have the extra time to host the sessions.” When she first restarted the sessions, they had much lower attendance, mostly art majors and minors. That core group has remained consistent, but the sessions have, largely through word of mouth, grown immensely in attendee count and diversity. Stratton said the Department of Art and Art History has been excited to facilitate such a range of student engagement with the arts.
APRIL 12, 2024