Week #39, Figure Drawing, Standing Female

Standing Female, c. 1955, pen on paper, 12" x 10 ½”.

This week we have one more figure by Dusti Bongé from the life drawing studio sessions. This sketch might be what we used to call a “blind contour drawing”. The intent behind these types of contour drawings is that you learn to fine tune your hand-eye coordination. The process is simple: never take your eyes of the subject matter or model, and at the same time never take your pencil of the page. Instead follow along with your drawing hand as your eyes trace along the contours of the figure. You are not to look at the paper to see if you are doing it “right.”

This exercise always yields very interesting results. In the process of doing a blind contour drawing it is exceedingly easy for features like distinctive body parts, overall posture, facial features, or a certain pose struck by the model to become exaggerated as the artist’s hand and eye try to capture them simultaneously. Thus, at times it results in a drawing with comically disproportionate forms, or faces with Picasso-esque misalignments of eyes, nose and mouth.

Yet at other times these distortions offer keen insight into the unique perceptive interpretation by the artist of the figure being drawn, as becomes clear in this sketch. With just a few pen strokes Dusti shows the relaxed pose of this female model with a quick curve in her back, her hands clasped behind her back and leaning into her left hip. But Dusti also captures some focal physical features: the slightly exaggerated ample hips suggest not only a zaftig lady but also indicate that the artist’s eyes were drawn to this feature rather than the shoulders and the proportionally tiny, flattened, almost absent, head.