This time, a teenage model for change (19)! Enjoy
hxxps://www.denverpost.com/2013/04/26/nude-models-are-crucial-figures-in-csu-art-class/
FORT COLLINS, Colo.—Makenna Caballer wakes up, puts on makeup, chooses an outfit and makes her way to the Visual Arts Building on Colorado State University’s campus.
Then she undresses—all eyes turn to her figure made warm by overhead lights as the work day begins.
The 19-year-old is one among a handful of students working as models in the university’s art department. Their bodies—some lean, others muscular and curvy—are analyzed, measured and assessed by artists who take the image of a living, breathing person and splash it upon the blank canvases before them.
These people are muses, subjects of intense scrutiny by budding art students learning the idiosyncrasies of the human form.
REKLAMA
“I don’t see them as a nude person,” said Gracie Stamps, a 20-year-old sophomore studying art and journalism at CSU. “I just see them as a problem you have to solve. Taking them from real life to paper.”
“It’s a different way of drawing than using a picture,” she said, explaining the challenge of visualizing a person’s mathematically complex proportions or using reality to break preconceived notions of what a head or arm really looks like. There’s something intricate, different about taking a model from the third- to second-dimension.
A tan blanket wrapped around her petite but “curvy” frame like a bathroom towel, Caballer waited for the Introduction to Figure Drawing course to begin on a recent Thursday morning. When seven students were seated and waiting upon wooden benches, Caballer’s bare feet carried her across the cool, paint-speckled concrete to a short stage splashed with light.
For the next 20 minutes or so, she’d bend at the waist or raise a graceful arm above her head in a series of faster-paced gestures. Onlooking students made quick to capture her changing curves and motion in the reds and browns of conte crayon—a claylike medium.
Caballer’s face stayed calm, focused. If she minded fellow students looking on upon the Mickey and Minnie head tattoos near her collarbones—or anything else, for that matter—an observer couldn’t tell.
“It just kind of came naturally,” Caballer said of modeling nude for a class for the first time last semester. After taking the job her roommate and friend, Shelby Thomas, saw advertised online, the undeclared major was “honestly mostly nervous about the modeling and gesture aspect, than my body.”
While there was a time not that long ago when Caballer’s confidence dipped low, that time is no longer. “I’m pretty confident about my body,” she said, adding that modeling has helped grow appreciation of herself.
Eyebrows raise and voice pitches creep up a decibel occasionally when the models tell people what they do.
Associate professor Gary Keimig knows times are changing.
For one, there’s no more talk of controversy that once had people objecting to enrolling in classes that used nude models. The last of such talk ended roughly 15 years ago, he said.
More recent, however, is the shift to a quicker-paced artistic world that’s seen its fair share of digital integration. At some institutes, students work solely from printed images and digital projections.
“It would be a completely different experience,” Keimig said of a figure-drawing class absent a living model and the opportunity to see, up close, the anatomy of a human being.
“It’s the difference between something that’s real and something that’s virtual,” said Keimig, who believes our culture, in some ways, blurs the two.
But that isn’t the case at CSU, where the three models interviewed by the Coloradoan agreed something would be lost from art education should digital images replace them.
“It’s a rare treat,” Hasler said of students’ opportunity to draw with a sense of urgency that comes from having a model set before them.
“Students quickly move beyond this naked person” to recognizing their bodies as art, she said during a class break.
“You really look at a person in a different way.”