London Memories Chapter 4 - The London Atelier of Representational Art

My first lifedrawing session happended at the London Atelier of Representational Art (L.A.R.A) down in Clapham north. They follow the size-sight method. This method, rescued from 19th century French ateliers, is based on the studies of Charles Bargue and Jean-Léon Gérôme . They considered that French painting of the mid-19th century had lost the Greco-Latin essences. To recover them, they carried out an encyclopedic work collecting models and excellent drawings. It consists of copying a model and trying to reproduce all the nuances of light and shadow as realistically as possible. The student begins by copying cast replicas of Greco-latin statues before training themselfs with natural models. It requires a lot of discipline since the model's measurements have to be taken a couple of steps behind the easel, always from the same point. The inner voice of the artist is irrelevant in the first years of formation because what it is about is to create a solid drawing foundation.

One of the many surprises that London has is that you can find schools, communities, groups, of any kind of hobby you have, no matter how strange or obsolete it may seem. The British understand that excellence in life is achieved through the wealth of non-professional activities.

Contrary to what we might imagine, the British are very social people, they are very serious when they have fun. Not surprisingly, during their impressive 19th century, they were building a lifestyle that today remains the reference in the Western culture. Just as European thought is primarily due to Greece, the art of fun was invented by the English.

My first contact with English culture was through literature. Compared to the German authors, profound and disturbing, or the French, extremely baroque and social engaged, in the delicious English literature in between wars I discovered that, for an English author, it does not matter exactly what he is writing about, as long as he does it entertaining the reader.

I Enter the gloomy room, the walls were decorated with huge drawings of teachers and students. There were four or five of us who met that evening. A young man, Charlie was giving instructions to the model. After a few short poses to warm up the hand, the series of long poses began. All my occasional companions urged to take measurements, standing in front of the easel, taking two steps back and extending their hand in a horizontal line with the center of eyes. The timing of all of them puzzled me. Used as I was to a kind of urban drawing which I may call guerrilla drawing, I opened my notebook and sat in a chair. What the hell, I thought, after all I am Spanish and therefore an anarchist. All Spaniards we are anarchists, I discovered it in my wanderings around obedient and disciplined northen European countries.

Since my days in Paris, I had completely removed the eraser and graphite pencils from my drawing toolbox. I draw directly with a fountain pen loaded with Chinese ink. The measurements of the model were taken in a jiffy, letting me be guided, not by my eyes, which always betray me, but by the coherence of the drawing. This method is very risky because it does not allow any correction and with the minimum error everything is ruined. However, when the brain, sight and hand are tuned in, a kind of transcendental state is reached. The absence of the possibility of correction causes the brain to become tense and manages to summon unsuspected resources.

At the end of the session Charlie came over and we chatted for a long time. He was a devotee of Spanish painting, he had traveled several times to Madrid to study the work of Mariano Fortuny, a good painter, and a better draftsman. He spoke with energy and passion. After spending five years as a student at L.A.R.A, he had finally reached teacher status. Still, he was struggling to sell his paintings and drawings. His life was L.A.R.A.'s workshops.

I continued to regularly attend L.A.R.A free sessions as they offered good lighting and long poses where I could investigate the limits of cross-hatching. Those evenings in L.A.R.A helped me to discover my inner voice as a draftman.