Surreal grandeur

It was a beautiful Summer's day in London today, and where was I? Not a hard guess, I was drawing and to be precise, I was attending a life drawing theatre session, held by London Drawing.

A few months have passed since my last drawing theatre session, but I found that the experiential techniques and drop-in classes that I've attended in the meantime, have been of great benefit in helping me to tackle the seemingly intimidating task at hand with renewed confidence.

We were stationed in the Grand Hall of Battersea Arts Centre, which is an inspiring and quite overwhelming space. Starting with various warm-up poses, to help up loosen up our hands and minds, we then culminated with the task of capturing a 1.5 hour-long performance. We were encouraged to use techniques we had dabbled with earlier, such as collage, continuous line drawing, layering textures and mark-making to capture the essence of the story.

At first I started to draw the large organ (not that type of organ) and stage in the background while I tried to figure out how I would approach the models, who were standing beside portable steps and pumping air into balloons, half of which were filled with helium, tied to strings and flew to enormous ceiling above. The rest of the balloons fell scattered across the floor and the steps. During this time the scene became less intimidating for me and my image-making progressed pretty naturally, especially after I figured it would be an impossible task to capture every detail with exact precision in the space of an hour.

The scene was constantly changing, which forced you into describing the gestural movements and sift through the important parts that would help capture the story. Finally, after both models blew up all the balloons, and a brief bit of rolling across the floor (by the male model), the male model proceeded to tie the balloons with strings to the female model who was sitting on the steps in the centre of the hall - the performance was truly surreal and created some fantastic final images from the class and lead to really original, unique artwork.