Drawing from Life

A slim, brown-haired model made her way to the front of the studio at 185 Nassau and dropped her bathrobe. Standing with one leg slightly in front of the other, she stood motionless as six students put pencil and charcoal to paper and began to sketch.

The students were at the first session of the Figure Drawing Club, a revived group dedicated to the art of the human form.

At the meeting Wednesday evening, visual arts professor Brian Jermusyk was invited to offer advice to the student artists. Within moments he had taken charge of the room as if it were his class, helping students perfect their lines and guiding the nude model in her poses.

Half an hour into the session, Jermusyk asked the students if he was acting too much like a teacher.

"No, no, keep helping us," said club co-founder and co-president Bianca Bosker '08. "The whole point of this is for us to actually learn."

Jermusyk continued to move from easel to easel, guiding students' hands and passing out pencil sharpeners.

He instructed one student to hold her pencil with her fingertips, telling her "that in a sense you're fencing when you hold the pencil and touch it to the paper."

"Figure drawing intrigues people who want to learn to draw," Jermusyk said. "Essentially it's a part of classical training to learn how to draw the human figure, a kind of standard for artistic ability in terms of fluency with the human form."

New opportunities

Club co-founder Gabriella Fuller '08 said she and Bosker decided to establish the Figure Drawing Club — or 'the Fig,' as it is known — "because we felt that despite all the musical and acting extracurricular activities on campus, there really isn't anything for people interested in the plastic arts."

"Painting and drawing are things we've really missed since coming here," Bosker said. "If you don't have time in your schedule to take a visual arts class you may find it very difficult to ever have opportunities to paint or draw at Princeton."

A figure drawing club previously existed on campus, but died out at the end of last spring.

The Fig is using the old drawing club's remaining University funding to pay for its current materials and model costs.

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"But we'll have to apply for more funding to finish out the semester," Bosker said. "We plan on having about five more sessions this year and won't have enough for all of them."

Not kinky to me

The new club's first model was College of New Jersey senior Lauren Tyska. As she modeled, she struck new poses at intervals of two, five or 10 minutes.

Tyska said she has been modeling nude for the University's painting and drawing classes for two years.

"Modeling is a kind of artistic experience in itself, so it's something I really enjoy doing," she said. "Looking at the drawings people do of me in classes is like looking into an extremely honest mirror. Some people think this is kinky but it's not to me. It's a way of seeing my body in art."

Tyska is a visual arts student at TCNJ and is a student teacher at a local school. "My experiences as a student [with nude models] have all been very positive," she said. "It's challenging to capture the moods and the sense of a living, breathing form of light and shadow and shape."

Though Tyska has few qualms about posing nude in front of crowds, she said there are times when modeling creates awkward situations for her.

"From time to time I'll go into the gallery to look around for a few minutes before I pose and a student in the gallery will start staring at me," she said. "It takes a while before they realize they know me as that model who posed nude in their art class."