The drawings in this show came out of a drink n' draw session that I have been hosting in Greenpoint called the Creator's Club. All over the city in various bars, back rooms and studios there are events called Drink n' Draws. You pay a flat fee and get to draw a figure model, some times there's free beer or the beer is really cheap. At one of these events, I met the model and told her that I had a space where we could something better, she's been one of our main models for the past year and a half.
The artists in the Creator's Club are made up of a mix of people, some who have know each other for many years, some for only a little while or not at all. We've settled into a friendly rotating group of characters, story telling and ball busting is encouraged (is there another way to say this?) and there have been a few nights that bordered on therapy. All of the artists in this show are North Brooklyn veterans who have lived and worked in the area for years.
When we did the first night, I quickly realized that, as the host of the session, I would have to be minding the clock and telling the model when to change poses. But I wanted to draw. I already had music playing and came up with the idea of having song based poses, the length of the pose being determined by the length of the song. I encourage people to bring their own playlists.
The poses were mostly full nudes and classical figure drawing poses tend to be reclining and gazing at the ceiling or sitting and looking off into space. Poses that can be held for a long time with minimal stress on the model. But some of the artists wanted poses from real life that they could use in their own work and there's usually a cell phone being charged near by.
I had been thinking about how we've become obsessed with our phones, we now spend most of our "down time" looking down at them. We spend a lot of time holding the same pose. So we've updated classical figure drawing to modern times, rather than looking off into space lost in thought, we sit or lounge and stare intently at our devices.
I looked at the drawings coming out of these sessions and realized that we had flipped the concept of the cellphie around into a selphie. With the selphie, the subject and the viewer are one and the same, and a lot of the images of people we see are now made by the subject. With the cellphie we have returned to the classical idea of model and artist.
