Revealed In New Ways: We find out how life drawing is transforming from fine art to therapy

In a life drawing class, there’s no direct physical contact, but there’s contact with other humans. People miss hugs, they miss their parents, they miss the human body. I’m talking with Tony Pianco, the founder of the Life Drawing Society, a London-based network that organises life drawing classes. Today, we’re stood in the hallway of a church hall in Bethnal Green, east London, while a class goes on through the door. It’s fairly busy, around ten people are sitting on old chairs while classical music plays from an iPad in the corner. Everyone is absorbed in their task, focussing on today’s model, Clifford, who sits motionless on a piece of foam covering a tatty chair surrounded by small, ancient electric heaters. One buttock haphazardly flops over the seat, and the room feels toasty, like an old person’s house. The air is pregnant with concentration. These classes, Tony tells me, have always been popular, and always will be – they act as sort of therapy, one that established artists, students and east London mothers alike can indulgein without the fear of pills, or bringing up painful memories, or having to explain themselves to anyone. “It’s extremely therapeutic on many levels,” says Tony. “That’s why people come, to do something different and to relax. When you’re drawing from life you don’t have a choice but to forget everything else. You have to use the right side of your brain – the one that makes you chill. Some people who come here suffer from depression, or they’ve tried to commit suicide, or they’re trying to stop drinking or something. It’s like a valve – people feel pressure pressure pressure and then they come here and it goes ‘PFF!’ It’s a release. Professor Stephen Farthing, Chair of Drawing at University of the Arts London, sees this release as a product of the reflective nature of life drawing, and how it forces a contemplation of both the physical body and of mortality. “Drawing is a tool of investigation – it isn’t just about making things to put on walls,” he says. “Whether you’re looking at Leonardo da Vinci or Stubbs, whether you’re drawing from life or from a cadaver, you’re not just making a physical investigation or an anatomical one – you’re looking at the very nature of who and what we are.” When I set out to write this piece, I wasn’t really interested in why people went to life drawing classes, or why people drew. It’s an obvious point to make that creativity in any form can be therapeutic; a way of quieting the mind, of silencing voices or releasing emotions. What interested me was what life models themselves get from it. But the further I investigated the more it seemed that drawing, and drawing from life in particular, is inextricably linked with a certain form of self-help. People see drawing as mental health tool, and people who put themselves forward to be drawn often do so for the very same reasons. Clifford, who I mentioned before, had no idea of my intentions with the piece, or this line of investigation. But when I asked innocuously how the 62-year-old got into life-modelling a career, he told me that it directly followed a breakdown, when he decided to leave his job as a lawyer to do something completely different with his life. “I was depressed and no one was really helping me,” he says. “People are there to draw me as a figure, not as a person. All you think about is keeping the pose – if you start to think about something else, you can move, all the muscles might tighten up. You have to focus and concentrate, your mind has to be clear.” I wonder if he ever feels vulnerable surrounded by eyes, all gazing on him. But as Clifford points out, when you’re a life model, people aren’t interested in who you are, but what they see. You’re a subject, not a personality; a point that many people keen to sit are looking to exploit in a way that can help them overcome certain issues or difficulties. This notion of becoming a subject to overcome barriers, to explore a sort of zeitgeisty pathway to mindfulness, or therapy, feels very new. It’s hard to imagine that sitters for Lucian Freud or Egon Schiele were doing so as a self-help tool. Freud’s sitters were famously people he knew – friends, family, lovers, peers – and while they may have been sitting to help the artist, or perhaps out of vanity, there’s no suggestion they did so for their own mental health needs. However, Freud has been widely quoted as saying: “The subject matter is autobiographical, it’s all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement, really,” a loud echo of Tony’s theories on why people from all backgrounds seek out life drawing classes. They’re looking for a human touch without the touching, to find out about themselves through the naked body of another; and it seems today, the subjects are looking to pitch their own body as “other” to help work through their own issues with it. This is something we observed first-hand working with Mike Perry on the London leg of Get Nude Get Drawn, a series