From Publishers Weekly
With the triumph of photography and the retreat of representation from "serious" visual art, the place of drawing as a central and necessary human activity might appear to be under some threat. Yet naturalist Steinhart's lively and gently polemical book shows it to be positively thriving, most passionately (and unexpectedly) in "drawing groups" that meet all over the country to sketch models and discuss technique. Steinhart (The Company of Wolves) is himself the enthusiastic member of such a group, and details of their rearguard defense of drawing traditions are the affectionately rendered center of the book. Moving from his own experiences to art history, science and the lives of the artists and models with whom he comes in contact, Steinhart examines this resurgence not only as an exercise in cultural self-expression but a collective response to a fundamental human need. Along the way, he gives quick but informative sketches of the world of children's drawing, the physiology of facial recognition and the evolution of photography. But the book's true milieu is the studio, and its core subject the complex relationships between hand, brain, eye and subject in the drawn depiction of the human figure. The fascinating life of the figure model Florence Allen (who not only posed over a period of many years for everyone from Diego Rivera to Richard Diebenkorn, but helped organize her colleagues into a professional guild) shows a side of the art world rarely explored with such sympathy and depth. And if Steinhart partakes a little of the "Us vs. Them" opposition to the contemporary art world common among his peers, he doesn't make a big deal out of it. For him, a drawing bound for the fridge door is taken as seriously as a painting in the Prado. 31 illus. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Why does the human animal, alone of all creation, have the ability -- and the primal need -- to represent the world, as filtered through the senses and the intellect and the soul, in the form of drawings? Out of such a simple yet fundamental question, Peter Steinhart conjures a fascinating meditation that spans such fields as religion, psychology, Darwinism, feminism, sociology, neuroscience and philosophy. In The Undressed Art, Steinhart has created one of those sui generis works such as Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. While its scope might not be as large as Pirsig's, Steinhart's book still speaks to many of the same issues of community, mindfulness, personal liberation and the dynamic interplay between past and present. A naturalist by trade, Steinhart brings a keen scientific manner to the main question of "why we draw." He cites the latest theories from consciousness studies, such as those found in the work of Steven Pinker. He also delves into the famous left-brain, right-brain theory of artistic creativity, discussed in books such as Betty Edwards's classic Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. He reviews anthropological and zoological evidence on the subject and examines the neurological development of children, elucidating the standard stages of artistic capability. Steinhart also looks at ways in which our culture respects or devalues the act of drawing. All of this is couched in pellucid prose aimed at the general reader. Discussing the hardwiring that underlies facial recognition among our species, Steinhart writes, "Our intense awareness of our own faces and postures is a quality older than humanity . . . Humans will look for responses to their own faces or bodies in the face of another, and thus seek to get others to display respect or fear or amusement in their facial expressions." There you have the quintessence of occupations as diverse as diplomat, politician, entertainer and hooker distilled into a few sentences. For Steinhart, the rewards of drawing are threefold: understanding, self-expression and communication. But beyond these somewhat obvious answers, he evokes a kind of Zen satori space that the artist enters, before concluding, "Whatever it is that gives an individual the impulse to draw seriously is very much a mystery." He nonetheless affirms that "Drawing . . . is a kind of exploration, a search for our own inner nature, our origins, our souls."Steinhart contrasts the meditative inner journey of drawing with the typical shallow amusements and flashy preoccupations of modern culture, building a strong case for drawing as a therapeutic counterweight to the thoughtless vices of our time.A dedicated student of drawing (an engaging self-portrait in pencil on the dust-jacket substitutes for the usual author photo), Steinhart guides us expertly through the actual mechanics of learning how to do it. He has a facility for conveying in words the interaction of muscles and eyes and mind that go into capturing on paper whatever presents itself to the artistic gaze. His description of his own struggles with artist's block is particularly affecting.Steinhart dips in and out of journalistic mode, chronicling the loose network of drawing groups across the country. With his focus on drawing from live, nude models, he digs into the lost history of such heroic models as Florence Allen, who hung with the Beats, posed for Rothko and Diebenkorn, and founded the Bay Area Models' Guild. This portion of the book is fully as intriguing as the more theoretical parts. Steinhart also deals frankly and fruitfully with the sexual dynamics between artist and model. With supporting testimony from many artists of his acquaintance, he argues that the sexual charge is transient and secondary to the real connections that link perceived and perceiver.Steinhart's book raises a couple of issues that it fails to deal with. There's no real examination of non-Western modes of drawing, no sense of how different cultures have regarded it. For someone attempting to make a universal case about the nature of humanity, this deficit is notable. On a related note, it's amazing that a person of Steinhart's sensitivity uses the phrase "flesh-colored" twice to describe a certain shade of crayon. Really? Whose flesh? Given Steinhart's emphasis on the division between word-types and image-types, I was also surprised not to see at least a small discussion of writers known for their drawings, such as Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov and Charles Bukowski. Finally, in his analysis of the historical battle between figurative and abstract art, Steinhart misses a chance to cite how artist Robert Williams and his Juxtapoz magazine have sought to restore the representational mode to prominence. But the overall effect of this engaged and engaging book is to make its lucky readers feel that only by picking up a pencil and drawing can we tap into "a repository of wisdom and energy, purpose and comfort" that is larger than all of us. Reviewed by Paul Di FilippoCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Naturalist Steinhart's previous books include The Company of Wolves (1995), so drawing may seem like a departure for him, but as he so magnanimously avers, "The naturalist and the artist are alike in their watchfulness." Each must be disciplined, observant, and ardent. Steinhart has been drawing for years, finding it an immensely beneficial endeavor, and he is not alone. Although art schools downplay traditional drawing classes, many amateurs and professionals have formed drawing groups so that they can work with a model, thus instigating a grassroots renaissance of figure drawing. Steinhart, an engagingly grounded and generous writer, seeks to explain this phenomenon, and his conclusions are as surprising as they are moving. An "undressed art" in its intimacy, drawing from nude models is an "act of discovery" and a "way of seeing" that nurtures our innate "human need to look deeply and expressively," especially at each other. As Steinhart incisively chronicles the experiences of models and artists alike, he eloquently celebrates life drawing as a communion and a source of compassion and meaning. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“Steinhart is one of those lucky writers who can’t help being entertaining, even when he’s making a serious inquiry. He reminds us that there is something ‘innate and human’ about the impulse to draw what we see. I wasn’t long into the book before I felt I was in the presence of a friend.”
–Edward Sorel, New York Times Book Review

“Steinhart has been drawing for years, finding it an immensely beneficial endeavor, and he is not alone. Although art schools downplay traditional drawing classes, many amateurs and professionals have formed drawing groups so that they can work with a model, thus instigating a grassroots renaissance of figure drawing. Steinhart, an engagingly grounded and generous writer, seeks to explain this phenomenon, and his conclusions are as surprising as they are moving. An ‘undressed art’ in its intimacy, drawing from nude models is an ‘act of discovery’ and a ‘way of seeing’ that nurtures our innate ‘human need to look deeply and expressively,’ especially at each other. As Steinhart incisively chronicles the experiences of models and artists alike, he eloquently celebrates life drawing as a communion and a source of compassion and meaning.”
–Donna Seaman, Booklist

“With the triumph of photography and the retreat of representation from ‘serious’ visual art, the place of drawing as a central and necessary human activity might appear to be under some threat. Yet naturalist Steinhart’s lively book shows it to be positively thriving, most passionately (and unexpectedly) in ‘drawing groups’ that meet all over the country to sketch models and discuss technique. Steinhart is himself the enthusiastic member of such a group, and details of their defense of drawing traditions are the affectionately rendered center of the book. Moving from his own experiences to art history, science and the lives of the artists and models with whom he comes in contact, Steinhart examines this resurgence not only as an exercise in cultural self-expression but a collective response to a fundamental human need. Along the way, he gives quick but informative sketches of the world of children’s drawing, the physiology of facial recognition and the evolution of photography. But the book’s true milieu is the studio, and its core subject the complex relationships between hand, brain, eye and subject in the drawn depiction of the human figure . . . Shows a side of the art world rarely explored with such sympathy and depth.”
–Publishers Weekly

“The act of drawing has been given a bum rap over the past half-century, Steinhart writes . . . been diminished by waves of abstraction and by video and conceptual and installation art. Like outlaws, figurative artists hole up in small groups and drop-in sessions with zero commercial incentive, responding to some innate human impulse and seeking a personal vision. Steinhart seeks to find meaning in this kinship between spirit and substance, the intensification of experience that figure-drawing gives to him. His thoughts are as intimate as a diary (though he will also make forays into brain chemistry in his search) . . . He is bracingly unself-conscious about the first flash of desire and anticipation that comes when the model disrobes, yet what he really wants to chew on is the way in which drawing allows a communication with the world, a connection, an empathy. He provides some terrific material on how models respond to their work and plenty of good stories about drawing classes . . . Steinhart searches for a coherent understanding of what makes him draw, but he is also at ease when he abandons rationalism and feels the graces guiding him to a moment of emotional access. An absorbing exploration of why we put pencil to paper.”
–Kirkus Reviews

“The Undressed Art is a charming, illuminating study of our impulse to register the world by putting pencil to paper. From a child’s drawing of a lopsided house complete with smoking chimney to the nuanced shadings of Thomas Eakins, Peter Steinhart reveals the fascinating workings behind this most unassuming art.”
–Billy Collins

From the Inside Flap
We all draw as children: we scrawl a sunbeamed circle for a face and dots for eyes, and then we move on to portraits of Mom with an upside-down U for hair and Dad with trousers up to his armpits. But sooner or later, almost everyone stops. In this delightful, revelatory book, Peter Steinhart explores why some of us keep on drawing–and what happens when we do.

Combining the scientific, the historical, the anecdotal and the personal with marvelous ease, Steinhart asks some provocative questions: Why do drawings often speak to us more eloquently than paintings? What is the mind doing when we draw? Why is so much drawing of the face and of the nude figure? What is the dynamic between a clothed artist and a naked model?

Steinhart makes clear that, at its best, drawing is a spontaneous expression of what we see, an “undressed art” unencumbered by affectation or calculated fashion. And he reveals its many rewards: it helps us to focus, to slow down, and to really see the world and ourselves. At once erudite and engaging, The Undressed Art illuminates the allures and joys of a familiar art–and inspires us to pick up a pencil and draw.

About the Author
Peter Steinhart is a naturalist and a writer. For twelve years he was an editor and columnist at Audubon, and his work has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones and Sierra. He has twice been a finalist for a National Magazine Award, and his essays have been widely anthologized. He has published four books, the most recent of which is The Company of Wolves. He lives and draws in Palo Alto, California.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
Allure

Eleanor Dickinson's line is lively and lyrical, a flute passage from Vivaldi, confident and sunny. It flows from the end of her felt-tip marker in curls and ribbons to divide form from formlessness, to mark the places where light glances and clings, to define the subtle curves of life. It is a remarkably supple and observant line, full of information, full of understanding of how a wrist curls or a finger bends, broad where shadows collect, finer as light intensifies, broken and invisible where light dazzles. It comes into a kind of miraculous life, born from the tip of the pen bold and finished, yet continually moving, continually revealing and describing: the back of a middle finger folding delicately away from the light, rounding down and darkening to the fingertip, then turning sharply where its contour meets the last knuckle of the index finger, now thin again in the light, down again to the index finger's rounded tip. By and by, a hand-or its contour-has appeared on the paper, and to my eye it has the exact proportion, the weight, the texture, the strength, the experience, the life of the hand across the room.

The hand across the room belongs to Yoshio Wada, a small, seventy-eight-year-old Japanese-born man with stooped shoulders, strong sinewy legs, close-cropped gray hair and a red and weeping blind eye. He is seated on a faded beige divan that angles out from the wall of what used to be the dining room in Dickinson's 120-year-old San Francisco home. Behind the divan are cloths and draperies pinned to the wall to provide a backdrop for the model at Dickinson's weekly drawing-group sessions. Wada is lit from one side by three floodlamps clamped at various heights to a stand. His right side is washed in yellow light, his left fades into shadow.

The seventy-eight-year-old model is nude. He is not seductive, not in any way Rabelaisian. His body has a seriousness, a dignity, a flawed but compelling humanity. It tells a story. As a young man at the outset of World War II, Wada had been interned with his family in a series of relocation camps in the American West. He had hoped to become an artist, but his drawing materials were taken from him. At the conclusion of the war, he was deported to Japan, where he had no family to take him in, and for two years he wandered the streets of Tokyo, looking for food. Eventually, an aunt who had remained in the United States arranged for him to be returned to California. He enlisted in the United States Army, but he was not permitted to touch a gun, so he became a medical corpsman. After that, for thirty years he worked in San Francisco as a hospital orderly. In his sixties, he took up watercolor painting. Unable to enroll in local art schools, he began modeling, because it was a way to eavesdrop on the instruction art teachers gave at those schools. Without knowing any of his personal history, the six artists who form a ten-foot semicircle around Wada are busily drawing his pain, his determination, his glacial patience and battered wisdom.

Dickinson lifts the marker tip from the paper, sits back and looks at the drawing. At seventy she gazes through alarmingly big eyeglasses-lenses the size of tea saucers, behind which her eyes are searching and impassive, perhaps the eyes of a surgeon. Shocks of dyed white and red hair drop over one side of her forehead, small exclamatory marks above an otherwise unconfiding face. She dresses in gypsy mode, favoring full-cut, dark-colored prints and the sturdy, comfortable shoes of one who works standing up. She is not given to lavish smiles or quick laughter. She doesn't offer unbidden opinions. She conveys the impression that all her attention is directed outward, that she has no self-consciousness at all. It is a characteristic I think I see in other artists in drawing groups, and I wonder whether it expresses a kind of selflessness or, just the opposite, is a mask designed to cover an overly sensitive self-consciousness.

Dickinson is one of the deans of figurative art in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has taught drawing at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now called the California College of the Arts) for thirty-three years, and her work is represented in many museums and private collections. The state of Tennessee is honoring her as a native daughter of rare artistic accomplishment with a retrospective exhibition in Nashville. She is always teaching, leaning over to look at my drawing, reminding me to measure, suggesting I leave some lines out or place the figure more effectively on the page.

She holds up her pen and uses it to measure off proportions on Wada's figure. Then she holds the pen over the drawing to mark off the units of measurement. She has said to me, "The ability to measure and the ability to see negative space are the greatest assests in drawing."

These are not the kind of words one expects from artists these days. Since the middle of the twentieth century, abstraction and expressionism have been the lodestones of fine art, and drawing has been diminished and disparaged. Commercial design and illustration these days is largely done on computers. When you ask the marketing director at Strathmore-a producer of artist papers for more than a century-what's new, he talks about a surge in sales of papers made for use with inkjet printers. At many art schools across the country, students may go through a four-year program without taking drawing or painting courses. More and more of the curriculum in art schools and more and more of the content in galleries and museums is video art, conceptual art and installation art. Less and less is actually based on drawing. And if you do get training in drawing, you're not all that likely to use it professionally. A local art instructor says he guesses that fewer than 2 percent of art school graduates go on to make a living as painters or sculptors or portrait artists or muralists. An apocryphal estimate passed on by artists in these drawing groups says only 4 percent of art school graduates go on to make a living as artists, and fewer than 20 percent go on to make art at all.

The place of drawing in the arts has declined to the

point that one of the major current debates among artists is over whether accomplished draftsmen like Ingres or Dürer or Michelangelo or Caravaggio used optical devices to trace projected images. Some leading exponents of the theory are, perhaps not coincidentally, abstractionists whose own drafting skills are limited.

But it could be said that a kind of renaissance of figure drawing is occurring. It is not something you'd note in the galleries or museums, for it is practiced, more often than not, by amateurs.

Drawing from live nude models used to be something one had to enroll in an art school to do. Today, one does it in community art and recreation centers, in fine-art museums, in privately operated ateliers and in home studios and living rooms. The number of places that offer classes in life drawing seems to be steadily increasing. In just about any city and in many suburbs you can find a drop-in drawing session, where, without advance reservation, you can pay a modest model's fee and draw from a live model for two or three hours. You can draw this way, for example, at the Minneapolis Drawing Workshop, the Truro Center for the Arts in Castle Hill, Massachusetts, the McLean (Virginia) Community Center, the Hui No'eau Visual Arts Center in Maui, Hawaii, the Northwest Area Arts Council in Woodstock, Illinois, the Tampa Museum of Art, the Art/Not Terminal Gallery in Seattle, the Art Museum of Missoula, Montana, the Community Hall in the Boulder Crossroads Mall in Colorado, the Creative Arts Center of Dallas, the Scottsdale (Arizona) Artists' School or the City Market of Raleigh, North Carolina. David Quammen, who models in Washington, D.C., knows of two dozen drop-in groups in the Washington, D.C., area. In New York City, there are Minerva Durham's Spring Studio, the Art Students League, the Chelsea Sketch Group, the Salmagundi Club, the Society of Illustrators, the National Academy School of Fine Arts, the Tompkins Square Branch Library and many others. You can find drop-in drawing groups in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Hong Kong, Bali and Jakarta-indeed, all over the world.

There are at least eighty different drawing groups meeting weekly in the San Francisco Bay Area. They range from small, very private gatherings of four or five artists in someone's living room to large public drop-in sessions meeting once or twice a week in community centers. A group I have drawn with in Palo Alto for fifteen years sometimes has more than fifty people crowding into the city's Art Center, jockeying for space and a clear view of the model. There are Berkeley housewives' drawing groups and there are gay men's drawing groups-even a gay-men-drawing-naked group. There are recreational groups meeting after-hours in lunch and seminar rooms at high-tech companies in the South Bay. There are life-drawing classes offered at the Bay Area's twenty colleges and universities, as well as programs at the three major art schools and a handful of smaller private ateliers. There are regular at-work sessions for the various film-animation studios and electronic game designers that have sprung up around the bay. It is possible to draw every day with a different group and to go on visiting new groups for four weeks before one either drops from retinal exhaustion or has to repeat a group. There are individual artists who hire their own models privately. All of this intense interest in depicting the human form supports at least two hundred professional artist's models, some of them managing to make a living exclusively from posing. There are two active and successful models' guilds in the Bay Area, through which schools, drawing groups, animation firms and individual artists can hire skilled and experienced models.

Says Betsy Kendall, a Berkeley chef who draws with a small group of friends regularly at her home, "There's a figurative tradition in the Bay Area. There's enough figurative art that you can look around and get inspired."

If you judged by what hangs in the galleries around San Francisco's Union Square or New York's Madison Avenue, you would have no idea that any of this was taking place. The artists in these drawing groups acknowledge that pictures of nudes are hard to sell. Says Norman Lundin, who teaches drawing at the University of Washington, "It's a loaded subject. Any time you present a nude you've got the message of sex hanging around it. To escape that is difficult." On top of that, to many people nudes suggest out-of-date art. Says Minerva Durham, who has taught drawing in New York City for twenty years, "New York is the known center of art, so you have a lot of things going on. But I think figure drawing has struggled here. Figure drawing is considered passé." She is talking about the galleries and the fine-art schools. Outside the schools and the galleries, something else seems to be happening.

If there is a renaissance of drawing taking place, it is not driven by the art market, but by something inside the artists themselves. It is driven, I suspect, by something innate and human, by a constellation of long-standing behaviors and impulses shaped as much by human nature as by culture.

Look around Eleanor Dickinson's studio, and you'd get no clue as to why these people are here. Each one of the artists is wrapped in a bubble of concentration, silent, absorbed, alone. There is little conversation in these groups when people are drawing. There is little talk about the nature of the work going on during the breaks, when the model usually dons a robe and sits quietly on a corner of the stage, stretching sore muscles. And while the models can be articulate, perceptive and precise about what it is that they are doing, it is hard to find artists who can explain what they are doing when they draw.

Part of that inarticulateness, I suspect, arises from a lack of clear consensus among artists about what constitutes good art. Part arises from the fact that every artist is an individual seeking a deeply personal vision, and all visions are different. Part arises too, I think, from the fact that artists have varying degrees of access to words, that many of the most visually inventive and expressive are not correspondingly adept when it comes to using language. There are visual minds and verbal minds, and they do not record experience and store it in memory the same way. And part of the inarticulateness arises from the fact that only a few of us consider ourselves successful enough as artists to profess a confident understanding of what we are doing.

Part of it, as well, is the intense concentration we apply to seeing what is there in front of us, on applying the right pressure to the drawing implement, on finding the forms in the model and placing them in the right proportions on the paper, on relating the figure to the background, on finding the lines that really count. It's not an easy thing to do, and, to all of us, good drawings seem supernaturally rare. Robin Schauffer, a Cupertino housewife who returned to school to pursue an art degree and has been drawing seriously for six years, says, "I don't look on my figure drawings as art. I look upon them as my scales and arpeggios. They're not good enough yet to say anything about the human condition."

We are less engaged in producing than we are in practicing. It's a refrain that runs through the work of even the best draftsmen and draftswomen. We do it not because we're good at it, but because there is some prospect that if we keep doing it, eventually we may be good.

That last idea is one that has run through the minds of many of the great artists. Hokusai declared at the age of

seventy-three: "From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the form of things. By the time I was fifty, I had published an infinity of designs, but all that I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-three I have learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence, when I am eighty, I shall have made more progress, at ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things, at a hundred I shall have reached a marvelous stage, and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive."

At seventy, Edgar Degas told Ernest Rouart, "You have a high conception, not of what you are doing, but of what you may do one day: without that, there's no point in working."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"We all draw as children: we scrawl a sun-beamed circle for a face and dots for eyes, and then we move on to portraits of Mom with an upside-down U for hair and Dad with trousers up to his armpits. But sooner or later, almost everyone stops. In this book, Peter Steinhart explores why some of us keep on drawing - and what happens when we do." Combining the scientific, the historical, the anecdotal and the personal, Steinhart asks some questions: Why do drawings often speak to us more eloquently than paintings? What is the mind doing when we draw? Why is so much drawing of the face and of the nude figure? What is the dynamic between a clothed artist and a naked model?

FROM THE CRITICS

Edward Sorel - The New York Times

Steinhart is one of those lucky writers who can't help being entertaining, even when he's making a serious inquiry. I wasn't long into the book before I felt I was in the presence of a friend, with both of us kvetching about how difficult it is to do a decent drawing, let alone a good one, and how it's always a surprise when it happens.

Paul Di Filippo - The Washington Post

In The Undressed Art, Steinhart has created one of those sui generis works such as Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. While its scope might not be as large as Pirsig's, Steinhart's book still speaks to many of the same issues of community, mindfulness, personal liberation and the dynamic interplay between past and present.

Publishers Weekly

With the triumph of photography and the retreat of representation from "serious" visual art, the place of drawing as a central and necessary human activity might appear to be under some threat. Yet naturalist Steinhart's lively and gently polemical book shows it to be positively thriving, most passionately (and unexpectedly) in "drawing groups" that meet all over the country to sketch models and discuss technique. Steinhart (The Company of Wolves) is himself the enthusiastic member of such a group, and details of their rearguard defense of drawing traditions are the affectionately rendered center of the book. Moving from his own experiences to art history, science and the lives of the artists and models with whom he comes in contact, Steinhart examines this resurgence not only as an exercise in cultural self-expression but a collective response to a fundamental human need. Along the way, he gives quick but informative sketches of the world of children's drawing, the physiology of facial recognition and the evolution of photography. But the book's true milieu is the studio, and its core subject the complex relationships between hand, brain, eye and subject in the drawn depiction of the human figure. The fascinating life of the figure model Florence Allen (who not only posed over a period of many years for everyone from Diego Rivera to Richard Diebenkorn, but helped organize her colleagues into a professional guild) shows a side of the art world rarely explored with such sympathy and depth. And if Steinhart partakes a little of the "Us vs. Them" opposition to the contemporary art world common among his peers, he doesn't make a big deal out of it. For him, a drawing bound for the fridge door is taken as seriously as a painting in the Prado. 31 illus. (June) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In this meditation on the meaning of drawing (primarily figure drawing from the nude), naturalist/journalist Steinhart brings a measure of science to understanding the perceptions and actions that engage the human mind in the act of drawing. But the book is as much about the activities of the human mind spontaneous, direct, and unencumbered as it is about drawing itself. The more successful autobiographical parts of the book are based on Steinhart's several decades of avocational figure drawing. Although there is a bit of concise history about artists' models, this topic, again based on the author's experience and interviews with models over some years, is fresh and highlights the dynamic relationship that can be captured on paper. The virtues of this essentially solitary activity are focus and escape from time, but the resulting object, at its best called art, can speak to others. For Steinhart, drawing can capture our humanity and connect us to nature no small accomplishment. For general and art theory collections. Jack Perry Brown, Art Inst. of Chicago Libs. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews