The Adventures of Helga: Bodies

The other day I decided, yet again, that my ability to draw people must be improved. This is a weekly event. As every week, I was determined to go back to drawing nudes in a variety of poses and not to indulge any odd flights of fancy or colour which might occur. I managed this for, perhaps, a half hour, which is pretty pathetic even by my standards.

I did manage to produce three fairly decent drawings. The one on the left is just my attempt to get to grips with what happens to people's thighs when they lie down, and how on earth breasts are positioned (seriously - breasts are the most difficult things to get right). The best I decided to stick onto gold paper, which is always a bad idea because then I'm no longer in the right frame of mind to practise technique, and get carried away with ideas. Therefore, the rest of this is going to be based on yet another idea.

Anyway, now for the more interesting part.

Since September I have been living in college, and for the first time in living memory, I have been surrounded by girls. As a dedicated keeper of male company, this has taken a while to get used to. Parts of it I like - I like the fact that I can discuss periods without the look of disgust, I quite like the fact that they do tend to have things like needles and thread/painkillers/eyeliner to hand, I definitely like the fact that we can talk about sex in a different way (I love my male friends, I do, but I do get bored of listening to the many worries they have about 'doing it right', or as is often the case, not doing it at all). I'm not so keen on the nail varnish and shopping sides of things, but swings and roundabouts.

There are also drawbacks. One of the worst things about living with girls, and some girls especially, is the endless series of neurotic food worries. It gets wearing when you are asked for scales by a very slim girl who often exercises in a way which seems to me more like punishment, who also sees fit to comment on how much you eat/how little you go out and punish yourself.

The thing is that I'm bored of that kind of attitude, which isn't to say I don't feel sympathy for people who haven't cracked it yet. I spent the best part of a year trying to starve away my hips and (to put it delicately) a rather rounded bottom and, while I lost a fair bit of weight - partial success - I still had the same shape at the end of it. Thinner, but it was still there. I also had dizziness, headaches, less concentration, and an unhealthy obsession with 'soup weeks', calories and how much fat you could pinch between your fingers instead of an obsession with the German genitive case, which, thinking logically, was arguably a far more important thing to be obsessing over. Luckily, I got myself sorted out before I ended up losing it, but I've been left with an interest in the subject nevertheless.

Whilst discussing all this the other day with a friend of mine, we came to a few conclusions.

Capitalism isn't helping. Bombarding people with advertisements for junk food on the one hand, creating odd working hours which tend to lead to a reliance on sugar/caffeine instead of something to eat on the other, and encouraging slimness as an expression of wealth is perhaps not conducive to healthy attitudes to food. Food is clearly not solely about nutrition and enjoyment, but comes with cultural attachments. What you eat, or don't, manifests itself in a hierarchical structure by which fat = poor, thin = wealthy. This is all incredibly obvious, but like most incredibly obvious things, there comes a point where you actually stop, think about it, and become struck by just how true it is.

This started me thinking (never a good idea) about quite how alienated from our bodies a lot of us feel. Clearly, some of us don't eat when we're hungry and stop when we're full, because it's so much more complicated than that, and really, it shouldn't be, unless you have one of those very overactive thyroids. After thinking about this for a while, I started to draw people in states of alienation. Things grow out of them and protrude from them which they don't expect or understand. Usually natural forms, because that's what it is we seem to worry about.

So here are some drawings, which should have been very simple exercises in the nude human body, and then I seem to have started intuiting again. One day I'll learn to stop.

There are more, but my camera is very temperamental. I like to think it has a mind of its own and passes judgements accordingly. Click on any picture to enlarge.