Peter Bevan, Glasgow UK

Attached is a work I did 40 years ago on the undergraduate course in Fine art at Gloucestershire College of Art and Design in Cheltenham. Despite all the studies in Life drawing I've done since and all the classes I've subsequently taught while at Glasgow school of Art, this image represents one of the most fascinating experiences of drawing from life. The reason is, the physicality and personality of the model, Mr Moses and how he affected the way I drew and through which, I gained insight into the quality of perception.

He was assigned to my class for a period of three weeks for observational drawings and paintings. Mr Moses was a pensioner and did modelling for a bit of extra cash. Most of the models we had as students were young or middle-aged women and really very confident in their role, unfazed by the requirement to pose naked in front of 15 staring strangers, well naturally, we weren't strangers for long. However, the high level of visual scrutiny directed daily at them was not reciprocated by them; more often than not, they appeared to drift in concentration often becoming so relaxed that they would begin to fall asleep.

Mr Moses, on the other hand appeared to be consistently at a high level of consciousness, aware of the "unusual" situation he was in; perhaps self-conscious to a degree, of his posing, is little eyes flickering constantly around his restricted field of vision. It became clear after a few different poses that he found it difficult to relax into them and held them still with great conscious effort. There was a feeling of held tension even in "comfortable" sitting poses, as though he felt he must always be alert in order to prevent the dreadful embarrassment of losing control of himself by falling asleep.

Mr Moses was not, as you can see, very lithe or muscular in fact, he was quite stiff and somewhat ungainly on his thin pin legs, as though he had not made much athletic use of his body during his life and appeared conscious of this in the very conscientious way he now forced himself to be fiercely still in the assigned poses. The effort required to ensure stillness began to show after a while in one pose, in that he would begin to quiver, almost imperceptibly to begin with but gradually with a visible vibration. He was a shy man not gregarious or chatty like the other models, but appeared happy to reassure us students that he was "alright" when we asked about his quivering and profusely apologetic if it was going to spoil our drawings!

To me, the physical tension and visible effort apparent in his holding of the standing pose in the above image became the subject of my work not only with Mr Moses but with other life models for some time. It seemed to me that his involuntary "vibrations" simply reflected phenomenologically the fact that all the other models moved too, more slowly perhaps, slumping into a doze or taking up slightly altered positions after a break, (over which we students constantly argued).

Drawing Mr Moses altered the way I made marks, they became smaller, more frequent, less definitive: they accumulated around each other suggesting a number of constantly changing positions in space, referring both to the phenomenon I was witnessing and to the fact that our perception is always moving too; our eyes constantly moving around our field of vision, assessing and reassessing relationships. My drawings became less substantial, more ephemeral; more like accumulative records of the hours or days looking at the model. In this sense, observing Mr Moses stimulated a new period of work for me, which I thought, was as honest as I could get about the very experience of looking.

http://www.petebevan.com/