Knowledge of Human Anatomy

After a class on aspects of arm and leg anatomy.

I've been interested in the study in human anatomy since I went to the anatomy lab with my friend Mike, who was going to med school in Vermont around 1985.  I remember that it had an immediate affect on me - not in the shocking way that you would think, but I was just interested in how amazing this machine is that carries us around all our lives.  I drew some small drawings in my sketchbook for a couple hours while Mike was going over notes and dissecting a shoulder joint.  So amazing.  I don't have those drawings anymore ... wish I did.

Teaching figure drawing is one of my favorite subjects to teach.  I use the figure almost exclusively in my own work, for reasons that I will go into towards the end of this entry, and I teach a section in anatomy for at least a couple weeks at the beginning of the course.  I've acquired about four books on anatomy, and every time I go into Strand Books in NYC, I drool over the Taschen encyclopedia on anatomy that costs $150 and weighs about 40 pounds.  So, I use my books, as well as some of my drawings form the figure, and I have the students learn all of the bones and muscles in the human body.  When I was teaching at Syracuse University, I would take my class over to the University Hospital anatomy lab at the beginning of every semester to draw from the cadavers.  (The doctor who ran the anatomy lab grew up with my father, and so when I went in one day and introduced myself, he said "y'know, I knew McKaig's from Jordan, NY," and when I explained that one of them was my father, I had an in).  After the class would leave the lab after the drawing session, it was as if they had seen alien beings, or witnessed some historic archaeological discovery right before their eyes.  Often, the drawings they created from that experience were some of the most sensitive and focused of the semester.

I teach anatomy because I feel that a heightened understanding and EMPATHY for the human figure is essential when creating images of the human form.  Too often students seem to be frustrated at the beginning of an attempt to draw the figure, but as soon as they understand what lies beneath what they are looking at - the inter-connectedness, the complexity, the structural elements - then their drawings gain a new richness and sensitivity.  When a model is posed in a certain manner, I can then talk to them about how the "rhomboid, teres-major and Infra and supra-spinatus muscles" are stretched out to extend the arm, etc., and they understand and pick up on subtleties that now are supported by their knowledge of anatomy.

I also teach anatomy, because the understanding of the all the inter-connected parts of the body also relate to all other structures and arrangements in the natural world.  Depicting the human form in space on a two-dimensional format is one the most difficult tasks that a student can undertake, and so if they gain in their mastery of this skill, then it empowers them to tackle almost anything else.  Kenneth Clark said: “The nude human figure does not simply represent the body, but relates it, by analogy, to all structures that have become part of our imaginative experience.”  I find that when my students understand the "science" of the body, as well as the expressive potential of the human form, then they tend to be much more fearless.  I'm all for that.