My urge to draw the human form

New artwork by Sudas (browse slideshow on fullscreen)

Beginning my studies, the first step pleas’d me so much,
The mere fact, consciousness – these forms – the power of motion,
The least insect or animal – the senses – eyesight;
The first step, I say, aw’d me and pleas’d me so much,
I have never gone, and never wish’d to go, any farther,
But stop and loiter all my life, to sing it in extatic songs.

So writes the poet Walt Whitman.

For several years, in my paintings, there has never been anything close to a human figure. It was not that I did not have the desire to draw a human figure, but it was as if the force with which that desire urged itself forward only allowed me to take a first step, without following it through.

Until one day, while playing with friends at ‘exquisite corpses‘, invented by the Surrealists in the 1920s, the urge for figure painting came up, albeit in a milder, more appealing tone – and I remembered that figures had already enlivened the paintings I did in my childhood and adolescence, only to retreat when I was later faced with the tyrannical complexity of life.

Since that day, the human figure has always been present in my work.

Today, I continue to respond to that inner urging to draw the human form, all the while trying to overcome the embarrassment I sometimes feel when faced with just how many I’ve done! And trying to figure out what to do with them all!

Someone once said that art should not give answers but offer questions. I am sure that one day someone, perhaps totally unrelated professionally, I don’t know, an astrophysicist, will reveal to me aspects of my art that I cannot see today.

The plates published here are part of a corpus of more than eight hundred made from August 2018 to the present day. I use watercolours, gouache, Indian ink and pastels on 300 gr satin paper in the 35 cm x 29 cm format.