Life Class : Philip James Studio

The studio is about ten by fifteen metres with a high sided ceiling.

A group of artists meets there each week for an evening life class.

There are two models: one takes a long pose of one hour, the other; five, ten or fifteen minute poses.

They change about half way through the session. The artists work in a variety of media: brush and ink, pencil, chalk pastel, sometimes in acrylic or oil.

They hold a group exhibition in a local gallery every two years, and go away for weekend landscape painting trips, at locations on the south coast or the Isle of Wight. The collection of drawings here are generally five or ten minute sketches, or oil paintings made in forty minutes. I use a soft pencil (grade 8B), on heavy cartridge.

One hundred drawings were selected from some two hundred made over two years, flatbed scanned from the originals.