The basic premise of life drawing is this: there is a figure and an observer, traditionally three dimensional and in the same space. A suggested caveat to this might be the recent transition to digital life drawing classes necessitated by national lockdowns. This can arguably be precluded by the fact that such classes not actually ‘from life’. This is not to say that such classes are any less valuable- however they are by virtue of their platform instructing in the observation of a figure already transformed and flattened by the camera. The relationship between the figure and the observer is mediated, and that is an essential difference to conventional life drawing classes. The inherent physicality of ‘conventional’ classes might lend itself to the assumption that the degree of a drawing's success relies on its verisimilitude. If this were the case, the artwork would risk running afoul of contemporary criticisms of illusionism. Critics such as Donald Judd; who in his 1965 text “Specific Objects” discussed the failure of illusionist paintings to acknowledge themselves as objects in their own right, have maintained that there is an inherent dishonesty in works which ‘pretend’ to be the thing which they are depicting. However, the point of life drawing is not to produce a like for like image- which is a flawed and ultimately unachievable goal- but to develop and understand new ways of looking; interpreting, manipulating and sharing your subjective view of reality. For example: you may have a ring of students around a model. They are all observing the same reality, but no two images will be the same because the way they observe is different. The mechanics of it- the way they stand, hold their pencil, move their arm- make this true in a literal sense. What makes this difference truly intractable, though, is that each of those students is an entirely different person with different life experiences and different personalities. E.H. Gombrich writes in his essay ‘Illusion and Visual Deadlock’: “…to say of such a projection that it 'looks like reality' begs the question. It may, but it also looks like an infinite number of possible, if improbable, configurations.”(1) Each of those students will have produced a work that (in some sense) represents the model. They will also innately and effortlessly have produced a work that represents individual expression, which is infinite and indefinite. Life drawing is important because this visualisation can be used as a tool for interrogating that expression. Ultimately, you are not learning to draw. You are learning to look. Understanding how; when and why you look- and having the chance to exchange this with your contemporaries- is crucial to any image maker. 1.Gombrich, E.H. 1982. Illusion and Visual Deadlock. In: Frascina, F.ed. Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. New York: Routledge.