how ideas of female beauty permeate our culture. Her artistic response was to create carefully crafted stencils based on ancient Greek statues, which she then spray-painted on top of her drawings (Figure 3). Her idea was to suggest how ideals get imposed upon how we see our embodied selves. Another response was to draw artifacts of contem- porary culture in and around her figure drawings (Figure 4), suggesting how our images of ourselves are interlaced with the objects that surround us. The essence of this teaching experience was a conversation, informed by a rich framework of tradi-
tion, contemporary art, and popular visual culture. This example also illustrates how a student’s aesthetic interests might be valued and how art and artifacts can be given mean- ingful contexts within the lives of students.
The evening figure-drawing sessions provided rich opportunities for the perfor- mance of teaching and personal conversa- tions. These unpredictable exchanges were the most important part of the teaching experience. The traditions of figure drawing, ideas about the body, and the possibilities
of drawing, created meaningful contexts
for these conversations, a construct with many connections to important ideas in
the lives of students and in contemporary art. Sometimes I got excited, because it was exhilarating to be alive and have a body.
The model had the magic and excitement of the human form, yet the drawings looked like stick people, straight up and down. To dramatize my feelings, I lay on the floor
and cried, “Your drawings are killing me, it doesn’t matter if you spend a year and draw every vein and hair on that leg. It doesn’t
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