UCL Surgical Society, London, 23 January 2025

Some professions seem to gravitate towards life drawing more than most. Animators, illustrators and digital designers are ubiquitous at drop-in sessions or organising their own groups. Less obvious, though often well represented, are architects.

Yet surely no profession potentially benefits more from honing hand-eye coordination through close observation of anatomy than surgeons. If they attend drop-in sessions, it’s perhaps understandably low-profile – off-Instagram – but I assume a few join-in.

It’s more usual, I suspect, for surgeons and medical institutions to organise their own dedicated life drawing classes. My first encounter with one was this informal ‘surgical life drawing’ meet-up for University College London (UCL) Surgical Society.

I believe this was their first such event. Bare Life Drawing sources models for them, and gave me the honour of getting them started. Organisers of the sessions are from the Surgical Society itself. I found them bursting with ideas and enthusiasm.

Their plan is to choose a particular skill as the theme of each event. Diving straight in at the deep end, they launched with ‘ambidextrous life drawings‘: draw conventionally with one hand while simultaneously drawing a mirror image with the other. Not easy!

What may have been a baptism of fire for life drawing newcomers actually resulted in laudable works. I kept my poses relatively uncomplicated. The challenge was already arduous without me making it even more knotty. It’s important to read the room.

Future themes are set to be ‘painting with scissors‘, ‘surgical movement and gesture‘, ‘joints and bends‘, and ‘flesh folds and skin‘. I wish them all the very best – especially when these skills translate to real life, holding a scalpel instead of a pencil.

Pose minutes, 7pm-9pm

Part 1 : 5, 5, 10, 10, 15, 15, 7.

Artworks

With apologies to artists I’m unable to credit.