“By indirections find directions out.”

I think it was Shakespeare who said that, although for the life of me I can’t recall the context. The phrase came into my head this afternoon when I was looking over the results of last night’s life-drawing class. I always like to bring my work home and spread it out in the studio during the next day or so, in order to see whether there are lessons I can learn from it. Today’s experienced was interesting.

The model last night was a young black man. He has sat for us before, but about two years ago, which is a measure of the fact that we have come to take a white model for granted. The challenge, of course, lay in the decision as to what colour to use when representing him. Obviously black would be just plain silly, because when you looked it became obvious immediately that the colour was much more complex than that. The cunning thing on the part of our tutor also was that she made us work with wax crayons, and in the selection we were offered it wasn’t possible to cop-out by selecting brown. We had to look very carefully, and then make an intelligent selection of hues which could be combined in orderer to reflect the real diversity of the model’s skin tone.

It was only when I was reviewing my work this afternoon that the penny dropped as to what the lesson of the session might have been. We do get awfully lazy in depicting white models in making the assumption that we know how to paint flesh. So we drop into established habits without really looking at what is in front of us. Skin tone, regardless of the ethnicity of the model, is actually very diverse. Looking at my own hand now I came to the slightly surprising discovery that I would need to use blue rather more than I might have anticipated.

This is, of course, the lesson that David Hockney has been trying to ram down our throats for several decades. What colour is that road? No! Grey will not do.