Poem Analysis: Life Drawing By Cathy A. Colman

Pablo Picasso’s quote, “Art is a lie that makes us see the truth,” acts as epigraph to Cathy A. Colman’s prose poem Life Drawing, a text that explores themes of art and the way that it reflects and reveals reality. The speaker of the poem acts as a nude model for a life drawing class, and as she is forced to remain still for the duration of the poem, her mind wanders through various tangents on the meaning and perception of art, and what that in turn means to her as a drawing subject. Through the use of the prose poem form, Colman illustrates the speakers flowing organic thoughts, with metaphorical imagery and evocative language help to characterize the speaker as a person with naturally occurring poetic thoughts. This meandering form additionally

The ubiquity of the bowl of fruit standing with her as the students are are tasked to draw plays into the larger history of the established methods that students are taught how to draw: they will inevitably draw a bowl of fruit, and just as certainly draw from a nude model. Her remembrance of Cézanne calls back to the very first paragraph of the poem where she mentions the class instructor having written a book on him, which subsequently inspired Alan Ginsberg to write Howl. The mention of Ginsberg’s writing and inspiration serves to further weave the speaker into the greater narrative of art history. She sees her situation of being viewed objectively as a model as fitting with the aesthetic of Cézanne, while viewing the process of live-model drawing as having elements of Degas’ work, “it was the attitude the moment when you were fixed in time before the light changed,” (Colman,