Breast Cancer, Female and Young

A new addition to the series

Disclaimer: This post contains a nude female figure I drew and colored in years ago in my figure drawing class. As I stated in a previous post, I will be displaying tasteful nudes to illustrate the raw, bare nakedness of the breast cancer experience. Some readers might view such nudes as offensive, alarming, and tasteless, but my intention is to provide a tasteful, but yes sometimes disturbing and alarming, depiction of the breast cancer experience, in particular from young women’s perspectives. 

Years ago, shortly after my double mastectomy with reconstruction resulting from the years-long breast cancer nightmare, I enrolled in a nude-figure drawing class at a local community college. In attending this class and drawing live models, I hoped to come to terms with the damage done to my body, given all the surgeries and treatments for breast cancer. 

I felt perhaps this class would lend itself to acceptance and healing, but it had the opposite effect on me. The raw emotion of having had breast cancer, the years of struggling to be healthy, and my deteriorated body image were so overwhelming that I had to eventually leave the class. I intended to never again look at the nudes I drew from the live models, to put it all behind me.

After all, I already translated several drawings of nudes into oil paintings, so I was done, right? Wrong.

A few months ago, I found my old, forgotten class sketchbook that I swore I would never open again. But for the first time in a long time, I opened it and found a number of nudes done in graphite and chalk pastels. And I have seen opportunities to translate the most effective nudes to oils and to thus create a larger collection. 

Basically, the process of sketching the nudes during class was transparent. Anonymous models would have a variety of poses, and we students would simply sketch what we saw. That was it. No meaning was assigned to these sketches. A good deal of time later, I decided to assign meaning to the original nudes I drew. I would re-create them in oils, having them making statements about breast cancer.

Yes, it is a leap to do this. But as an artist, I have the creative license to depict these anonymous nude figures into whatever message I’d like. And I’d like to make a statement about young women and breast cancer, a topic many people – regardless of age – should be able to relate to.  

Below is a nude I sketched and colored with chalk pastels. I remember the teacher turned the overhead classroom lights off and turned on a dim light – probably so we could define the shadows more easily. As I was sketching and filling in the colors, I never thought this would eventually be part of an oil painting collection.

Now I am trying to figure out how to translate this pastel figure to oils on a canvas and to have the nude express a reality about breast cancer. I don’t even know what it will be named. Next week, I will show the first draft of this drawing in oil form.