Gesture in Life Drawing: Finding Movement in Stillness

Drawing from life is never still. Its essential energy comes from movement—a body breathing, shifting weight, turning its head. Even in the longest pose, subtle restlessness persists. Life doesn’t hold itself still for us—and drawing shouldn’t either. Gesture, not stasis, is at the heart of expressive drawing.

Gesture gives a drawing its vitality. It’s not about exact likeness, but about rhythm, weight, and movement. Gesture is less about accuracy than immediacy — the sense of a body alive in space. It acknowledges change and allows for it. The best gesture drawings feel alive, as if the figure could move at any moment.

Gesture drawings layered with rubbed-back lines — traces of earlier marks hold the memory of change

Even in longer poses, the freshness of first lines is kept alive through shifting, overlapping marks

When I teach, I often ask people to look for the whole movement first: the tilt of the shoulders, the stretch of a spine, the grounding of the feet, the outreach of an arm. These are the structures of presence. Only after that do we turn to details. Working this way shifts the focus from “getting it right” to really noticing how a body inhabits space.

The challenge grows as time passes. In a two-minute pose, marks are fast, searching for essence. In a longer pose, there’s a temptation to treat the body as solid and fixed. But bodies never hold still in that way. The task in longer drawings is to maintain the freshness of the first lines. Rubbed-back marks and ghost traces of earlier attempts can remain, carrying the memory of change. This layering, this refusal to over-fix, gives life to the drawing.

Large-scale charcoal drawing in progress — layered lines carry the memory of shifting poses.

Sometimes, a gesture is energetic, full of tension, with quick marks chasing the arc of movement. But it can also be quiet. In Rembrandt’s drawing of a child taking its first steps, two figures guide the child. One tilts their head with care, while the other extends an arm in a gesture of direction and support. The drawing holds the tenderness of the moment, showing that gesture is not only about movement and force, but also about the subtler ways bodies express relation, guidance, and care.

Rembrandt, A Child Learning to Walk, c.1646 — gesture here is tender, showing care and guidance.

Leonardo, too, was fascinated by gesture in life. Vasari writes that he would follow people through the streets if he noticed an interesting movement — memorising the curve of a back, the rhythm of a walk. It’s a reminder that gesture is not confined to the studio. Try it: sketch people rushing past, catching a movement before it’s gone. The drawings may not look “finished,” but they carry something no photograph can — the pulse of a moment.

Quick outdoor sketches in watercolour and pencil — catching fleeting gestures before they’re gone.

For me, gesture is at the core of both practice and teaching. In life drawing, printmaking, or painting, it keeps work responsive and open. Returning to gesture is returning to drawing as an act of attention—a way of staying awake to presence and change.

In my own art practice, these ideas came into play in Ghost in the Machine — a performance work that reimagined the workers of an abandoned cardboard packaging factory as ghostly animal presences. Their roles were transformed through embodied animal gesture, which became the thread between body, memory, and space — animating the factory as both archive and stage. More on this project [here].

And it’s gesture that brings this back to life drawing: the quiet intensity of another person’s presence, the reminder to notice, to slow down, and to be fully there. In the end, that’s what keeps drawing alive — its attention to change, movement, and relation.

Life drawing in the studio — gesture keeping work open, responsive, and alive.