I’ve sometimes been puzzled by this idea from art tutors as I practice life drawing to find the ‘pose’s story’. When I look, I don’t see heroes or villains, nor do I see battles, lightsabers, or the kinds of tropes you see in stories.
So what’s the story of a pose? What does it mean?
For me, it see it as the gestural flow of the pose, the compositional the poses offers. A story about the person and the expressiveness of the human body. Find the opposing C curves, flow downwards like a river a cascade. It shows the human body has a kind of symmetry, but it’s one in motion, with it rhythm and flow.
The contrapposto pose of classical art is still alive, it how we behave, we don’t stand firmly on both legs, spaced apart, but we shift our weight from one to another. But we don’t stand in a neutral stance a lot of the time. We create asymmetry and curves in the way we stand,
Models on the catwalk do the same, there to strike a pose, to create the curves and lines, and show them off. It whats makes looking at the human body in situ interesting.
It shows that art is not always about a literal narrative, rt instead can be compared to music. You can enjoy art without any message or lesson behind. Art can be seen as forms, colour, and shapes without any message or meaning behind it.
The ‘story of the pose’ is then a practice of seeing how all these lines and curves fit together to form the image of a body, a person, perhaps telling us something of their emotions offered through the expression of the human form.
The story is the movement, the rhythm the body shows us, a body language.