Santa Rosa artist has many bodies of work

Now that human beings can peer into the nooks and crannies of outer space, where is the final frontier?

Many believe that it lies within, under our own skin.

Professional artist Valerie Winslow of Santa Rosa was so captivated by the traveling “Body Worlds” exhibit in 2005 that she spent three days drawing and sketching “among dead bodies in L.A.”

“It’s a chance to see a realm that is normally off-limits,” she said of the 3-D exhibit of human cadavers in motion. “And it ignites this primal curiosity.”

Winslow is no stranger to human anatomy. As a figurative fine artist and instructor for the past 30 years, she has taught herself the intricacies of how bones and muscles attach, what they look like and how they move.

More recently, she condensed that body of knowledge into an instruction manual, “Classic Human Anatomy: The Artist’s Guide to Form, Function and Movement,” released in January by Watson-Guptill.

The hardcover book has caught the attention of both the art and medical worlds, garnering glowing reviews that describe it as “a lavish masterpiece” and “a gold mine of important information.”

But the book also appeals to art lovers, with 800 beautifully rendered anatomical drawings, diagrams and charts, hand-drawn by Winslow herself. The artist made the anatomical drawings on brown toned paper using graphite pencils, pastels and white chalk.

For the past 20 years, Winslow has served as the Anatomy Coordinator and a full-time faculty member at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University’s School of Fine Arts, where she teaches artistic anatomy.

As a teacher, Winslow learned how to simplify anatomy, taking the muddy jargon of the medical world and clarifying it with layman’s terms.

“All of this is easy for medical students,” she said. “But it’s gobbledygook for artists ... I say, ‘Trust me. I’ll walk you through it. It’s not that bad.’”

In the book, Winslow walks the reader through all the major bone and muscle groups, tendons and ligaments. Her drawings wash away the blood vessels and other assorted gunk that appear in most medical illustrations.

“I look at it from the point of view of an artist,” she said. “I want to clear away the clutter.”

Winslow first decided to write an anatomy book in the early 1980s, while teaching at the California Institute of the Arts and the Art Center College of Design in Southern California. “The students nudged me to do the book, and they gave suggestions along the way,” she said. “My female students in particular felt I was an inspiring role model because I went into a field rarely tread by women.”

One key suggestion from students was to include diagrams of the movements of each muscle. That piece of visual information was missing in all of the artistic anatomy books in Winslow’s extensive collection.

“Most books just described it, and each description was confusing,” Winslow said. “Some kinesiology books had drawings, but the drawings were bad.”

Winslow is especially proud of the book’s glossary, which lists all the anatomical terms, gives the pronunciation and description for each and traces its origins in Latin or Greek, then gives synonyms for each. While researching the book, she noticed that many of the muscles and bones had been renamed over the years, sometimes multiple times.

“This was causing a lot of confusion,” she noted. “One of my key goals was to gather as many of the synonyms as I could and put them in the glossary.”

As a young woman, Winslow’s passion for anatomy was first ignited when she stumbled across a book of drawings by the Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo.

Amid the self-expressive art of the 1970s, the idea of artistic anatomy had been dismissed as passé. But Winslow was drawn to it as a figurative foundation, so she started studying it on her own.

One of her mentors, Lorser Feitelson, showed her how to complement her knowledge of anatomy with the classic canons of figurative proportion, rhythm and grace. Techniques such as the rhythm of form keep drawings from looking like medical illustrations. “You look at the pose and see the flow of energy, and you exaggerate it,” she explained. “The technique started with the Greeks.”

Once she understood the basics of anatomy and the aesthetics of drawing, Winslow was able to draw out of her head. That freed her up to make compositional changes on her own, without having to hire a model.

“Knowledge gives you ultimate freedom,” she said. “Not every artist will need that skill, but most will, especially the animators.”

Over the years, Winslow has worked on animated films and has trained Pixar animators in artistic anatomy. Her keen eye is quick to notice when an animator has not done their anatomy homework. One digital sequence in a Harry Potter film, for example, made her cringe.

“Someone on a broom was thrown off and was kicking around,” she said. “The way the joints of the knee were moving looked fake.”

When art students have a firm grasp of anatomy, Winslow added, they are often better at inventing their own non-traditional style. “It gives them more authority about their work,” she said. “They are more artistically fit.”

After a lifetime of study, it took Winslow seven months to write and illustrate a sample chapter of her book. Her plan was to shop the book around while working on the rest of the chapters.

“I was hoping for rejection for three years, and by then, I’d have it done,” she said.

It didn’t quite work out that way. The very first publisher called her back within two days and gave her the thumbs up. Unable to take a sabbatical, she put her nose to the grindstone.

For the next three years, she slept three or four hours a night. When she wasn’t teaching, she put in 18- to 20-hour days on the book. She even had to go into debt. “I had to hire models and take photoshop lessons,” she said. “I went through two computers, three scanners and three printers.”

But in the end, the meticulous artist is pleased with the masterpiece. And she’s considering a second book that will explain how to draw figures in certain positions and movements.

“They only allotted 304 pages,” she said. “And I ran out of pages.”

You can reach Staff Writer Diane Peterson at 521-5287 or diane.peterson@pressdemocrat.com.