Howcome so many arts are of chubby body?

Question

When I look at drawing, it's almost always chubby or old body. It's somewhat common in charcoal art as well.

What's up with this? I'm wondering because I usually perfer to draw slender beautiful body instead of a chubby or old people body. Hope someone can tell me why there's not more art of young fit body?

Answer 1

Simply stated, fuller (chubby) figures are much easier to draw. The curves of the full figure make for more interesting compositions, as do the wrinkled features of the elderly. Also, women are easier to draw than men, who are much more linear in shape.

Answer 2

Yeah, back in the day it was all cool to have a little fat on you, like in the middle ages and the Renaisance. However, if you look to Greek art you will notice that all those people are quite in good shape. These are just matters of different conceptions of beauty. As for chubby people in drawings today... well, it is probably a greater artistic challenge to illustrate fat and wrinkles than it is to illustrate a perfecltly slender person. Furthermore, remember that art is not soley drawn for aesthetic purposes and the artist may find something intriuging in drawing people that are not quite beautiful.

Answer 3

Artists usually like to draw the various conditions of the human body. The perfect, slender body is much too pervasive in the performing arts, and in modeling in America. There isn't much tolerance for any other type of body, except in the case of character actors and actresses. So, the artist is also interested in drawing different body types that represent all the interesting facets of humanity, to which the average observer can relate in his own life. Of course, everyone has their own preferences of body type, but in reality, how dull life would be if everyone were the same

Answer 4

All my artist friends and I find a sagging or aged body (or face) far more interesting to draw or paint than the perfect young woman. There's life, experience, and character there. My own favorite bronze sculpture is a bag lady. The slender beautiful body etc you describe, however lovely, is a blank page - or at best displays the grace of a cat or other natural things. Admirable, but drawing it teaches one nothing about art or life. As my 13-y-o grandson wrote on his T-shirt "Talk to old people - they know cool stuff"

Answer 5

Many charcoal and pencil drawers (as well as painters) like to play with light and texture. A perfect, fit body tends to be a smaller task than an aged or full-figured model. When you have more textures (wrinkles, curves, whatever) and light issues to deal with, you have more challenges to face. In the conceptual realm, there tends to be more metaphoric interpretations in the less "ideal" figures. Nothing against Jay M. the art teacher, but on the contrary, photo realistic figure drawings of the "less perfect" tend to be more difficult and more challenging than the "smooth" figure.

Answer 6

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, also popular forms of art are as well.
In most classical art work, as many people have stated, the women are curvy or 'chubby' because that was considered beatuiful at the time. Just like being pale was once considered beautiful and now everybody's destrying their skin to get a tan.
Also the popular forms of art have changed as well, when thoes paintings were created, or charcoal drawings, they didn't have photography or film. That was how they captured images. now adays we have cameras, all kinds of them and that's how most images are captured.
The popular medium now is digital photography, the 'ideal' woman is a young healhy tanned one, so you will find millions of photographs of healhy tanned women.

Answer 7

Yup we are living in an age of unrealistic body images. No wonder so many have anorexia/bulimia and other disorders. Everyone is madly trying to make their body look like a mannequin. "Real" people just aren't so perfect. Ever notice on BBC people are much more realistic? Everyone is not pretty or thin or perfect. They don't all have prefect straight white teeth or perfect complexions. It's quite nice to see real humans on TV sometimes. Calista Flockheart and other teeny tiny semi-women are the freaks and rather ugly being so bony and shapeless. Real women have curves and even *gasp* bulges because that's what skin does!!

Answer 8

Because standards of beauty change. Marylin Monroe would likely be regarded as chunky by modern sensibilities, and Mae West would probably be considered huge.

Notions of beauty have varied widely across time and cultures. Consider the nineteenth century's taste for the extreme hourglass figure and their unfortunate habit of using corsets to literally bind the body to fit that ideal. Women were actually killed from those things. The Chinese had a taste for tiny feet which led to foot binding practices for centuries that left women's feet hideously deformed and unable to walk. That curious inclination has only recently gone out of style.

Heck, chubby is nothing...

Answer 9

Back in the day woman were thicker. And that was a fashionable look of the times. It showed others that they were of wealth, and healthy. It's kinda the way we look at how women dedicating themselves to making themselves look attractive.

Answer 10

Partly because body beauty standards have changed. Some eras of history have thought that plump women were voluptuous and not simply, "fat and ugly"