I spent my summer studying nude portraiture in Greece

While you were wasting your summer in a finance internship sophomore Lily, went to study art on the remote Greek island of Paros.

The second year signed up for a semester an island art school to learn about color, live drawing and nude portraiture in the Mediterranean – which she says gave her a “toolbox of different ways to look at life”.

We sat down to talk to Lily, who probably had the best summer out of anyone anyone at Harvard, about her island experiences.

So what sort of training did you get at the Aegean Art School you went to?
Basically, it’s a really traditional program. It’s this tiny art school situated on this Greek island called Paros, run by Americans, which attracts people from all over the world.

There are maybe 20-25 students any given semester, so it’s really personalized and individualized, and you get a lot of one-on-one time with the teachers, which was amazing. But they take a really traditional approach, which is really interesting.

They start from this basis of… sort of combating this notion that all art has to be super original. There’s this post-modern, contemporary idea that everything has to be breaking down some boundary in some way.

But they, instead of indulging that, turn it around and look back and say, hey look, beauty is something that is really built through the play of light on paint, and the play of color and building up the skills and the technique to be able to manipulate your medium just so, and capitalize on the little subtleties that make a painting or a sculpture or a photograph really crisp and precise and perfect, rather than attempting to do some insane conceptual categorical deconstruction of the entirety of art ever, which has no staying power.

What about the nude portraiture you did?
So, basically, during my first week of art school, the school has a really great art history program where we live in this Twelfth Century villa, outside of Pistoia and we go visit different art all over Italy every day, and really study all the Renaissance painters, which was phenomenal.

While we were living in this villa, one of my friends, who is this phenomenal woman who at the time was an arts journalist, and is now running galleries in London, she was really into figure photography, and she needed models.

So on the first evening, she asked me and my new friends if we would pose for her, and she’s 25, and she’s lived this cool, extraordinarily badass life, and I was only 18, fresh out of high school, and I wanted to push myself past my comfort zone, so I volunteered myself, and then a couple days later, she was like, “Hey, are we gonna do this? Let’s do this right now. Go take your clothes off.”

And I was like, “Ah! I am not ready, I didn’t shave my legs this morning, and I don’t feel comfortable.” But I was so desperate to be the kind of person who is comfortable with my body, and willing to strip just for art’s sake, that I just did it. And I took off all my clothing.

It was uncomfortable for about the first 30 seconds. But then you adapt. You get comfortable, and you realize, OK, this is my body. For the entirety of that first shoot I was shaking, and I think there’s this strange sort of intimacy between the photographer and the model, especially when someone’s naked in that situation, because you’re not that person’s lover, they have no subjective affection, they may not even find you beautiful.

In some ways the model-photographer relationship is fraught with professional customs. And your body is just another body for the sake of the composition, and that can almost be liberating, because you think, I’m just another body, I’m just another person, it doesn’t matter if I don’t have body hair, it’s fine. And I definitely had more personal shoots where I felt seen, which was amazing.

I think I really did get comfortable with myself and my body through this process of just repeatedly doing this over the course of the entire year. We would just wake up at sunrise, and drive to the other side of the island, and somebody would strip and somebody would take photos with a film camera. We would dive in the freezing Aegean Sea at sunrise for each other.

It was just this weird sense of camaraderie, where we were all willing to expose ourselves to our friends to get the shots they needed. But almost out of the camaraderie, out of us being that comfortable with each other, that was when the art started to get really good.

So was there a lot of emphasis on technique?
We did a lot of very hands-on technical skill training. For a couple of hours a week we would do life drawing with a live model, lots of short gesture poses and the drawing teacher was the most brilliant instructor I’ve ever had.

She would take us through little exercises just to see more. She would teach us how to capture mass, so we did a lot of scribbling and blocking, trying to understand the way the body was situated. We did energy lines trying to capture the movement of the figure.

She would give us basically this huge arsenal of techniques for solving out, translating the three-dimensional, or even four-dimensional with movements, existence of the model onto the two-dimensional page, while capturing all the nuance of those four dimensions.

So by the end of the semester, we’d just built up this toolbox of different ways to look at life, and translate it into something that we could, I don’t even want to say capture, but more like express.

Was there more focus on realism or more expressive?
I don’t know if I want to draw a line there. I think of the drawings I did for that school as poetry in a way. It wasn’t that it had to be true to life, it was that it had to be fluent. Every part had to work with every other part.

There’s no objective, like this is what our eyes are seeing, even our brain is constantly doing an interpretation of it. So I think drawing is figuring out which parts and which interpretations to highlight so that your rendering of your impression of something can translate the most powerfully to whatever your viewer is.

What did you learn about yourself?
I think my art practice during that year was something that really sat in the middle of eastern and western ideas of practice, because my drawing instructor, had this quote from a painter, I can’t remember who it was right now, but who on his deathbed was like, “If I just had ten more years, then I could be a real painter.” And I think that’s kind of a trick of that sort of thinking around skills. You never have enough time to perfect things. What you really learn is to judge yourself very subjectively.

There is no objective measure of whether you are good or you are not good. There’s only the moment you get better at something, the more flaws you can see, and the more you realize you have yet to learn. I think my teacher gave a great model for understanding this, which I love. It’s like, you move through these phases, which are, you start being unconscious and incompetent – so, you suck at something and you don’t know you suck at it, and then you become conscious of your incompetence.

And then you become conscious of your competence – so you can do the thing, but you have to think really hard about it – and then you become unconsciously competent – so you don’t have to think about it, you can just do it. But the moment you become unconsciously competent, there’s something else that you realize you suck at. So it’s this constant push and pull.

And I think I learned how to think of my life not as this thing where I could check all of these boxes, and just be done with X goal and Y goal and Z goal, but a thing where I would be constantly striving toward something as a sort of stasis, a constant state of trying to improve myself, whether it be in drawing, or writing, or whatever endeavor I chose. There’s no end goal there, there’s just continually honing with no final outcome of success.