The Emotion of Posture: A Contemporary Figurative Line Drawing

Medium: Aluminum pen on paper (developed through analog process art, including pencil sketches and paper cutting)

Subject: Women’s legs as the structural axis of fashion and silhouette

Theme: The expression of deep emotion — strength, beauty, and fragility — through posture

Artist: Visual Story Artist Kazue Shima

I think about what makes a woman’s legs compelling — their beauty, their strength, their fragility, their allure. Clothes are worn over them. Miniskirts, long dresses, trousers. Whatever the shape of the bottom, it depends on whether these legs allow it.

Unlike a top, which sits close to the face and can be influenced by it, legs are far from the face — and because of that distance, there’s no room to fake anything.

I believe a single angle of the legs can express every emotion. The turn of a knee, the bend of an ankle, strength, joy, sorrow, despair — it’s everything about how a person stands on the ground, emotionally.

Through my work as a model, I learned that it’s the hips that determine the shape running from the thigh down to the foot. It isn’t theory — the position at the body’s center decisively shapes how fabric flows and falls.

Even when hidden beneath a dress, people sense the shape of the legs extending from the hips, instinctively. The two legs that form the body line beneath a dress are the axis that holds the dress’s most beautiful shape.

I usually draw legs together with the clothes. But sometimes I want to focus only on the life carried by these two body lines. Are these legs wanting to move forward, or grieving? If moving forward, with what feeling? Sometimes the legs push the heart forward; sometimes the heart carries the legs.

I use many different methods to depict legs. Which method becomes the final work is something I decide only after seeing and feeling that particular pair of legs with my own eyes and hands.

I traced lines with pencil. I cut paper into shapes with no room to escape. Trying several techniques, I realized what I wanted wasn’t simply a beautifully shaped leg. I wanted legs with the strength to move the viewer forward — the same strength I needed to take my own next step.

The line of the aluminum pen became a shape that trusts its own forward motion. Without any hint of clothing, these legs seem to make the sound of walking, unhesitating, toward the next world — and that gives courage to everyone who sees them.