Executed around 1967–70, this life study reflects Mercedes Matter’s deeply held belief that drawing from the figure was not an academic exercise but a means of discovering pictorial structure through direct observation. Made during the formative years of the New York Studio School, which Matter founded in 1964, the drawing was likely executed in front of her students as part of her teaching practice. Matter had absorbed this method from Hans Hofmann, with whom she studied and worked closely: Hofmann often demonstrated directly before his classes, using the act of drawing and painting itself as a form of instruction. Matter carried this approach into the Studio School, allowing students to witness the continual process of looking, correcting, and rebuilding that lay at the center of her practice. Here, the figure emerges through repeated, urgent charcoal lines, shifting contours, and intersecting diagonals, as though the body is being discovered rather than simply described. The drawing thus becomes both an independent work and a record of Matter’s pedagogy, embodying the Studio School’s emphasis on sustained observation, structural analysis, and the transformation of perception into form