Six or seven years ago a friend asked sculptor Alison Enslin to join a figure drawing group.

“I don’t draw,” she said.

Still, they needed one more person to be able to afford to hire a model, so Enslin decided to help out.

“I tried it and I really liked it,” she said over tea in her Milbridge home. “It was entirely different, entirely new. I had never done anything like that.”

On any given week small groups throughout the state gather around a model to study the muscles, skin and form of the human body. Some are professional artists who will use their sketches in preparation for paintings, sculpture or finished drawings. Others, such as Enslin, are amateurs who are satisfied with the process of sketching and the camaraderie that the groups afford.

The work of 50 of these artists is on view in “The Figure Revealed” through Feb. 29 at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport. Artists Anthony Shostak, Nancy Morgan-Barnes, Peter Fogg, Lee Silverton and Jack Montgomery will give a panel discussion on “The Figure in Contemporary Art” at 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 1, at the CMCA. Genetta McLean, who juried the show with painter Joel Babb, will moderate.

“The idea behind the show is to highlight works by people who draw regularly from a figure,” said Robyn Holman, who organized the statewide juried exhibition last fall for the Atrium Gallery on the University of Southern Maine’s Lewiston-Auburn College campus. “They go through an exercise which is centuries-old of all getting together in a group. There’s a certain social element involved.”

That social element appealed to Enslin, for whom sculpting is usually a solitary activity. Though her whimsical sculptures bear little resemblance to her Matisse-like figure sketches, she intends to find a way to work the drawing element into her clay pieces. Her involvement with the group has influenced her work in other ways, as well.

“Everyone uses different materials, so you get to use a wide range of styles and materials, and you steal ideas from other people,” she said, laughing.

When the show was assembled, Holman was surprised by the diversity of the work. The pieces range from quick sketches, such as Enslin’s, to full-scale oil paintings, such as Janet Manyan’s “Mary,” which depicts a seated nude looking off in the distance.

“I actually expected a lot of the poses to be similar,” Holman said. “I was really impressed by the range, not only in the poses, but artists using different mediums. You never felt like you were looking at the same thing twice.”

Even if you were. Several pieces in “The Figure Revealed” depict the same person in the same pose with vastly different results.

“You can get that range in one group,” Enslin said. “People work so differently.”

But one thing remains the same – the tradition that these artists uphold. One of the oldest life drawing groups in Maine has been in existence for more than 40 years, first in Saco, and later in Berwick. But the concept of drawing live nudes dates back to the 1400s, McLean writes in the exhibition literature. In 1435, Leon Battista Alberti declared that the human figure “was best mastered directly, unclad.”

It’s a tenet that rings true today, as well. Figure drawing is an integral, basic foundation course in many academic art programs, and, as the CMCA exhibit shows, among practicing artists. In many cases the resulting drawings are a means to an end, but in “The Figure Revealed,” they are celebrated in their own right.

“One of the reasons that appealed to me is that these are sketches – people were not intending them to be exhibited. They were working on something, practicing,” said Holman, who plans to do another “Figure Revealed” show in two years. “The idea of exhibiting these works to me seemed exciting.”

The Center for Maine Contemporary Art is located at 162 Russell Ave. in Rockport and is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday; 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. For information, call 236-2875 or visit www.artsmaine.org. Kristen Andresen can be reached at 990-8287 or kandresen@bangordailynews.net.