Take it off, take it all off!
12:33 p.m.
I have a modicum of artistic talent. I can draw and sculpt and paint to a certain degree, and I have a good eye for visual composition. While a person has to have a certain amount of natural talent to do these things, it sure helps if he takes a class or two along the way, and I am no exception to that recommendation. The first drawing/painting class I took after graduation from high school was a night course offered one day a week when I was working as a legal secretary for a father/son law firm in Toronto, when I was a tender 19 or so. We worked mostly in acrylics painting still lifes and various other dead things, but I received a shock one evening as I arrived late for class and everyone was already hard at work drawing something perched on a desk in the middle of the room.
At first I thought it was a mannequin, then I realized that the object in question possessed pubic hair and was actually a petite, slim girl (who turned out to be a dancer when she wasn’t modeling for artists) in a rather uncomfortable-looking pose. I quickly got out my drawing materials and went to work, having gotten over my initial shock, and rather enjoyed working from a living body, as opposed to the various dead things we had been drawing up till then.
My next encounter with a naked person was when the teacher hired another model, also female but neither petite nor slim, to strut her stuff in front of us. This girl was fat at a time when not that many young people were fat (we’re talking 1976 here) and I was very uncomfortable drawing her. My first few attempts made her look rather svelte, but towards the end of the session, I really got into it and made her more and more voluptuous until she herself, upon going around the classroom looking at people’s renditions of her, remarked that I had made her look pregnant. I refrained from saying what was foremost on my mind.
There was an interesting phenomenon surrounding that woman. She was not particularly attractive, leastways with her clothes off. Between poses she wandered around the classroom dressed in a striped caftan, and even though we had just been looking at her completely starkers a moment before, everyone ended up staring down her cleavage.
The next and last model I drew in that class was a young man, a very good looking young man actually, whose poses kept forcing his figure off my page. When I first started drawing there I had kept my sketches small and neat, but as time went by, they got bigger and bigger and my teacher complimented me on my use of the entire space. Now with this fellow, I needed bigger paper.
Anyway, as he was posing above us, I was constantly looking up and down (we drew on desks, not easels which would have been a lot easier) and developing a nasty crick in my neck which I attempted to knead out with my left hand while I drew with my right. After the session was over and I was rolling up my drawings to take home, I suddenly felt hands massaging my neck and shoulders, and I chanced a glance behind me to see that the model, still totally naked, was working away at the knots that had formed while I was drawing him. I was speechless.
I did not draw a nude model for many years after that, not until I took a drawing class at the university here during the summer session about eight years ago. Our professor had hired an art student to pose extensively for us, a tall, blond young man, very good looking, very nicely built, who was extremely unabashed about his nakedness. I remember having a conversation with him before class, he completely nude, as we waited for our fellow classmates to arrive. At one point he realized he had to go pee and was about to walk out of the room into the hallway when it occurred to him that he had nothing on, so he grabbed two cushions and masked his nakedness thusly so he could make a mad dash to the can.
When I started my own university career, I actually contemplated modeling for art classes but never actually did it. I didn’t need the money that badly and I think the classes may have conflicted with my schedule. Nevertheless, I am not squeamish about naked people. In our northern cultures where we are covered up much of the time due to inclement temperatures and religious prudishness, nudity is made much of. Perhaps we need to see more of each other, not less, to get over this prejudice.
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