It's Still Life - Esther

Imagine being stared at.

Imagine being stared at by a complete stranger. Like, REALLY stared at.

Now imagine they take out a pad & pencil & start measuring you up & drawing you.

Then imagine LOTS of strangers doing the same.

Then imagine you’re NAKED.

& they’re NOT.

It’s quite weird isn’t it?

But I went to life drawing classes for years & not only was it not weird, the nudity was the least weird aspect of it.

Most life drawing classes were pretty routine affairs, often frustrating & extremely tiring. Because I’ve always worked full time, I had to attend them in holidays, or more frequently evenings. At first I went to evening classes held at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen with a co-worker. Her husband lectured there so she knew her way about. Unlike me, she’d also gone to art school & knew what to do. Going with her gave me confidence I’d never have had otherwise. In time she stopped going, but I was keen to improve & carried on. It was more enjoyable when I realised I wasn’t too bad at it. I grew to like everything about it: lugging the materials around all day, the enormous, robust easels that would nip your fingers as you adjusted them if you weren’t careful, getting there as sharp as possible to get the most straightforward model position (no-one wants to deal with foreshortening of legs/feet at 8pm), the horrible, fluorescent lighting, the smell of turps & linseed oil from the day students’ classes, the scraps of masking tape everywhere. Even the warning bell five minutes from time causing the perma-irritated janitors to hassle us into hurrying up & kicking us out had a comfortingly familiar appeal. In any group, it’s good to have a common enemy.

 

Despite occasional bitchiness, artists would be kind & highly interested in the work of others. You’d take on a reassuring tone to those less confident, pick out the things they’d done well, turn into a tutor. & if your own work was awful, they’d do the same for you & you’d brush it off with a joke or say things like, “I should’ve gone for charcoal this week,” but secretly hated yourself & your stupid drawing.

Because you had a live model, you had to consider their needs. Things like breaks, toileting, cramp & being in potentially deeply awkward positions for hours. Most tutors were careful about the model’s rights as a worker & considerate of their comfort, however I attended one oil painting class where the tutor had the model dress in a black plastic bag. It made for some exciting painting but even in as grim a summer as Aberdeen can manage it was sweaty work for the poor model. Inevitably though, models’ breaks happened just as you were getting something good down. You’d try not to look annoyed. Then the tutor would draw little marks on the floor or chair to show roughly where they were positioned. When the model came back, there was a lot of “turn your head a bit that way,” “your leg was more here,” “you’re facing the wrong direction,” “could you shift your scrotum a little to the left please?” & then I’d think about how weird it was for the models.

On the rare occasions a model was sick, you might have to draw a plaster statue or artists might take turns to sit still for the class so that the time wasn’t wasted. I did this once for – heroically – an hour. Rather than “sit,” I chose to lounge. Of course. I found it quite easy but I couldn’t imagine doing it without clothes. There can be few instances where you’re in a room & every inch of you is being scrutinised, judged, literally measured & no-one cares what you’re like as a person. As a model, no-one’s interested in your opinions, your favourite film or where you buy your bananas.

There was no idle chit-chat with a model other than during the breaks. They might ask artists how they’re getting on & some models liked to see what you’d done so far. They’d stretch a bit & the tutor might ask them if they were warm enough. Tutors would have to wrangle the tiny electric heaters towards the pose a bit. The heaters would be useful for everyone. Big rooms, high ceilings & blowy corridors for 2-3 hour classes during Scottish winter evenings were chilly at best. Sometimes my freezing fingers struggled to grasp a pencil, never mind churn out a masterpiece with it. As is proper, the heaters were strictly for models. You had paid good money to come & be miserably cold.

Now & again, a tutor would decide the class wasn’t being stretched enough & would give you “exercises.” For instance, “You have two minutes to capture this pose, using only mud & a stick – GO!” & you’d go. (This really happened). Then, “This one lasts thirty seconds! GO!” Sometimes, “You must render this pose in ninety seconds without picking up the pencil from the paper! GO!” Oh how I’d hate these nights! I’d turn up imagining having a two hour tussle with a single pose. I’d have all that time to settle into worrying about it not looking quite right for an hour before I’d realise the left arm was actually pointing down the way at an altogether sharper angle & berate myself for not having measured more carefully half an hour ago. But no, tonight you would be TAUGHT, you would be TESTED, you would have to WORK. You would have to agree with the tutor that it was all BENEFICIAL. You’d also be wasting page after page of decent cartridge paper so you learned to bring along some cheap sketching sheets in case of the occurrence of tutorial whim. Sometimes though, you’d have a whim of your own & decide you’d have to PUSH yourself. Perhaps use COLOURED paper! Or pastels! Terrible ideas, almost without exception.

I feel I’ve played down the weirdness. One class in particular was very weird but that was mostly because the model was weird. He was someone I had been at school with, someone’s brother. He had - & may still have – very tight red curls, cut closely to his head & very blue, very starey eyes. You didn’t want your eyes to meet those. He wore a dingy, slightly saggy pouch, which only emphasised his nakedness & made it weirder. I may well still have some drawings of him somewhere to prove it…shudder.

He did not speak during breaks & no-one spoke to him either. He’d even nip out of the room to god knows where wearing only his slippers & shabby dressing gown. He was not a chatty model. Several years later, when on holiday in Vienna, I saw him prancing about, head to toe in black leathers, accompanied by a surprisingly sophisticated woman & a brown dog. I tried to look away, but those eyes had fixed me – too late! Their intensity dimmed almost imperceptibly when they saw me. Worse still, he gave a little nod of recognition.

I could tell we both wished none of it had ever happened...

Some heads - which was all I was ever interested in anyway

Title borrowed from (London) Suede.


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