Observations at a Life Drawing Class: Part One and Two
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
I went to a life drawing class the other day. It the first time I’d been to one of these things. When I walked in, a girl, about 20, was sitting on a chair wearing a blue bathrobe. Her hair was buzzcut short; she had a few tattoos on her legs and one between her breasts. A bunch of old men with sketchbooks sauntered in after me. One guy had a bushy, Mario Kartesque mustache and wore a Livestrong bracelet. Another guy’s eye twitched.
I didn’t know where to sit or what to do. I paid my $13 and sat on the side. I pulled out my pad of newsprint and sharpened a charcoal pencil. I expected like a lesson. I expected someone to teach me how to shade the Illiac crest.
The girl paced back and forth. She looked a little nervous. She offered me the easel that she was going to lean against when she did her poses.
“No thanks,” I said. I told her I’d go in the back–in the far, far back and do my little sketching.
The instructor offered us strong, cheap-smelling coffee that he’d brewed in a pot that hadn’t been washed in years. Lines of old coffee formed like a 300-year-old oak tree’s rings. It was like Command Sergeant Rivera’s ass coffee that he used to keep brewing 24/7 in Battalion Headquarters–the kind that leaves flecks in your colon that don’t come out until the undertaker cuts you up and flushes you with embalming fluid at the end of days.
The instructor told us we could drink the coffee from red plastic cups–the kind you’d find towering next to kegs. When no one took him up on his offer, he slapped his hands together and said, “Ok, two ones and three threes.”
The girl hit the timer which was her cell phone. She took off her bathrobe–gingerly.
One of the old guys coughed. Another guy held up a small stick and closed one eye as if he was replastering a wall.
The woman’s body wasn’t beautiful in the traditional sense, but I’m sure someone liked it. Every time she turned around and showed her rear, the instructor would sip his burned coffee and nod. “Nice pose,” he’d say. “Very, very nice.”
I had a hard time with things. One minute is ridiculous. Then three was better. After a series of poses, the woman would step off the podium (which was covered with a quilt to offer some sort of comfort) and then put her bathrobe back on. The class was three hours long. After we got to the 15 minute poses, I said enough was enough and left. Three hours is too long to draw someone naked. I was the first person to leave.
Part Two:
I returned two weeks later.
I was late and was stuck with the worst positon–a desk way in the back that was missing half a leg. The same people from last time were there. The guy with the Telly Savalas hat all rolled up like a condom; the kid with his “art” shirt on inside out; the midlife crisis woman who was there to study beauty while tilting at her life’s windmills, fat watercolor brush in hand; and the proctor who again offered us his burned coffee.
The people were all in the same places; it was like the 5:15 mass at Saint Agnes. People just go to the same place and do the same thing, I suppose. Right?
Our study tonight was, again, a woman. She didn’t take all her clothes off like the buzzcut study last time. She left her panties on which made no sense to me, but I’m not the one standing there sprawled out naked so who am I to pass judgement. She did her 5 x 1-minutes with grace. It was cold in the room and she held her form like a champ. I clawed my way around her figure–making broad lines and then erasing them. I had learned my lesson this time, however. I didn’t care about the face or the patterns of the quilt. It’s all about lifting the charcoal at just the right time–forming the right line; lifting the pencil precisely when it should be lifted.
“Isn’t the body amazing?” I asked the old man next to me. “It’s enigmatic,” I said.
He covered up what he was doing.
I sipped the burned coffee and nodded. I was buzzing a bit. Nakedless is alluring.
After the 15-minute pose, it was time for an extended break. The model put on stretch pants and a sweater. She walked over and looked at everyone’s art. Someone chatted her up. She hopes to someday open her own studio. It’s going to be in Coatsville which conjures up discarded 40-ounce bottles and strip malls in my mind.
“Where do you work now?”
She works at Applebees.
I think about her delivering fizzlin’ fries and microwaved nuggets of bread and cheese.
“Applebees in West Chester or Exton?”
Exton.
She offers a critique to someone who doesn’t appear to want one. She looks at my splotched paint debacle upside down.
She doesn’t say anything; she makes no gesture other than to turn away.
The proctor tells her it’s time for 1 x 20-minutes pose. Just as she stretches her arms and legs out in front of us, I slap my materials together and leave.
