I survived, but my delusions didn’t.
I had fancied that models lived in 1930s bohemia. Man Ray. Kiki de Montparnasse. Opium-scented ateliers. And me, silk-robed and saucy. The whole hokey shebang.
Of course, modeling is anything but. It’s low-paying work in badly-heated dull gray basements, cracking my back in 20-minute contortions. No wonder so many models are out-of-work actors or homeless. Mostly you’re taken as a collection of angles, colors, skin and muscle to be rendered.
Not that this made me a comrade in the sacred cause of Aht, dahling. The distance between viewers and model could hardly have been greater. In some schools, I wasn’t even allowed to speak.
The artists’ discomfort with nudity was palpable. Respect meant ignoring us. And paying $10 an hour.
When I got the chance to quit modeling for illustration work, I didn’t hesitate.
As an illustrator, I’m on the other side of the sketchpad. I sit in those same dull room and draw naked people. It feels more like a gym membership than anything to do with Man Ray.
So, it’s with great joy that I see the few breaks in the grim façade that is life study.
The first time I saw what drawing nudes could be was at the Society of Illustrators, on the Upper East Side. It’s an old gentlemen’s club, with scotch, red velvet walls and chauvinism. I love its oak-lined bar and Rockwell portraits. I love its self-conscious archaism.
Mostly I love its Jazz and Sketch sessions. Each Tuesday, and the third Thursday of every month, the packed, drunken room (the Society members drink like it’s 1925) draws models like sword-swallower Heather Holiday and burlesque queen Dirty Martini. And there’s Lex Grey singing hot, husky jazz, sweet and sinful. It all puts me in a mind of Toulouse Lautrec and the mostly-lost kinship between theater folk and artists.
More recently, Michael Alan and Dana Gurfel founded the Williamsburg Drawathon, which started in November and looks like it’s going to go monthly. Set in the velvet-draped Fix Café in Williamsburg, the Drawathon is like a seven-hour-long ‘60 happening. The models pose in scenes—Dark Opera, Biblical and such. There’s the sense of liveliness and connection and, well, romance that was always so absent in my posing.
Then there’s the Pratt Drawathon, the granddaddy of alt-life drawing. It happens in April—the date’s always uncertain until a few days before. The Drawathon inspires the war stories and cultish addiction of protest rallies, but with none of the protest. Twelve models, 12 hours and unlimited caffeine. The ramshackle Pratt building becomes an orgy of African drumming, and the whole thing reeks of sex, adrenaline and sleepless nights. If art, a mostly boring and solitary pursuit, ever becomes shamanism, it’s here.
It ends with 20 naked models dancing slowly; the only light the sun rising over Brooklyn.
The first time the Pratt Drawathon ended, I nearly cried. I was drunk and caffeine-sick and sleepless—and leaving the New York you always read about, and rarely, if ever, encounter.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School, my own attempt to resurrect that silk-clad and saucy world that made me go to art school. It’s at Williamsburg’s Lucky Cat. We drink, draw greasepaint-clad models and throw contests where you can earn more drink.
The standard life drawing class denies models their humanity—and denies nekkidness its due. Maybe that has to do with artists’ three-centuries-long drive for respectability. But when I see a bare-assed boy on a model stand, I don’t see abstract, platonic solids. And when I was posing, I didn’t want to be reduced to that, either. It seemed more respectful to acknowledge me as a possessor of breasts and personality.
And that’s what life drawing at its best does. It admits that there’s something exciting about drawing these naked people. And that they’re people after all.
