by cheri block sabraw
During college, Delia worked as a nude model for beginning art students enrolled in FreeHand Drawing 101. Her body, a house of layers and fat, offered rich practice in dark and light shadowing, especially for new students unaccustomed to working with charcoal.
On the raised dais in the center of the room at USC, she laid herself out and adjusted the folds over her thighs as if her excess skin were a lovely petticoat around her waist.
OK, students. Our model has arrived and disrobed. Please take your places. She will hold her pose for thirty minutes, said the instructor, a certain Dr. Aikens, well known for his own clean line drawings of the lonely people he sketched in Griffith Park and out on the beach at Santa Monica.
Today, we will be working with charcoal only. Please begin.
Making eye contact with the twenty or so people who surrounded her was one of her mind games, a little like spin-the-bottle. When her gaze landed and stopped on one of the young men, who with straight face and a seriousness of purpose, allowed his charcoal to shade in that dark shadow somewhere between her legs, she enjoyed watching him shift a bit, as she did.
For a nude model, fat is good. The more, the better, she thought, her eyes stopping to admire the small rose tattoo on her outer calf.
Besides, the twenty-five bucks she earned for disrobing and propping for several hours was worth the effort. And what effort!
First, she had to hold a pose for thirty minutes. For a 250 pounder, pointing her toes, arching her back, slinging back her head and gazing toward the heavens wasn’t easy. Today her elbows ached and her knees called out for aspirin.
In the next thirty minute segment, the teacher’s assistant, a supercilious woman named Cherylle said in casual, low tones, and now we move to a thirty-minute breast quest. Draw and shade from the navel to the neck.
Delia’s breasts had long ago acquiesced to gravity and hung down in a Polynesian sense: comfortable and nurturing. Instead of the usual symmetrical human body where arms and legs are mirrors of the other, her breasts went their own ways: one to China and one to Spain, one east and one west. You get the picture. It was during this pose that Delia would leave the room (after she had adjusted herself, of course) and in her mind’s eye, journey to Kauai where she fancied herself a Vulcan queen, admired and fanned by lowly suffering men and poor skinny women.
Her ornate crucifix, with Jesus himself in a bad way upon it, sat nestled in between those breasts in a trinity sort of way. She supposed her religious symbol confused some of the prudish coeds diligently trying to render a likeness.
I was one of those little coeds, a determined little sprite with a big ego and a sassy haircut.
I finished my drawings of Delia, packed my portfolio and charcoal, and headed back to my dorm.
USC was playing Notre Dame that weekend.
Crucifixes: there would be many.
Go Trojans.
Oh my, what psycho-erotic intensity to begin the work day with.
I am both a notorious starer (I ogle at anything that interests me with the abandon of a small child) and a charcoal drawer who has sat through hundreds of hours of live-model sketching.
I was always amazed by my own ability to disembody the model. Once I started drawing, I did not see a person but light and shade and line and negative space and weight shift.
If any of the models had actually caught my eyes and held them, i would have been freaked out.
Is staring without abandon a European thing? I have noticed in Europe that people stare with little concern, especially on buses and trains.
Here, it seems that eyes avert when one is caught looking.
At the overseas English-style (high) school I attended mostly in the 1950s in a very conservative society, the very idea of schoolboys drawing a woman sans clothes, was completely beyond the pale.
When I read your account of your art class, which I assume was in an American high school, I wondered how it fitted in, in an America of Bible-thumping Evangelicals and Family Values.
Would not gazing at an unclothed woman for many, many minutes, have sapped the moral fibre of the boys at your school, and consequently the moral fibre of the nation?
Peter Paul Reubens comes to mind… often… and at disturbingly awkward times.
Yes, Douglas. You are right, here.
Christopher,
This is a work of fiction although I did take Free Hand Drawing 101 during my college years at USC.
Perhaps I should have written this bit as a high school scene. Now that idea has potential.