'Dear Naked Stranger'

When the first nude model came into the studio and removed his black compression shorts, quickly and efficiently, gasps and shocked laughs echoed around the room. As with the first shock of cold jumping into a pool, we were taken aback by the sudden appearance of fleshiness. Some of us turned away; modesty is only a learned instinct, after all. The instructor chuckled, unsurprised by our reactions. I looked, and then kept looking.

Four others were enrolled in this class at London’s National Gallery, led by portrait artist Adele Wagstaff. I was the youngest by at least two decades. On the first day, our cohort smiled uncertainly at one another, shuffling our feet and our belongings. “Blistering out there, isn’t it?” (It was 26°C; by British standards, Saharan).

In grueling HIIT session form, we stood behind our easels and did three rounds of twenty-minute sketches, or five-minute scrambles, or hour-long drawings, our incipient artistic sensibilities not yet accustomed to the tolls of looking for so long. My arms and calves ached. In these initial sketches, my light, wavering lines depicting the model’s penis reflected my inhibition; I was also anxious about doing the model any injustice via length, shape, or shade. I quickly realized that the other injustices I was inflicting on the model’s form, through proportion, space, or line, were far larger, and so capturing the exactitudes of his genitalia soon disappeared beyond my scope of worry.

The model was not overly muscular, but still, you could see the ridges of tone where light and shadow hit. He had blondish hair across his shoulders and chest, extending downwards towards his gently rounded belly. No matter what I could possibly think during the sketching process, he continued standing straight, staring fixedly at a point in the distance.

In between poses, the model made no movements to cover himself up. He was postulated just as he would have been while wearing clothes, leaning casually on the prop blocks, stretching out his quads, even manspreading a little, while chatting with the instructor about what was to come on the schedule. Any questions we directed towards him were asked demurely at first, eyes cast away. Art questions our arbitrary binaries: we were unsteadied by the constant shift from the model as the unwavering object of our focused attention, to just another human being in the shared room. But why not both?

In between sketches, we wandered within the Galleries, pressing between droves of tourists and sweating Londoners alike to see Michelangelo’s unfinished The Entombment, and attempt replicas in our sketchbooks. Throughout the course, the live models would imitate poses similar to those found in the oil-finished paintings, and through the rhythm of practice, we would get closer to capturing the full figure of the subject.

After twenty minutes of staring, and as we began to shuffle back towards the studio, the model complimented my sketchbook iteration of Christ’s pose. We got to talking. He, like the other models (I would get to learn in time), had gotten into modelling through word of a friend. According to him, he’d first been terrified of the concept, not having felt at home in his body then. I understood the feeling. He’d been referred to a gig— and on a whim, knowing nothing else, simply decided to go for it. Since then, he told me he’d written a book on how transformative the experience had been for him, and how it led to a career, ongoing for several years, of standing before knit-browed students and artists alike with their pencils and brushes. And in doing so, he found himself appreciating his own body as art itself.

ii. the female nude; social and societal permissions around voyeurism

Women’s bodies appear to me first as steamy shapes in the bathhouse. Onsens are one of Japan’s national treasures; I remember dipping in mineral-scented springs up to my shoulders, trying to keep my towel-wrapped head out of the water. Women everywhere. Sluicing away soap at the pre-onsen shower stations; murmuring as they soaked, watching their young children from a distance; shivering as they danced back inside from the snowy outdoor pools, gripping onto each other’s arms so as not to slip on the damp floors.

The bathhouse bodies of all kinds, all sizes, all ages, lounged about like housecats. There was no performance needed about the way you walked or lowered yourself into the water; nobody gave a shit. So long as you kept quiet and respectful and considerate of everyone’s space, you could soak as long as you wanted and just be, half-aware only of the heat creeping back into your limbs, inch by inch.

When we met the female model on the second day, beautiful was what I thought. The model had broad, athletic shoulders; she had soft curves, and she wasn’t a size zero. Unlike with drawing the male model, I didn’t shrink from tracing the lines of her nipple or breast, or feel awkward watching. Naturally, having faced myself all my life, these parts are familiar to me. Fluidity is the word our Day 2 instructional booklet used; the model was a dancer, and her poses held both rigor and grace.


Drawn on Day 2; comté and white pencil. One of my favorites to come out of this class.
I found myself watching with a fascination that wasn’t tied to desire or to criticism or any of the markers we typically find ourselves attached to when considering naked people. I cannot fully say I watched with absolutely nothing from the outside world reflected in my gaze, for the stool, and the pencil, and the air-conditioning, and the coffee breath were all very much real; perhaps gone unnoticed, but just as integral to the making as anything else.

There, as she blinked, looking out in profile, as I tried to follow the curve and fold of her belly, the expanse of her thigh, the shades in her back marking her scapulae, unconcealed freckles and moles, I was entranced.

In emulation of the Carracci cartoons (as shown above), charcoal was the primary medium we used on this second day; I like it because it permits mess. You start off by scraping your stick of black across the blank page, smearing it with your hand to create a grey, foglike background. Adele then got us into the practice of squinting towards the model, in order to determine the most defined areas of light and dark, before using the eraser to sculpt away in negative.

The idea is to start seeing bodies as shapes first; you don’t even have to have a fixed image in your head at all to start creating. When we look at these masterworks, the tendency might be to spring back, hesitant. How the fuck did they do that; how could I possibly do that? Look closer; it’s all just lines, play of light and shadow. That’s all it takes to start.

Female nudes have passed through periods of being marked historically taboo, we learned; one of the most famously controversial was Diego Velázquez’s The Rokeby Venus. “The portrayal of nudes was officially discouraged in 17th-century Spain. Works could be seized or repainting demanded by the Inquisition, and artists who painted licentious or immoral works were often excommunicated, fined, or banished from Spain for a year.” (Wikipedia)

The critic Natasha Wallace discerns ‘The Rokeby Venus’ as “an image of self-absorbed beauty”; at first glance, the reclining Venus appears to be admiring herself, assisted by her winged son, Cupid. But Venus cannot be looking at herself in the mirror, because the viewer can see her face reflected in it—upon closer reflection (pun intended) we come to recognize that she is instead looking at us. There’s a timeless comfort in the way she lounges, at ease in herself.

When we think of the female nude now, maybe pornography is the first thing that comes to mind. Bodies are more accessible than ever today. I could fit together any number of randomly-generated words in any search engine and surely within a few seconds, a video featuring people I have never met would be spit out matching these specified parameters, costing nothing but the sanctity of my portable device and my own finite time.

Voyeurism is infinitely encouraged in this space of moneymaking content creation and ‘man on the street’ videos; we are incentivized to do nothing but look, jumping from one series of flashing, fleshy images to another with minimal engagement. To that, porn is more accessible to our generation now than in any other time; addictions begin young and are commonplace. You can’t protect your kids from everything they might see on the Internet. Recording and filming without consent becomes standard practice; views and likes justify everything, it seems, just enough to distract.

Within this space of primarily parasocial engagement with others’ bodies, being held in confined quiet with just one person to consider feels like respite. The more time passed, the more we were urged to look for in our drawings. Your eye follows, again, the slope of the model’s back; three— no, three and a half head-lengths away, there’s the hill of her palm, arch of her fingertips. There’s the crease in her belly, the tilt of her thigh.


iii. draw from life
Once, I had considered saying yes to the ad that called for volunteer models at my university’s art department— but only for all of ten seconds. The models were to be paid about nineteen dollars per hour: a fortune, compared to the eleven-dollar wages that characterise most of the on-campus jobs available to undergraduates. My weighing of the job’s pros and cons stopped once I considered the hard, immutable fact that these strangers would be peers, and that in itself was frightening.

In a class like the National Gallery’s, you see these strangers for one stretch of three days and then potentially never cross paths again; you don’t even have to learn their names, if you don’t want to. Within the campus bubble, even if the total enrolment number crosses the twenty thousands, there is every possibility of running into someone and have them blink back at you, before situational recognition kicks in and you realize you know their face from when you stood naked for an hour or two and let them see your ass for free.

The range of ages in the class was a blessing, in this respect. We know the mindsets and typical thought patterns of our peer group better than any other. We think we know exactly what they might think, what comparisons they could draw, kind or unkind. As a kid, I was self-conscious even in the locker rooms, opting to sneak-change discreetly behind my towel while the others held loud, full conversations wearing nothing.

Posing for strangers to see all of you, there’s a vulnerability and simultaneous defiance in the act. The body is not bothered with our inclinations, conflicting and underwhelming, to lie and cheat as we may think ourselves capable. Just a body, just a mass.

There are some days when I feel heavy in myself; when I feel I don’t truly know what I am doing in this body. I trace my fingertips over the inside of my forearm and notice the tickling sensation that arises. That is me. My hair feels as though it is making an effort to hang in my face. The sensation of doing things helps. I try to focus on what it feels like to sit outside, the wind chilling my ears and face, to feel the warm glint of a disappearing sun for just one second.

It’s been more than a month since this class, and I’ve drawn a lot since then. It’s also been a lot of fun observing bodies in public; the way they move, how functional they are. Modelling is far more physically demanding than one might realize. Twenty minutes of not moving, limbs postured in awkward angles, is hard to bear. When I asked the female model whether it was strenuous at all, she responded yes immediately. It’s exhausting both physically, mentally. It takes a lot out of you.