Picture a large room, white-washed walls, and a thin grey industrial carpet infused with a thousand missed drips of ink and paint, and spots of ground-in charcoal.
A haphazard ring of drawing benches look inwards from the outer edge of the room. Miles Davis bleats and bops a beat from the beat era.
A middle-aged man, wearing a sweater than fit well twenty years earlier struts around the room, looking over shoulders and making barely audible critiques under bushy eyebrows. He twitches to the tempo, his hair, thick at the back yet retreated from the mountaintop, sways a little as he surveys the perimeter. He was cool once back when he and his beloved trumpeter were young lions. Now he’s a toothless old tiger, carrying a torch for coolness while hiding misogyny and old guy bitterness inside his art practice. He’s now a drinker, coasting towards his retirement. His paintings are in the national gallery in Ottawa and he still gets invited to lots of parties and openings, but teaching pays the rent and keeps him surrounded with young blood and a kind of fandom that rewards him with free beer on pub nights.
In the centre of the room, the underpaid male model sits on a low dais; all tight rib cage and muscular tension. He’s a blonde Adonis with unwashed hair, reclining with flexed triceps and shoulders. He’s almost perfect except for missing the front half of his right foot. A living damaged sculpture, he models when he can and works in construction the rest of the time.
His appreciators spy his details like falcons scanning a field. Skin stretched tightly over bone, a little fat bound in the gluts, and on the lower back, scars near the lumbar vertebrae that resemble stretch marks. Beautiful contours are idealized, and scars and blemishes are appreciated like war wounds. There’s a real empathy needed to deconstruct a human body with your eyes and then reassemble it line-by-line on the page.
Students sniff and adjust on their drawing benches. A girl just a year out of high school stares intently while she struggles with her charcoal stick. Noticeable points on her sweater betray her portrayal of a dispassionate art student. This must be the first time she’s had to pretend to be cool sitting just a metre away from a completely naked god. The model just poses, acting dispassionate like the Greek statue he’s imitating.
A light scratching fills the air as graphite and charcoal fight on newsprint to render futile marks into some personal visual language. Some lines are elegant and practised, and some are just crude scrawled gestures. None of the marks come easily. Little groans, sighs, and barely audible curses are heard in between Miles Davis’s horn. Cheap sheets of newsprint get torn-off in sudden bursts of white noise. The lessons they show are where the values lie, collapsed and folded over on the dirty industrial carpet.
It’s a test of adulthood, of being brave with yourself; a beautiful silent struggle.
