I’ve not yet reported on my art class this week.
It was notably different from the previous couple of weeks as there was a) no charcoal involved and b) a naked woman.
I’d never done life drawing before. As the woman disrobed in front of me I sharpened my pencil and tried to come up with some other double entendres.
We had a few exercises to deal with; firstly ‘two minute poses’ wherein the model would adopt a (naked) position and we had one hundred and twenty seconds to draw it.
Whether this was a test of art skills or psychological profiling I have yet to ascertain, as looking back at these drawings shows I neither drew breasts or a head on any of them. Is this how I objectify women?
Partly. The non-breast was typical repressed English embarrassment. I tried to draw them on one of my drawings but the first attempt was so laughably carry-on-pert-confessions-of-an-art-student that I rubbed one them out immediately.
The next exercise was to make the (naked) lady do lots of different poses in quick succession, this differed from the first task in that there was a stool (of the sitting kind, it’s not that kind of art class) and we had to draw one picture over another.
It’s good in as much as it makes you think quick; to see how different poses give different movement, etc etc. But bad in that what I’m left with is a huge scrawl of legs and stools (and no breasts) that next to the first picture is painting me as quite the psychopath-in-waiting.
After a break it was time for the meat of the lesson, she lay down on a tatty mattress for the remaining hour and we drew.
Again I left the breasts until the absolute last minute, at one point making eye contact as I energetically jerked my hand on the easel with (I’m afraid to say) my tongue sticking out of my mouth slightly. She looked slightly scared. But, in the reverse of the spider adage “they’re more scared of you than you are of them” I was terrified.
Every time I tried to draw her face she looked like a monkey.
I looked at her, she didn’t look like a monkey.
I drew her, she looked like a monkey.
I rubbed it out, looked at her – no monkey.
I copied exactly what I saw with my own eyes – monkey.
She was going to look at this. I had to cut facial features to a bare minimum and erase the banana I’d put in her hand.
As the lesson drew to a close I realised that I’d exhibited some classic diversion tactics by spending more time trying to copy the pattern on the mattress than actually drawing in a nipple. I think I need help.
On the way home, the naked drawing rolled up tightly in my bag, I felt relieved that nothing too untoward or embarrassing had happened.
Then, after stopping off in Marks & Spencers to buy some bread I got distracted by a man talking to me, I pulled out my ipod headphones to be told I’d dropped something, I turned around to see a woman helpfully bending down to pick up the piece of paper. Then stopping as she saw the scrawls of a woman-hating killer on them.
I grabbed it, ran into my flat, ate some bread and so far have killed no women.