Recently I've been thinking of a drawing group that I used to sit for as an art model. The homeowner was a classically trained painter. His figures all have a similarity. The one below recently came up for auction, and it resembles me at the time that I used to sit for him. What I like about the painting is that it isn't me. But it isn't *not* me, either, since we blend into that similarity. We are all Benny Bufano / Vigeland-esqe.
The only truth in this painting is the light. The woman sits facing a large set of windows. The floor is not blue. The wall is not white. She is perched on a chair, on a fair-sized riser in the lower level of a Victorian home on a steep hill. Behind her is a famous and gigantic 19th century map of Paris made of four enormous sheets that are tacked to the wall.
The room smells of sweet raw wood and sour coffee, housed in an old fashioned urn that you'd find at a church function. The whitener offered is a can of Carnation Evaporated Milk. To this day that is what I drink in my coffee.
The model changes in a small raw wood closet behind a curtain. A fat black string is tied to the pull chain of the lightbulb above. It's clear when you're working for this group of artists that you are experiencing something of another era.
Because of this, and because I no longer know these people, most of whom have died, I sometimes try to recreate the room in my mind. What you can't see in the model's face is that the she sits across from artists in chairs two deep, in four hour stretches on two successive Mondays. There's Joe, my sister's old boyfriend, who introduced me to the group, and Dale, who lives in the same co-op he lived in back in the day. The hummer, who may have been the only female artist in the group. Henri, a tiny and charming man from Martinique, who dated Julia Child's sister during the war. He's the one who taught me the story of how (supposedly) the French field easel was invented by a man who was imprisoned during the war.
I stopped sitting for drawing groups decades ago -- the work's so strenuous that I would sometimes almost faint. But I miss the environment, and these people and artists in general, really.
That was today's rabbit hole. I had a sudden thought that if I Googled Dale's first name and the name of the co-op (a former mayonnaise factory), I could probably learn his last name and what had happened to him. It worked. Glad to know he's still doing art.
I really should have bought this painting.
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