We agreed that we ought to get dressed, leave the holiday apartment and do something else for a few hours in the evening. There was a choice. Richard lll performed outside on a grassy bank, or we could drive over to the St Ives School of Painting for the drop-in life drawing class. We had a copy of the play with us to acquaint ourselves with the plot. But while reading it she took offence at a
misogynistic speech made by the hunchback King. Also the weather looked a bit uncertain. So the life drawing class it was.
She paints and draws and is familiar with life drawing classes. I’m used only to six-inch brushes and Dulux Weathershield. I’m not a prude — at least, not lately I’m not. Neither am I against public nudity. In fact, I live close to, and occasionally lie on, a popular nudist beach. But I wasn’t sure that I wanted to scrutinise minutely a naked stranger from an embarrassingly short distance, then try to depict what I saw on a sheet of paper, then have my effort criticised by an art expert.
Knowing something of the history of the Porthmeor studios at the St Ives School of Painting (est. 1938), and of its famous alumni such as Terry Frost and Patrick Heron, I also expressed an anxiety that whoever was tutoring might resent having to lower themselves to comment on my toilet-wall-style of representation.
‘Idiot,’ she said.
We arrived a minute late. The studio was in a loft with a huge skylight and window views of Atlantic rollers breaking on the beach. It was exactly the kind of sexy, dusty, paint-spattered, cluttered, perhaps 1950s atmosphere I’d fondly expected. Faced with the reality, however, I cynically wondered whether it was artful design. As we walked in, four chaps and nine women were claiming pitches at an inward-facing circle of ancient wooden easels and contending for elbow room like a lot of territorial robins. In the centre of the circle was a dais covered with a blanket.
The tutor, a man, came forward and briskly told us to help ourselves to materials. It has been my (admittedly limited) experience of artists that anyone who dresses like an artist or talks like an artist probably isn’t one. Proper artists, because of their neurotic illness, tend to go the opposite way and do their level best to blend in with the rest of us. This smart, casually dressed bloke might have been a modern civil servant. By my handy rule of thumb, I inferred from this that he was very possibly a painter of international repute. One or two of the older, grander, gaudier women in the room looked like artists from Hollywood central casting.
Informality was the keynote. We must help ourselves to paper, charcoal and bulldog clips, the tutor told us, and pay at the end by putting money in the tin. The largest sheets of paper cost 15 pence each, he said.
We found two easels together on the outer fringes. I was in her bad books straightaway for sharpening one of her pencils for her. One does not sharpen 4B drawing pencils, apparently. Then a young raven-haired woman in a blue towelling dressing-gown insinuated herself sideways through the crowding ring of easels and let the gown drop from her shoulders. She climbed lightly and confidently up on to the dais, lay on her side in a reclining pose that was somehow active rather than passive and which for all I know required skill. Her figure was voluptuous and her skin was nearly as white as my sheet of A2.
‘Thank you, Sandra. Ten minutes,’ said the tutor. Immediately everybody began scratching and scraping furiously at their paper sheets as though he’d let off a starting gun. My neighbour, one of the grander, gaudier women, noticed my incredulity at the speed and ferocity with which she was attacking the paper, and declared, ‘Oh, I’m so ancient, darling, I can’t possibly hang around waiting for inspiration.’
After ten minutes, Sandra changed position and orientation. After a further ten minutes, she changed again. This time, as she shifted position, she said, ‘Who wants more fanny?’ It was the only utterance I heard her make all evening. Nobody responded. They’d all gone into yet another concentrated frenzy of creativity.
Before the last pose before the tea break, I clipped a new sheet of paper to the easel, and when I looked up I saw that she was sitting on a small wooden chair right in front of me with her legs wide apart and she was looking me right in the eye. Going with her fanny joke, I held out my charcoal stick at arm’s length, closed my left eye, cocked my head, and did that perspective measuring thing, with the charcoal tip on her aforementioned. She applauded with a lovely smile. ‘Ten minutes!’ said the tutor.
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