Live Nude Models

sax*

OR AS A YOUNG MAIM,

HE WAS EXPOSED TO WOMEN WHO EXPOSED THEM-

SELVES FOR ART. WHAT COULD

HIM ABOUT

YOU IVIAY TURIN! OUT TO

have already had it. That's to say, to have had it before you could make intelligi­ble use of it, perhaps before you could get your synapses to parse it for what it was. By the time I was 17 years old and had a girlfriend who would take her clothes off (there had been one at 15 who, serially, entrancingly, wouldn't), I'd been envisioning women with their clothes off, ravishing them with the secret lidless eyeball of my brain, for at least five years. Though these were five long, aching years, which I took entirely per­sonally at the time, I do realize how

mundane such a confession must be. Is. There wasn't anything baroque or complicated in my pining visual­izations or the procedure by which I took their edge off, and it's surely the case that a savvy person glancing my way would guess I did pretty well nothing else of note at the time.

Here's what's un-mundane: In that same span, through my rude, ripened, teen-prime years, there were live nude models appearing nightly in my home—women to whose unclad forms my ordinary, lidded eyeballs had regular access. My father painted them, upstairs in his studio. "Nightly" may exag­gerate, but through those years nudes were the main subject of his large oils on canvas, of which he painted dozens—sometimes from memory or from studies but often with the body present before him—as well as generat­ing many hundreds of nudes on

paper or vinyl, in pencil, oil crayons or gouache or combinations of those mediums, nearly each and every one of which was done in the presence of what at eight or 10 I would have still called "a naked lady" (or, rarely, but it bears mentioning, in the presence of a naked man).

Me, I opened the door. I walked through. My father's studio was part of our home. I did this, probably, begin­ning at 12 or 13, when I would have learned to refer to the naked ladies in question as "models," as in a mock-casual formulation like "We can hang out in the kitchen, my dad's up with one of his models" or the defensively sophisticated "Sure, I see the models with their clothes off, it's no big deal." I do recall forming sentences like these, just as I recall the slightly widened eyes of the models themselves, a few times, as

they met the eyes of the would-be jaded 12-year-old who'd pushed through the door without knocking. I can also bring up a good portion of ambience (visual aspects of which are confirmed by the paintings themselves): the musty throw rugs and scarred chairs and hand-carpentered easels and exposed-brick wall; the upright, soldered-iron wood-burning stove my father later installed; the jazz or blues or (less often) leftist news and culture-gab of WBAI seep­ing from the cassette-playing boom box; the savor of brushes marinating

in turpentine and tangy odor of the cake of Lava soap—the only brand, my father explained, that would gen­tly strip oil paint from human skin—at the shallow porcelain sink; the bulletin board layered with valentines from my mother and enigmatic newspaper clip­pings (the death of Karl Wallenda was one) that would inspire later work of my father's, etc. What I can't supply, despite the clamor I by now imagine I hear from my reader on this point, is an account of any parent-child con­sultations on the topic of the models and how I was or wasn't supposed to feel about them. I can't supply these because, I'm fairly certain, they didn't occur. Nudity Is Fine, like Nixon Is a Vampire or Grown-Ups Smoke Pot, was a truth floating in our house, the sort I gradually inferred was somewhat more true inside our doors than out.

I not only glimpsed the models. At 12 or 13 I declared myself an apprentice artist and began to draw them myself. Not in the studio upstairs, or rarely there. Mostly I went along with my dad on "drawing group" night, to the home of his artist friends Bob and Cynthia, a loft space on Atlantic Avenue with square footage enough for a model to stand encircled by seven or eight artists sit­ting with sketch pads braced on crossed legs, or seated before small easels. Spe­cifically, seven adult artists (though my father was their elder statesman, likely at

least a decade older than any of the oth­ers) and one teenager. Young teenager. I began before high school—I know this for certain because there were nudes in the portfolio of sketches I used to win entry into the High School of Music and Art that year. I was a regular at drawing group for three years, I'd guess. By the time I was 16 I was through hanging out with my dad, for a while at least. But for three years I soaked my eye­balls in live flesh—not even a kid who'd grown up at a nudist colony could have been invited to stare like I stared. After all, I was an artist.

No one balked at my presence. This was 1977, 1978. The models, so far as I can rely on these memory tendrils I'm chasing, were blase. These were mostly art students themselves, settled into an easy if boring gig. Likely posing for a group of men (continued on page 112)

LIVE NUDE Models

(continued from page 94) and women together was more comfortable, generally, than making a private exhibition for a solitary male, and evenings at Bob and Cynthia's were convivial. The routine followed the lines of every life-drawing class since pub­lication of Kimon Nicolaides's The Natural Way to Draw and probably long before it: a series of rapid-fire poses so the artists could loosen with gestural sketches, then five- or 10-minute poses, then a few held long enough for a study—also long enough that the model might pause to stretch or even don a robe and take a five-minute break before resum­ing. Between poses the artists wandered to see others' work, and I did this too. Sometimes the models roamed too, in their robes. Other times they were uninterested in the results. I worked with Cray-Pas or gray or colored pen­cil, or compressed charcoal and, less often, painted in watercolor and gouache. I was less patient than the adults—I was there learning patience, as much as anything—and remem­ber feeling "finished" with studies before the longer poses were done and then watching the clock. Apart from that lapse I worked in absorption, as with all absorbing work since I recall precisely zero from the mental interior of the experience.

What I wasn't doing—I'd know—was men­tal slavering. The Tex Avery wolf of sexual voraciousness not only restrained his eyeballs from first swelling like dirigibles and then bursting like loaded cigars, he slept. Any account of the evolutionary "hardwiring" of lust is stuck, I guess, dismissing me now as an outlier, or just a liar. The superexten-sive actuality of women's bodies before my eyes was either too much or too little for me to make masturbatory mincemeat of. Both too much and too little: The scrutiny was too much, the context too little. I don't mean they weren't sexy bodies. I'd guess they were. But Jonathan-seeing-them wasn't sexy at all. Even as I recorded with my charcoal or crayon the halo of untrimmed pubic bush and the flesh-braid of mystery that it haloed, I attained a total non-purchase on those bod­ies as objects of desire. The palace of lust was a site under construction—that's what I was off" doing at night or afternoons, fantasizing about girls I knew who'd never even show me their knees. Then I slavered plenty.

Did I, in my imaginings, substitute for my non-girlfriends' unconquerable forms the visual stuff I'd gleaned at drawing group? Nope. As much as a T-shirt's neckline or tube top's horizon might seem a cruel limit to my wondering gaze, I didn't want my imagina­tion to supply the pink pebbly fact of aureole and nipple like those I'd examined under bright light for hours at a time. It wasn't that I found real women's bodies unappetiz­ing but that I didn't have any use for them in the absolute visual sphere within which I'd gained access. Much like a person who's disappointed or confused at seeing the face attached to the voice of a radio personality well known to their ears and then realizes that no face would have seemed any more appropriate, I suspect I didn't really make mental nudie shots of girls my age. I didn't picture them undressed; I imagined undress­ing them and the situations in which such

a thing would be imaginable. My eyeballs wanted to be fingertips. I was a romantic.

A romantic teenage boy, that is. My romance encompassed a craving for illicit glimpses, not because I lacked visual information but as rehearsals of transgression and discovery. A craving for craving, especially in the social context of other teenage boys, that mass of horny romantics. But we're talking about a terrible low point in the history of teenage access to pornography: Everyone's dad had canceled his playboy subscription in a simul­taneous feminist epiphany a few years before (that everyone's dad had once subscribed to playboy was a golden myth; I trust it was halfway true). The internet was a millennium away. A friend and I were actually excited when we discovered a cache of back issues of Sexology, 2l black-and-white crypto-scientific pulp magazine, in the plaster and lathe of a ruined brownstone on Wyckoff Street. Pity us. When a couple of snootily gorgeous older teenage girls suddenly moved into the upper duplex of a house on Dean Street, there was some talk among the block's boys about climbing a nearby tree for a leer, a notion as halcyon-suburban as anything in my child­hood. But the London plane trees shading our block had no branches low enough to be climbable, had likely been selected precisely for their resistance to burglars. The point is, I was as thrilled to imagine glimpsing the sis­ters as any of the other schemers. I could very well have gone off to drawing group the eve­ning of that same day but made no mental conjugation between the desired object and the wasted abundance before me.

Only two uneasy memories bridge this gulf, between the eunuch-child who breezed through a world of live nude models and the hormonal disaster site I was the rest of the time. One glitch was the constant threat or promise that a drawing group model would cancel at the last minute, since tradition had it that one of the circle would volunteer for duty instead. Two of the group's members were younger women—named, incredibly enough, Hazel and Laurel—for whom I har­bored modest but definite boy-to-woman crushes and with whom I may have managed even to be legibly flirtatious. If one evening a model had canceled and either Hazel or Laurel took her clothes off, I'd likely have been pitched headfirst into the chasm of my disassociation. I never faced this outcome. The only substitute model ever to volunteer

on my watch was our host, the hairily cheru­bic Bobby Ramirez. But I would never forget what didn't happen, who didn't undress. You may choose to see this evidence against my assertion that the scene was not a sexual one for me. I choose to see it as certifying proof of my capacity for fantasizing about clothed women who lingered in the periphery of my vision at the exact instant I ignored naked ones in the center of my vision.

The second slippage took place not at drawing group but in my room, with my friend Karl. We were 14. Karl and I usu­ally drew superhero comics together, but this afternoon, deep into the porn drought of the 1970s, we drifted into trying to pro­duce our own, doodling fantasy females without the veil of a cape or utility belt. At one point Karl reached an impasse in his attempt to do justice to the naked lady in his mind's eye and let me analyze the prob­lem. Yes, the nipples were too small, and placed too high, on the gargantuan breasts Karl had conjured. He'd also too much defaulted to the slim, squared-ofF frame of the supermen we'd been compulsively per­fecting. "Do you mind?" I asked. Taking the drawing from Karl, I compacted and soft­ened the torso and widened the hips, gave his fantasy volume and weight, splitting the difference between the unreal ratio and something more persuasive. He'd handed me a teenage boy's fantasy and I, a teen­age boy, passed back a woman, even if one who'd need back surgery in the long run. Karl and I were both, I think, unnerved, and we never returned to this exact pursuit. Our next crack at DIY porn was retrograde and bawdy, a comic called Super-Dick, with images that were barely better than stick figures.

Confessing for the first time my authorship of Super-Dick, I'm flabbergasted, not at the dereliction of parental authority that would traipse nude women past the gaze of a boy still excited to sketch with ballpoint pen a hieroglyphic cock-and-balls in cape and boots and have it catapult into the obliging hairy face of a villain named Pussy-Man, but at the Mobius strip of consciousness that enabled that boy to walk around believing himself a single person instead of two or a hundred. If I've bet my life's work on a suspicion that we live at least as much in our wishes and dreams, our constructions and projections, as we do in any real waking life, the existence of which we can demonstrate by rapping it with

our knuckles, perhaps my non-utilization of the live nude models helped me place the bet. How could I ever be astonished to see how we human animals slide into the vicarious at the faintest invitation, leaving vast flaming puddings of the Real uneaten? I did.

My last year at the High School of Music and Art a teacher booked a nude model for us to draw in an advanced drawing class, one consisting only of graduating seniors. By chance this was the last time I'd ever sketch from a nude model, though I couldn't have known it at the time. By implication this was a privilege we seniors had earned after four years of art school: to be treated like adults. Still, there was plenty of nervous joking in the days before, and, when the moment came, the doors and windows were kept carefully shaded against eyes other than those of us in the class. Needless to say, I felt blase for several reasons, not least my own recent sexual initiation. I'd also begun to reformat myself as a future writer rather than an apprentice artist (at 17 I'd already been an apprentice artist a long time), and everything to do with my final high school semester felt beneath my serious attention.

Yet ironically, I'll never forget the model that day. I remember her body when I've forgotten the others—had forgotten them, usually, by the time I'd begun spraying fix­ative on my last drawing of them, before they'd finished dressing. I remember her not because she was either uncannily gorgeous or ugly, or because I experienced some dis­concerting arousal, but for an eye-grabbing anatomical feature: the most protuberant clitoris I'd seen, or have since. This wasn't something I could have found language to explain to my fellow students that day, if I wanted to (I didn't). The model showed no discomfort with her body. She posed, beneath vile fluorescence, standing atop the wobbling, standard-issue New York City Department of Education tables I'd been around my whole life, the four legs of which never seemed capable of reaching the floor simultaneously, and we 30-odd teenagers drew her, the whole of us sober, respectfully hushed, a trace bored if you were me, but anyhow living up to the teacher's expectation. But I do remember thinking: I know and they don't. (The boys, that would be who I meant.) I remember thinking: They'll think they're all that way.