Bryony Bond, Manchester UK

I remember life drawing classes when a fairly elderly, male life model wore a leather posing pouch, a triangular scrap of leather with three pieces of string keeping it loosely attached to his body. Every time he changed his pose he would place his watch very carefully on the floor in front of him. Somehow I always seemed to be seated behind him, and briefly, I would be presented with an unusually intimate view. Brief, but striking enough to remember it nearly 15 years on.  

Place and date of story Evesham, 1994

Andrew Bracey, Manchester UK

The day started innocently enough. It was roughly the 3rd life class on the foundation course at Plymouth College of art and design and i was beginning to get the sense of what drawing the figure was. This rainy October was when I realised that life drawing was so much more than the act of drawing. the class entered at various degrees of tardiness to find the room as you would expect; the easels set up around a mattress waiting for the life model to appear. Paul, our tutor was present, looking busy. We fell into the usual chatter that precedes the start of day on a foundation course, swapping gossip and last nights tv. However we began slowly to dry up in our chatter and started to increasingly look at out watches. Time was pressing on, most of us had already been here for 15 minutes and there was still no life model. We began one by one to fall silent and start to wonder what Paul was doing, he certainly was not talking to us as he usually did, some had tried and got a silent response.

Finally when there was absolute silence in the room, Paul proceeded to tell us what he was doing. We had all noted he was stirring something in a jug, however we did not expect him to start tipping the substance all over the floor whilst telling us that he was spunking all over the life room, spreading his seed, as it were. There was horrified looks around, by both male and female students. Joan, our other fine art tutor looked on approvingly at our revolted faces, each one of us thinking what the hell had we signed up for and could he do this? About this time the (female) life model entered and stepped over Paul's sperm, which was beginning to seep towards people along the floor boards, and set up a pose. Paul then very matter of fact told us that this would be a 3 hour life model pose and to get drawing.

I was not the only one that started to draw with not quite my full attention on the paper and the model. After one hour i had to move for fear of the spunk of Paul crossing and spreading over my easel patch. For 3 hours there was silence, with Paul and Joan looking smugly on as we struggle through our drawing session with real unease.

Of course Paul could not really do this and after 3 hours told us that we had in fact had a mixture of salt and a little water infesting the room, not his seed, but the thought of it. Of course all our drawings were slightly different in their mood that day. This was the start of our life drawing session which also variously featured the model lying in sand next to a real skeleton, an ex army man holding a real life broadsword for a morning (it was bloody heavy as all males found out in the break) and a life day which consisted of Wagner’s Ring cycle blasted to us in the morning and a Barry White song on repeat for a whole afternoon. I look back on my life classes with such fondness, who says they are a stuffy institution?

Andrew Bracey, is an artist based in Manchester and senior lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Lincoln

www.andrewbracey.com

Peter Bevan, Glasgow UK

Attached is a work I did 40 years ago on the undergraduate course in Fine art at Gloucestershire College of Art and Design in Cheltenham. Despite all the studies in Life drawing I've done since and all the classes I've subsequently taught while at Glasgow school of Art, this image represents one of the most fascinating experiences of drawing from life. The reason is, the physicality and personality of the model, Mr Moses and how he affected the way I drew and through which, I gained insight into the quality of perception.

He was assigned to my class for a period of three weeks for observational drawings and paintings. Mr Moses was a pensioner and did modelling for a bit of extra cash. Most of the models we had as students were young or middle-aged women and really very confident in their role, unfazed by the requirement to pose naked in front of 15 staring strangers, well naturally, we weren't strangers for long. However, the high level of visual scrutiny directed daily at them was not reciprocated by them; more often than not, they appeared to drift in concentration often becoming so relaxed that they would begin to fall asleep.

Mr Moses, on the other hand appeared to be consistently at a high level of consciousness, aware of the "unusual" situation he was in; perhaps self-conscious to a degree, of his posing, is little eyes flickering constantly around his restricted field of vision. It became clear after a few different poses that he found it difficult to relax into them and held them still with great conscious effort. There was a feeling of held tension even in "comfortable" sitting poses, as though he felt he must always be alert in order to prevent the dreadful embarrassment of losing control of himself by falling asleep.

Mr Moses was not, as you can see, very lithe or muscular in fact, he was quite stiff and somewhat ungainly on his thin pin legs, as though he had not made much athletic use of his body during his life and appeared conscious of this in the very conscientious way he now forced himself to be fiercely still in the assigned poses. The effort required to ensure stillness began to show after a while in one pose, in that he would begin to quiver, almost imperceptibly to begin with but gradually with a visible vibration. He was a shy man not gregarious or chatty like the other models, but appeared happy to reassure us students that he was "alright" when we asked about his quivering and profusely apologetic if it was going to spoil our drawings!

To me, the physical tension and visible effort apparent in his holding of the standing pose in the above image became the subject of my work not only with Mr Moses but with other life models for some time. It seemed to me that his involuntary "vibrations" simply reflected phenomenologically the fact that all the other models moved too, more slowly perhaps, slumping into a doze or taking up slightly altered positions after a break, (over which we students constantly argued).

Drawing Mr Moses altered the way I made marks, they became smaller, more frequent, less definitive: they accumulated around each other suggesting a number of constantly changing positions in space, referring both to the phenomenon I was witnessing and to the fact that our perception is always moving too; our eyes constantly moving around our field of vision, assessing and reassessing relationships. My drawings became less substantial, more ephemeral; more like accumulative records of the hours or days looking at the model. In this sense, observing Mr Moses stimulated a new period of work for me, which I thought, was as honest as I could get about the very experience of looking.

http://www.petebevan.com/