Life Drawing

Life Drawing is another area of this fine world that I have No Experience Of. My drawings at school were always described as erratic by my art teacher Mrs Heaton, and to my recollection I have never drawn anything from life other than a pot plant during one rainy art lesson in year 9 with my Beloved Friend Jennifer Valerie. (We subsequently snuck out to help the caretaker litter-pick on the back field as we made the joint decision that it would be altogether More Interesting).

My father, an excellent artist, is a connoisseur of the more risqué types of life drawing, aka, the naked type. He is currently enthusiastically rummaging around in a box of pastel drawings that he just dragged out of a dusty corner of his office in an attempt to find some of his favourites, done as a member of the prodigious Ashton Art Group. The top three are, in descending order :

Naked 20 something lady in nothing but a hat
Naked twenty something lady in nothing
Naked twenty something lady with back to us and bottom shaped like peach.


So far it all seems rather glamorous, however, I am assured that the world of life drawing is not all Jack, Rose and the hope diamond. Men have stormed out when faced with male posers in possession of multiple rude piercings (Dad’s art teacher’s advice to ‘always draw the human form starting from the middle’ proving too difficult to follow)… and a lesser artist once threw in the charcoal when asked to draw a voluptuous 70 year old lady among purple umbrellas and scarves, with all her goods on display like a Greengrocer on Market day. 'I don't know where to start,' she apparently mumbled bewilderedly.

Life Drawing : Not Always Like This.

Just like life, and boxes of chocolates, it seems that life-drawers are never aware of what they’re gonna get before they walk into the church hall and turn on the heater. It’s all part of the fun.

All things considered, Life drawing seems like a perfectly nice, healthy way to keep fathers out of trouble. However, it is not something the Great Raymondo would consider participating in, either on the pencil-holding side or the lying-on-table-borrowed-from-the-Brownies-and-trying-not-to-blink side. One would make her blush and the other would make her shiver. She is not a fan of doing either.