chapter 1

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BRIEF ACCIDENTS CASE #07: The Art of the Body

Thread topic: / Life / Experiences / “Has anyone else gained lots of weight??”

Post Title : “I felt connected to a pose model I had one time”

posted by: p_a_renoir

posted : Sunday, 10 January 2021
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I saw it happen to someone. I never shared a word with her. I never even learned her name. I heard “Sadie” one time, “Sabina” another, mentioned off-hand by people who were just as ignorant as myself, if not more. They claimed she’d transitioned. I didn’t think so. In retrospect, I didn’t want to think so. But then it started to make sense as signs emerged in small fits and starts, and to my surprise, I found I didn’t care that it was true. I suppose I wanted to care, but the want was an old one, and it felt stale in my mind. It was too weightless to bear at this stage of my life. If it was true that she had transitioned, then it wasn’t obvious. Or maybe she’d done most of her transitioning. I guess it just wasn’t obvious when in correlation to the transition which I was about to witness. I was about to feel a wordless attraction to her.

I’m an artist. Not an artiste, as such, but I am reasonably above par. What I will say is that I care. About art. About its particular universalities and modes of communication like a shiver of wind down an avenue we otherwise couldn’t find. I’d rather express than copy, so my subjects of study are usually anything emotional, strange or contradictory. I try to find paradoxes, and express them. Translate them.

Which is why I felt regret when I found myself signed up to a life-study class named “Change”, and it was just a plain old human model who strolled in, placing herself on the pedestal at the centre of the easels without a word.

She had a plain, soft face, the curious absence of lines around her eyes, nose and mouth leaving her with a bored expression, a perpetually disappointed gaze. I wondered if I’d ever see her smile. If I’d ever detect thoughts flashing behind her wide, vague brown eyes. Her mousy, curly hair was done up in a ponytail in order to keep her gaunt neck and shoulders in view so that the artists could study every line and angle of her slender body. But the slight impression of bones, ribbed framing and elevated shoulders closed a void between us, and I felt like I was standing that much closer to her. It was a body I knew. Ever since developing an eating disorder at the age of twenty-four after an emotionally crippling separation I’d rather not talk about here, the age of twenty-five had arrived, and now I was here, feeling so diminished that people couldn’t see me anymore. I was half invisible, even to myself. I used to be semi-muscular, enough to be athletic, but carried some excess weight on top. I didn’t feel great about it, but at least people took me seriously. Now when I look at my back in the mirror, I can see my shoulder blades under the cold and clinical bathroom light.

I spent some time looking at the model – tracing the shadowed underside of her collarbones, the jutt of her shoulders – and all I could do was think about myself. I still looked masculine, but only by virtue of my structural width and depth. Something she echoed in me. Or I echoed in her. And that’s why I felt like her.

The sessions could only be held for an hour-and-a-half at a time every week, and so she had to come in and re-enact her exact pose every seven days so that us artists could pick up from wherever we’d left off. I don’t know how they do it. It has to be a form of self-flagellation, or the subtle remains of Catholic guilt.

I felt a measure of guilt as I began doing a compositional sketch. I’m an incredibly slow, meticulous worker. By the time the others had finished, I would be one of, if not the last artist in the room, holding her back, obliged to return each week for her deathly still pose until I either finished, or my legs fell out from under the guilt and I had to pretend I was finished.

There were eight of us in the room; an old ballet hall on the third level of a tenement building which the local art school used now and then. The source of light was on my left; tall dusty windows all the way down one side of the hall, letting a diffuse amber glow into the room.

To my left was an elderly lady in what was a probably culturally-insensitive purple kimono and dyed spiky mane with huge bronze hoop earrings. To my right was a middle-aged Sudanese man with hair that was only just beginning to transition into greyness. We exchanged a cursory nod. Nobody spoke. Everybody got to work.

When it came to realism drawings, my first step was to sketch some light lines indicating room-depth, angle of the light, dimensions of the model’s pedestal, her height, location of her head, furthest point her foot extended to, the position of her hands, angle of her spine, and so on. I was already bored – I’d done this too many times. There would have to be a way to add some sort of flair to it later on. I hadn’t used charcoal for a while, now. Maybe it would be fun to do that again. For now I committed to the grind, laying down the outline of her body, spending long spans of time peering at her features until the hour-and-a-half came to an end.

The pointy slope of her nose was millimetres away from being “unfeminine”. There was a confusing structure to the lower half of her face, a subtle weight that counter-balanced the shape of her nose. Around her placid eyes there was a width of bone that would have looked masculine if not for the natural smirk of her smooth lips. I couldn’t decide who she was when nobody was looking. But I liked it. I felt even closer to her, now. My loss of weight in the last few years had sucked away the illusion of mass in my face, and I saw more of a girl than a man in the mirror these days – especially in the mornings when my eyes were still puffy and swollen from sleep.

It was in moments like this which I began slipping back into panic. The bare glint of wiring, the mesh of the cage – and then my instincts lept for routes of escape. But what was I going to do? Overeat? Overcompensate? Being seen as fat would have been even worse. My will was trapped, and so was my voice. No string of words in any version of the dictionary in any language in the world existed to match it.

She was side-on to me, facing the light at a fraction of an angle. The pose she’d chosen was to sit just on the edge of her platform, very simply. A performance of modesty – “don’t notice me” – knees together but not touching, feet apart, toes angled inwards, shoulders pushed up as she leaned with her hands on the edge of the platform, thumbs tucked under her thighs. Her head was turned to the left, and she gazed in absent silence down at the something on the floorboards in front of me.

I could see her hip bones. I drew a few lines. Just their upper ridge, pressing themselves against flesh held back against her body. She was not emaciated. Not so malnourished as to see the path of her veins, the tensile pull of muscles under her skin like a layer of suction wrap. All she really lacked was mass.

I didn’t get very far that session. I spent too much time looking at her, trying to figure her out. After that hour and a half I felt like I could draw her from memory.

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